I believe this organization should be putting out somewhere in the ballpark of two to 5,000 pieces of content across seven to 10 channels on the internet a day to achieve the business goals and ambitions that it has globally. Yeah! You got your perspective.
So, so many of the things that I believe are going on and could impact an iconic, very large scale business like this is widely available on YouTube or LinkedIn and so I want to be a little bit more specific or nuanced. I think, to set up the framework because I’m gonna assume most people don’t know me or where I stand on this, I believe that the enormous technology advances that I’m sure especially a company like this understands and then the nuance is underneath that infrastructure, I think that the collective in this room, including myself, grossly underestimate what it all actually means and because it’s so big, it’s so heavy, it’s so transformative, if you just think about, and kind of looking around the room here, a lot of people gonna be able to do this, if you truly spent a half a day with yourself over, you know, a nice walk or a bottle of wine or however you like decompress and think about what has happened in technology advances just in the last 20 years it gets quite scary.
Obviously you guys do a great job physically showing that with mobile devices and the progression but just the whole nut, everything I believe in, and my passion is how communication basically dictates everything we do, right. I was born in this Soviet Union and so I grew up in a, I was born in a place of communism and then I was able to immigrate to the US, a place of capitalism and media and a very different point of view and I think in a lot of ways I was very, in hindsight, taken aback by that or think about that, I constantly think about why when there is a coup in a country do they go to the newspaper and radio and television station first before they even go to the palace and it’s because it’s the punchline.
The thing that has the control is communication. And I think as a matter of fact, this argument, this debate, this passion I’ve had for the last 15 years has become much more obvious to people as the political landscape has changed across the globe very much on the back of the modern technology revolution when it comes to communication. And for me where I get really excited as a businessperson is when I’m met with the best products or services that are not necessarily winning the game, that they’re up to completely and utterly on the back of brand perception or execution of communication at this moment. And so I couldn’t imagine for example, and not knowing everybody’s business units or what you work on, but every time I go to a remarkable company inevitably there’s a high percentage of people in the room that are working on something where they are disproportionally the leader in quality but the business results are not matching that product or service completely and utterly predicated on either, A, you know, being way too much of a sales organization and not a marketing brand organization or B, not even thinking about how the actual decision maker is being affected to make a decision and where can we reach them and how and what have you.
And so for me stumbling into the talent, the natural talent, that very nice bio, what I realized from having, and this might sound very interesting and it took me a long time to realize it, the reason I had eight lemonade stands, and I did, the reason I had eight lemonade stands as a child which is absurd and very unique is on a stage like this actually five years ago I’m giving the story, I used to give my bio more, and I actually remembered for the first time, why was I doing that? Because I was starting to get a little bit upset with myself, was I lazy and just one of my friends to work? But what I was actually doing as a six year old kid, as a six year old child, I was walking, the 1980s and America was much more safe, so I was walking about in the neighborhood and I was looking at the cars driving and trying to figure out where to put my lemonade stand sign on which tree or which post of a sign and basically 37 years later right here right now I’m still doing the same thing.
I’ve been chasing the attention of human beings to figure out where they’re paying attention and then I spend the rest of my time trying to make a sign that’s gonna make them stop and buy my lemonade. And I very successfully did that for my father’s business on the back of modern communication technology advances. The reason I was able to build a small wine shop into a national player in no time with no venture capital, nope, not even a credit line, working with my own small capital, three million dollar business doing 10% gross profit. To build that to 60 million with no cash infusion in five years takes one move, a remarkable ability to make every penny work like a dollar in acquiring customers. How did I do that? I did that with email marketing and Google AdWords because that was the enormous arbitrage in the market from 1996 to 2001. An arbitrage and an understanding of consumer behavior that my competitive landscape did not understand.
That has basically become the seed that allowed me to later be an early investor in Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr because I viewed them as the next paradigm shifts and it’s what makes me think every night about voice-activated devices with AI infrastructure behind them because every consumer picks convenience over everything and will use those devices to make decisions and then that becomes the new toll booth to transactions. That’s very consumer centric, very much what I think about when I think about a company like this is how does that translate to a B2B environment? How does that translate to the cliche things that are at friction to my beliefs with an engineer sales DNA driven organization? And it plays out in many ways but ultimately what I think it plays out in is I genuinely believe for this company to take full advantage of 49,000 patents, to take full advantage of the speed in which it’s deployed to become a leader in 5G and many other things that I’m sure people are proud of or the innovations that are happening throughout the globe is A, ironically to become a media company itself.
