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The role of communications has changed. The expectations are higher. The margin for error is smaller.
Earning Your Seat is a podcast for communications leaders operating under changed expectations without a clear playbook.
Hosted by Dino Delic, Stephanie Lerdall, and Genevieve Brammall, the show places the hosts inside an experience many communicators recognize. Smart, capable leaders learning in real time how influence is earned, tested, and sustained.
Each episode features candid conversations with leaders across communications, data, media, and technology. Alongside those conversations, the hosts test ideas in real time, question what they have been taught, and confront where common advice breaks down under organizational pressure.
This is not aspirational thought leadership. It is a practical look at growth as it happens. How communicators earn trust, collaborate across functions, and lead with authority in a world moving faster than the role itself.
Pull up a chair. The work begins now.
Dino Delic (00:00):
This is Powered by Meltwater. Hi, I'm Dino Delic and in the studio with me is Genevieve Bramall and Stephanie Lerdall.
Genevieve Brammall (00:22):
I'm Jen and I'm the head of PR in News Corp Australia.
Stephanie Lerdall (00:25):
Hey, I'm Stephanie Lerdall. I lead comms for Morningstar, which is an investment research firm.
Dino Delic (00:31):
For a bit of context, I've asked Genevieve and Stephanie to join me as my co-hosts. They're two communications professionals at different stages of their career, and I know they're going to learn a lot about themselves from these industry experts. I'm putting in front of them because I have an underlying motive. This is part podcast, part experiment, and part comms bootcamp. This is earning your seat. If you've been following the evolution of social media strategies in the comms world, you've likely noticed a shift. Social used to be the Wild West, an uncharted territory where companies could take risks and get away with it. Now it's a powerhouse driving everything from reputation to sales, but like Spider-Man says, with that power comes a whole new set of challenges. Okay, fine. It's not exactly what Spider-Man said, but that's what I'm saying today because I'm curious what happens when you're given full ownership of a channel that's both a marketing tool and a potential crisis engine. How do you strike a balance between brand building and driving direct sales, especially when it all falls under one umbrella? Our guest today is Kirsten Echeverry, and she'll help us answer all of those questions and more. Kirsten is the director of social media and influence at IBM and has been on the front lines of social strategy, especially in tech. She's here to give us a behind the scenes look at what it means to truly own social media in 2026.
Kirsten Echeverry (02:02):
Honestly, I love this role. It's been kind of one of the highlights of my career, but I will tell you it has not been an easy journey to get there. Social is sort of, I'll say kind of the sexy part of marketing and comms that everyone wants a piece of, right?
Dino Delic (02:19):
Kirsten has spent years at the helm of her company's social strategy, which means she knows exactly what it's like to be the go-to person when things go well and when they go wrong. But as you'll tell us, owning social media doesn't just come with glory, it comes with responsibility. So how do you balance pushing brand reputation while also being cautious enough to avoid landing in a crisis?
Kirsten Echeverry (02:44):
I spent a number of years in more typical comms roles, so morphing into social has been, I've been in it a while, but I know kind of probably where you guys are at in terms of the pressure you're getting, but also trying to figure it out and balance it.
Dino Delic (03:01):
What excites me most is that correct my quote here if I'm wrong, you have full ownership of social. So it's not just that social sits under comms, it's that you have full ownership of social. What's it like to have full ownership over social?
Kirsten Echeverry (03:16):
Social is sort of, I'll say kind of the sexy part of marketing and comms that everyone wants a piece of. And so I think it is really hard because you are dealing with a lot of competing priorities or misaligned priorities across marketing and communications, and you have to be the one to say, how do we show up as one brand externally, and how can social help us do that? So I love that we've been able to centralize social at IBM over the last three years. So globally, we support all business units across comms and marketing in more than 20 countries. But with that comes challenges to your point, right? Do we understand the market? Can we truly lead social driven strategies? I think the business of social, which I'll talk more about, is very different than just a checklist of things