And when I say media I mean publishing. I think over the next decade or two you will see companies like yourselves and your competitors start to realize an editor-in-chief will sit at the highest levels in a company like this because actually being publishing DNA is imperative. Which is extremely difficult for a company because if you’re gonna be a publisher you need to be a publisher, which is very different than being an advertiser. You know, putting out content that has no direct attribution to something that you can measure in the short term as a funnel to a sales center to a transaction takes a level of discipline, especially if somebody’s held accountable for every 90 days or every year but that will be the requirement because a word that has been really running through my head quite a bit over the last couple of years as entitlement. Mainly because I have exploded on Instagram and I get 10,000 direct messages a week from kids who are wealthy, affluent, being totally taken care of and they hate their parents for creating entitlement and they don’t know how to get out of it.
But they’re making a lot of excuses, that’s a different story. But what I realize is that same thing that a 19 year old whose parents have paid for everything and she or he is realizing wait a minute I’m a zoo animal and I don’t know how to live in the wild, I believe there’s a level of entitlement that is rampant amongst the Fortune 500 or biggest companies in the world of thinking that they’re entitled to the business. They make audacious points of view on their competitive landscape, they say silly things like, make razzes and jokes about emerging competitors who eventually become their biggest issues and I’ve been thinking quite a bit about that. And I think it all leads to actually a very interesting place which is ultimately both high net-worth parents and executives of very big companies unfortunately are not consumer centric. Unfortunately play within their B2B confines.
Score on different metrics than the actual end user that they’re supposed to be deploying for. And so my luck, and that’s what I’ll call it, of DNA of only ever being consumer centric has led to the honor of sitting here and talking to you and having people pay attention and all the nice things that have happened to me and it’s fun because there’s nothing more entrepreneurial or rogue or disruptive than actually caring about nothing in the middle but the end consumer.
Pandering to nothing, not awards, not the press, not the media, not the B2B environments, not the conferences not the people that are fancy, just the end consumer and building leverage there which ultimately gives you leverage with all the things that I just mentioned that are in the middle. And so for me what that all, all that pontificating leads to the following, Ericsson should be putting out 250 pieces of LinkedIn creative a day. And it probably puts out three, nine, seven, and more importantly, is that picture, video, and written article white paper? Is that been contextually post produced for the understanding of how LinkedIn algorithm works? Does it understand that the adjectives used in the copy change the difference of 37,000 people seeing it versus 2.9 million people seeing it? Is it a video that people actually want to watch or was it a video that somebody wanted to make because it makes them feel good of what it looks like? Does it ladder up to the brand which is a complete exercise of executives making subjective calls? Unfortunately so much of what big companies do is an insular game of politics pandering to reports that mean nothing and a lot of other things that ultimately become the demise of great companies and it makes sense but it doesn’t have to be that way.
And the place that I think is most practical to actually make a hard change is marketing and communication. It’s very hard to make a quick change on your product, it’s more difficult to change your culture, you know, there’s a lot of things that are a challenge but not wasting your media money on television commercials that nobody watches, banner ads that nobody clicks and millions of other executions that make no sense other than to the bullshit reports that sit in the middle to justify the bad behavior is something I have an enormous passion for. Especially when you have what I call sawdust. I’m super fascinated by sawdust. At some point in our world somebody looked at people cutting wood and said, the stuff that’s going on the ground is something I can sell. and I think about that a lot, I also, bottled water is the much more interesting one. I would probably pay an uncomfortable amount of money to have the right to in a VR setting sit in the room with whoever she or he was that decided this was gonna actually play out selling something that was free to the world because as a marketer as you can imagine, that is a very fascinating execution.
But that’s actually how I view a company like this. If you think about the sheer amount of sawdust in the form of unbelievably compelling tech stories that happened in the halls globally around the 100,000 people that are touching this place and, you know, one man’s point of view as an outsider, the sheer underrated nature of your advances. The end consumer complete point of view on this company that is just not fair to the level of what you’re actually achieving and even the B2B industry that is actually doing business with you, their even own perception of what’s happening here, yes, comes from cliche, the DNA of being a Nordic country, and the way you talk about yourself.
But that is in my opinion the obvious excuse to just not being a modern communications company. And how you address that and how you think about deploying your stories, your value propositions, your nuances, across what I believe is now the real call to arms, no different than this organization two years ago taking a step back and saying okay, in a difficult European, you can’t just fire everybody, you know, kind of game, how are we going to thread this incredible business challenge of updating our talent pool while becoming pot committed to something like 5G because maybe this last chapter hasn’t gone exactly how we wanted but by winning the next thing we win? And honestly that is the most invigorating thing of technology advances even if you haven’t done the last two kind of turns as well as you wanted.
If you’re the best at the new turn you just leapfrog everyone, right? I mean, it’s super fascinating. To me, much like what you’ve done operationally and organizationally and have execute against some of your core capabilities, that’s kind of how I think about communication. It’s kind of irrelevant how well you’ve done from 2011 to 2014 in producing creative for these new environments, the next decade is gonna be one enormous game of volume of output and whichever biggest companies in the world figure that out first and can execute it will disproportionally pick up market share. And what I mean by that for clarity, was I was probably being kind on how many pieces of creative I think Ericsson should be putting out on just LinkedIn a day. I genuinely believe what I’m about to say, as quickly as humanly possible I believe this organization should be putting out somewhere in the ballpark of two to 5,000 pieces of content across seven to 10 channels on the internet a day to achieve the business goals and ambitions that it has globally. As you can imagine that is a very difficult DNA shift in a world where people overanalyze every single thing on, if the color is blue enough? Or let’s spend for different meetings literally debating a single adjective.
Or let me impose my political weight as the final decision-maker and just give some feedback that I actually don’t even know if I really believe but I need to give it to justify the fact that I even have a job. And that is literally how I see it. And that’s not, I’m not trying to be mean or razz, that’s just an observation and all of that is the friction to putting out 5,000 pieces of content a day.
So if I’m right, which I feel very confident about because it’s already happened, a lot of what I’ve become is not predicting the future, it’s over communicating what’s already happened, it’s just that people aren’t looking or aren’t incentivized to look in the same place as I am looking. So I think Ericsson needs to be a competitor to NPR and have 54 separate podcasts in the marketplace globally around the world putting out a podcast a day. I think Ericsson needs to be, today should not be a day where everyone’s so excited about Mary Meeker’s slide deck, which is amazing and I am excited for it but if you just think about the sheer IP that sits within the for macro walls of this organization to put out extraordinary contemporary decks in fun ways to consume across these platforms to create leverage for our sales organization to create revenue, I just think there’s an extraordinary miss in the B2B environment and somebody’s gonna take advantage of it and I’d personally like to be associated with it for my own long-term being historically correct but it’s gonna be more fun to just just see it in the wild because I think that’s where it’s going.
So that’s what I’m seeing and I would love to, I’d love to go into Q and A and go a little more detailed with some of that pontificating and so thank you so much for having me. (audience applauds) So am I just gonna hear it here, repeat it for everybody back home and the cameras, great. Who’s got a question? Yes. Oh we do have a mic, awesome, yes, yes, great, thank you. – [Audience Member] You mentioned 5,000 pieces of content on LinkedIn. I’m the one who posts the content on LinkedIn, one post or two posts a day.
How do we communicate and get everyone in the company that understands to amp up the social media team? We have a few people, like maybe a handful of people and we’re already stretched to our limit for what we wanna do. We wanna do these things, we just, the time. How do we be able to sell that in to everyone else in a good way? – Sell that in because you’re asking them to help you produce content or sell them in because you want them to amplify it or sell them in because you want allocation of more resources to hire? – [Audience Member] More resources, less demand on doing other things which is like producing press releases and putting press releases out.
– So a macro media thing. How do you do that? You do that in most organizations by communicating in a way that may lead to you getting fired. (audience laughs) I think the reason I answered it that way is it’s actually the truth. If the people that are actual practitioners of any craft are not willing to be aggressive with their convictions to communicate to CFOs nothing will ever happen. There’s only two ways I’ve ever seen big companies do the right thing. One, a cheerleader who mounted enough political clout to actually get something done. Or two, massive pain at the macro level that has required them to take a deep look at themselves and change their behavior, that’s it, that’s it, that’s it, you know. You know, you’re gonna have to find who can help you get it done. To me the ability, or the internal and external partners that create this ability to communicate is oxygen.
For me, the amount of things that I would be willing to give up at this company if I was the CEO in return for the ability to put out 5,000 pieces across all platforms, being 500 on LinkedIn a day is almost everything except the core innovation. Definitely the bananas in the hallway. I mean that and I mean it for a purpose because as my profile has grown, as my results have spoken, as many things have happened, you know, I come from being a businessman, I’m not necessarily a comms person by trade. I’m quite proud that every day since I’ve been a professional I’ve been the CEO of a company that has grown exponentially, every day, every single day that I’ve breathed from 22 to 43 I’ve been at the helm as the CEO and COO the way I operate of two companies that have been the fastest growing companies in their sector.
I’m proud of that. What that also allows me to do is as the last half decade of my career is evolved I’m now sitting down with board members, CEOs, CFOs, activists, investors, and when I look at a true P and L my ability to have a logical, financial, or operational conversation around the notion of you’re telling me of no more money to pour in. First, 90 cents of the dollar that you’re spending on marketing and media is going in the garbage. You have no money for social media but this company is thrilled to buy a booth at a bullshit conference that costs more than the entire budget of your Linkedin media spent.
Let’s just, one more time, I don’t even know your P and L and I know I’m right right now. I know because I know because it’s a pattern recognition. I know that this company will spend more money building out a booth at some conference that mattered 21 years ago then they will spend on working media dollars properly deployed on LinkedIn which is the global communications portal of the B2B world, the end. Like what what else needs to be said? (audience applauds) In a world where I used to think I was smart but the clapping and reactions in this room overtime taught me I wasn’t smart, I was just in a position where I could tell the truth. My question to this reaction is, so why, what? Like how do we fix that? Who is your external media agency partner who isn’t incentivized to deploy the dollars in your best interests, they’re deploying it in their best interests because they’re inevitably a holding company themselves that’s publicly traded and they’re pushing television and programmatic media spend because that’s where the margin is, that’s the truth.
Who’s gonna fix that? Obviously I heard earlier today you have a new CMO and, you know, it’s her, it’s the CFO, it’s the legacy. Inevitably in companies like this sometimes even at the family level or the CO level there’s a relationship with an agency that’s 21 years which inevitably means you’re getting ripped the fuck off. So, you know, these are the things I’m thinking about. – [Moderator] If you could just also repeat the question. – Yeah, so I’m so sorry, that question is, there’s two people posting, how do we fix it? (audience laughs) – I have two questions. – Two questions. – [Audience Member] The first one, you said 2,000 on LinkedIn, try to post on social channels, how do you come up with those figures? And then the second question is, can you tell us a time that you failed and what you learned from that? – Great, the question is, how do you actually practically deliver on these two, three, four, 5,000 pieces of content a day, a week, how does that actually get done? And the second question is talking about a time I failed, and third, please? – [Audience Member] How did you come up with 5,000? – Completely out of my butt.
(audience laughs) And let me explain what I mean by that. I’d actually like it to be more, I just don’t think you can get there. And I think about what my intuition is on how much money you’re wasting on marketing and if that was deployed on the ambition of making a lot of content that you would get to those kind of numbers, got it. So whether, listen, I would dance if you put out 15 meaningful pieces of LinkedIn content a day, right? You know, I would dance. And meaningful, and what I mean by that is I have so much empathy for internal teams trying to do it with press releases, everything. You have to understand, if I was sitting and having dinner with my mom right now and she said, “hey, son really, like really, “what’s the punchline of why VaynerMedia and you “are so right, like, what has been going on?” I would say mom, “it’s our post-production capabilities “for the content, context, and nuances “of the seven platforms that have all the attention “with an overlay of deep empathy “for the person that’s consuming it.” Like, the one craft that I’ve developed and now have scaled internally is just human IP of understanding math and art, quant and qual around, you know, it’s funny, when you look back at how I’m talking here, it’s value post production contextual creative, it’s not posting on LinkedIn for the sake of posting.
You know, the ROI of any execution is predicated in your skill set. And so I arrived at the number based on eventually at scale, AI machine learning, all these things, we’ll be able to create so much micro fragmentation of a lot of these things and hopefully you know create content at scale. But for the time being what does, you know, I for example, I have a 30 person full-time team that works on my personal content as one person. I did put out 15 pieces of meaningful post produced creative for LinkedIn yesterday, me. You can imagine if I’m able to do that what I think you should be able to do.
Me versus Erickson. So as far as failing, it’s interesting, I don’t have like a fantastic obvious failure and that’s actually a weakness because it’s very grounded in my deep, deep, deep immigrant roots. I’ve never done anything that is so overextended myself that if it didn’t work that I would really fail. Where I’ve really failed is on the things that I haven’t done. I’ve fantastically passed on Uber twice in the angel round and that $25,000 check would have made me $500 million. I fantastically didn’t even reply to Air Bed and Breakfast’s email to have, which is what bnb stands for, to invest in their company. I’ve passed on a lot of opportunities that have become fantastic, they’re the most obvious. And then the really biggest mistakes I’ve made is when I didn’t come to a conference like Brilliant Minds over the last five or six years and that would’ve been the conference when I met someone and she and I would have done something.
So it’s much more when you’re crippled by opportunity it’s the hidden things that you’ve passed on that are the great mistakes of your career, especially when you’re like me who’s not ever playing a financial arbitrage machine game where you’re trying to slide one past the goalie and hope your timings right. I’m a marathon runner in a sprinters costume and so I don’t put myself in a position to be that vulnerable. The other thing is, from from 18 to 29 I worked every single day, all of them.
And so I definitely think like one vacation a year for a week with my friends from high school college would have been a good idea. I was just so passionate, I so wanted to pay my parents back for being the greatest parents and bringing me to America that I was obsessed with building that family business and I probably could have had a little bit more leisure in my 20s which I regret. Not really, but yes, you know what I mean? Not really not because I became successful, honestly, because I just loved it.
I go garage sailing on the weekends, literally go to people’s yards and try to buy things for a dollar that they’re selling that was in their basement and then repost it on eBay for eight dollars and in that seven dollar ROI get more excited than landing an eight million dollar client. So for me businesses my hobby, you know, and so, that’s why I say, not really, because I just loved it. I loved you know working the register on a Saturday when I was 25 years old because I loved it. – [Audience Member] Hi, I have a question here. So when you talked about the volume and take it up to 5,000 posts a day, but you also talked about the importance of being relevant and having meaningful content.
How do you ensure that you stay relevant to your followers? – The question is, in an ambition of thousands of pieces of content a day how do I also nail home relevance? Which is a big part of it. So ironically this volume framework inevitably creates relevance. What will happen, it’s kind of like a workout plan. If I’m able to get my partners, friends, people I care about, clients, my own stuff into a framework of volume inevitably, let’s just say somebody was in here and said, “approved.” And everyone’s like, okay now we do it. Inevitably tomorrow’s board meeting is, well what are we gonna say? And what you realize is, and this is devastating, like one of the things that’s been really fascinating and we work with very large companies, is once you see it you can’t unsee it.
And and the level of visceral negative energy I have towards the modern-day marketing world, watching some of my clients starting the process of going there, it’s real fun for me because literally a week earlier they’re having this subjective completely non practical meeting and then a month later after the first month of this work they can’t even stay in the room for 10 minutes because it seems so silly. It’s like many things in life, once you see something sometimes you can’t unsee it. So the entire model is built on relevance. All of a sudden you are making a piece of content to female CIOs in Russia. Because you’re making 5,000 pieces of content. Like, you’re not gonna make vanilla anymore. You’re in the business of selling vanilla, you are. Everything is so over corporatized and everything’s trying to reach everybody, even when the seed of the idea was a good idea by the time it sees the day of life it’s vanilla. When you’ve made the commitment to producing volume everything is relevant because you start becoming educated on how deeply powerful these platforms are and if I want to reach a CTO that went to MIT and I want to use MIT colors in the creative because I know that makes her or him more likely to click it, I mean this is real stuff now, all of a sudden 5,000, you can’t imagine how quickly through a detailed conversation around this 5,000 seems way too little.
Everything, like just think about the two examples I gave you and how your minds running with the fact that this is actually in perpetuity. Every school, every neighborhood, every geographic, every job title, every organization. Like that’s just the framework of seven or eight cohort beginnings that is an X and Y which allows you to go forever. You could be making content that starts with, hey are you 28 years old? And the person who sees it is, yeah I am. You know, like you can’t imagine how infinite this actually plays out and so, you know, it was fun to hear you ask the question ’cause I was smiling inside, I’m like, it’s once you make the commitment to that framework the only thing you can do is relevance.
And by the way, relevance is the only thing that sells. Not potential reach which is the currency of big companies. GRPs and impressions and the cost of those impressions potential reach, not actual reach, it’s being reported as you reach those people. You don’t believe that, you don’t believe that article reached 29 million people. Potential reach versus actualized relevant consumption. That is the delta. – Hello. – Hey, sir. – [Audience Member] It’s very fascinating talking about the volume so I’m staying on that as well. We have this target group of 500 operators and key decision-makers in each operator and when we do less content with them, sort of more focused on keynotes, stuff they are in on. Whenever we start going into volume and work a little bit further from our core operators and makes it a bit more about general technology. It’s interesting that our volume has gone up but it’s also draws more students, sort of tech interested people in general, so yeah, but I do think that we’re sort of flooding the channel a little bit for some of those core decision makers so we’ve definitely become much more famous and pulling in more and more people but I think that a lot of these executives that actually buy our stuff, you know, get our messages with them can sort of get a little flooded a little bit.
– So don’t don’t let them see it. The question is, we’re flooding the 500 decision-makers who actually drive our business if we go to this model. Yes we build the macro brand and there’s more interest but we’re actually over communicating to the decision maker which makes them tune us out which could be detrimental to our business. Don’t let them see it. See, the thing that’s most fun about being an actual practitioner of your craft, which I’m sure all of you feel the same. You know, it’s funny over the last five to seven years I’m like, wait a minute, I really understand this, I really understand wine, and I really understand the New York Jets.
What I don’t understand is everything else so I’ve started becoming a very not interesting dinner guest because I don’t even have excitement anymore to talk about things that I’m a headline reader of or kind of know. You could black out the 500 people that you’re scared of bothering when you’re posting that content. You’re also making assumptions that they see everything. There’s so many variables that go into this. Plus, we haven’t had the conversation of what you should be surrounding, you know what’s great about B2B? You know who you’re selling to. You know, a lot of my B2B friends get mad at me but I’ve done very well in exiting my SAS businesses, I have a B2B business now, I used to have a B2C business. B2B is easier than B2C. I just don’t know what else to say, one man’s point of view, I just like the idea of knowing who the 500 people are that I need to do business with.
Let’s go into a slight variation of my model in what you and I are discussing. A, on our LinkedIn channel let’s start there, our ability to not let them see it is very high. You just black them out from those posts, so that’s mission one. Biggest issue that we were talking about in the short term accomplished. But let’s go on offense instead of defense. What about the fact that we can know that those 500 people in today’s world based on how many people are sharing or if we want to just take the admin of that person out for a drink if they’re into fishing, if they’re into proper football, if they’re into many other things, and then we can feed them that.
I literally closed the four million dollar account by talking to that person about St. Louis Cardinals baseball because I saw that that’s what he was Tweeting about. The reason we take them on fishing trips and golf trips and all the stuff that we wine and dine on we could be doing in relevant content for a hundredth of the price so that’s my answer to that question, right, we don’t have to flood them because that’s what’s good about modern technology, you can control the levers. More importantly I’d like to flood them with more things that all individual five, we should have five people in creative. You know, in a world where you’re like, we have a small team and we have to do everything and dumb shit like press releases, I’m saying, let’s create eight person production and strategy and media teams per 500 people.
I would build a 4,000 person team to produce content for 500 people because it would be ROI positive. To your point, they’re driving our business so let’s become the greatest executor of what they want to consume and brings them value. The problem is, not knowing what you’re putting out, the problem is is that oftentimes we’re not putting out content that is valuable to the person on the other side in the macro. We’re talking about our products and services. Ericsson has permission to talk about everything. And what Ericsson needs to do is make a graph of what are the other 90 things that these 500 people care about that have nothing to do with us and let’s be the greatest publisher of information around that. Not to mention, the ability to use these channels to create content that pulls those people into real life is remarkable. I use digital as a gateway drug to interpersonal relationships.
So if we know that 13 of them are the biggest wine connoisseurs and we decide to get Jancis Robinson and fly her in here and do a wine night and then send an invitation on LinkedIn that is gated that, are you interested in a 1961 Bordeaux tasting hosted by Jancis Robinson on a pretty boat on a beautiful summer day here in in xyz city, tends to work. We’re just not committed to the craft ’cause we are used to a top-down culture of communications. Make a single blunt object at the top, force it down every channel with no context. – Hey, Gary. – Hi, how are you? – I’m Jos. – Jos. – [Audience Member] I just joined Ericsson a month ago. – Awesome, yep, I heard, yes. – Thank you for being here. – Thank you. – [Audience Member] It feels like a lot of the world that we’ve been living in for 11 years to communicate to Ericsson so I’m thankful for having these conversations and bringing the human aspect to the scale of Ericsson of being human when anyone asks me what we do and having the conversation with you was one of the interesting parts of the conversation that we’ve been having.
So I wanted to ask you a question on this which is more of the what you actually talk about in channels to be relative and be relevant to people. Lots of us struggle with this, working hard, which is sort of the stickiness of your content. But you also talk a bit more about the death of this, of working hard but also being sustainable and taking care of yourself, can you talk a little bit about that? – Sure, the question is, thank you for knowing a little bit about kind of my trajectory of how I’ve been filling the pipes. What I’ve been to your point and thank you for knowing that. Definitely when I transitioned from wine to let’s say entrepreneurship in my content it was 2007, eight, nine, and we were going through a global economic crisis and as you can imagine as an immigrant who answered your question of what my regret is, I don’t I think it’s very difficult to give advice that says become more talented. Be born with more talent, very not practical. So where I found myself was going to another place that felt very practical to me and as you can imagine it’s all I ever saw for the first 35 years of my life which was work ethic was a controllable part of the game that if you did that if you’re out working your competition, practicing after practice, all the things we know about sports and music and theater and acting and all those things, that that was an incredible advantage.
And in a time and place where people were getting laid off and things of that nature it hit the right tone. It was natural to me and the timing was right. To the more nuanced question which I appreciate which means you’re paying attention, over the last 18 to 24 months as the world changes as we get into entitlement era after 15 years of economic or 10 years of great global economic growth, much like my concern with entrepreneurship because there’s so much money in the system everybody’s idea gets funded and we’re not building businesses, we’re just building companies to get more funding. What has also happened is a more human conversation more Nordic and European centric than US and China centric about work-life balance, about mental health issues, about burnout.
I found myself two years ago watching contemporaries, even friends, start to use me as a poster child of bad. That I was pushing too much burnout and things of that nature, hustle porn and other things, and I was empathetic to it. As much as I was hurt and wanted to make 500 videos of in the first book, which is my Bible, I talk about if you want to work nine to five and make 40,000 a year but if you’re happy you’ve won, I think I’ve been and I have been incredibly consistent around happiness, not money and many other things but to your point, because of my personality traits what was associated was hustle and things that nature so I have to take responsibility for that and so over the last 24 months I have spent more time and energy to contextualize everything to make sure I’m covering the bases so that people know where I stand on this which is what I said earlier, I don’t actually regret it because I loved, business is my hobby.
But if one wants to go to every softball game or every track meet or, you know work, 31 hours a week and they’re fulfilled that makes me happy, I don’t get to judge. So yes I think what’s so great about communication and so great about advancements is you can create clarity, you can talk about different things, I talk a lot more about parenting today than I did in the past because, not even because I’m a parent, because I’ve been more in tune to how I was parented. So yes, I’ve definitely been more aggressive in making sure the things that I’ve always believed are more associated with me because I have no interest in other people painting a picture about me that isn’t true. But it all goes to one big game of self-awareness. You know, you can get burned out work in 30 hours a week because you’re unhappy because you’re trying to be to work life but what actually you are is an alpha go-getter and you do want to grind.
Not living your actual life is the problem, letting other people’s opinions dictate your behavior is the problem. Self-confidence, most parents create insecurities. Hi. – Oh, I have the mic. – That works out, whoever has the mic gets to ask the question. – [Audience Member] I’m curious about the question that the others asked before we talked about it, so how are you gonna make those 5,000 posts? – First of all, thank you, the question is how do you practically make 5,000? So a couple things, one, as I became more in tune to this model over the last three years, which is the evolution of everything I’ve been doing, it’s really interesting, Twitter has become a far more important platform for me and Linkedin has become a far more powerful platform because 5,000 when you hear that seems super daunting if you’re close enough to the business where Ericsson does the cliche thing which it spends $500,000 making a video because their creative agency wanted to make it and nobody’s ever gonna see it and it cost 500,000 because you starred somebody in it and it’s just 500,000.
And so you hear that and you’re like, this is crazy, we can’t make 5,000. It took us four and a half months to make that one video. When you think about the world the way I do which is you have so much internal IP that putting out 50 Tweets in the morning in written form with no picture or video support behind it but they are just thoughtful questions, statements, observations, hot takes as I like to call them, whatever it may be, when you do that all of a sudden you start seeing how the number can go up but where it gets most interesting is why do you do that? Why should Erickson from 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. put out, you know, 84 between LinkedIn and Twitter because that’s a place where you can get away with the volume in the feed without overexposure but can still get actual consumption because if it doesn’t do well it doesn’t penalize you in the same way, the way an Instagram or Facebook does.
This goes into understanding the platforms, why should LinkedIn, excuse me, Ericsson put out 84 pieces of content in written form on LinkedIn and Twitter from 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. every morning? It’s because what happens from 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 in the afternoon next. What is amazing about the volume model is the notion of marketing for the sake of better marketing. So what happens after you post those 78 is you start getting quant and qual feedback.
And what you do with that feedback is you make the next decision which is are you going to write more about that or has there been such a huge reaction to people’s response on what 5G actually means to their day to day, not just faster and better battery, but how our entire world changes when you create that speed of information, how that actually makes autonomous cars real, how that actually allows a doctor in Peru to perform a surgery on somebody in New York, how that actually actually actually does. When you see the response now all of a sudden you say, you know what, that little three sentences we said about, did you know when 5G is in your life this happens, got such a big response, why don’t we now have our graphic designer make an infographic real quick around five things you don’t know about 5G and let’s post that at 3:37 p.m.
Today and then when that goes well then you decide, why don’t we go quick little video on our iPhone talking to Lars in R and D he knows a lot about this shit. Let’s go over to him, Lars says it, and then you just post it not with what’s quality with green-screen and lighting. I mean, I was powdered before I came out here right now. (audience laughs) That to me is not the variable of success of this talk. That was not going to be the variable that made this go well or not. It was what I was gonna say and Lars with an iPhone with bad lighting saying something thoughtful and then that posted at 7:04 p.m.
On our Twitter to the small group that cares matters and so when you get into that mindset you can see how it works and its really just having writers, designers, something we call predators, shredators, which are people who can film and post produce for the channel all in one person. Talent, humans. Commitment to being able to pay those people to do the thing because you value that more than the lighting in your booth in Spain at a conference.
(audience laughs) I went there. It’s always fun to go somewhere where the group knows exactly where you’re going. And I’ll tell you why I go there, I go there because you’re going there to check a box of what’s normally gonna happen anyway. Your your most senior executives are having dinners with those clients to begin with anyway, you’re just you’re just spending a lot of money on something that actually matters far less. I don’t mind checking a box for perception is reality, I don’t.
I mind that what I actually said, which is the lighting of that booth or that pavilion costs more than all the media dollars you deploy against targeted LinkedIn creative, that’s what I mind. Doesn’t mean you’re not spending a ton of money on media, it’s just that your media partner is incentivized to spend that media in a way that’s in their vested interests, not yours.
This is the conversation, this is real life, I like real life, thank you. (audience applauds).
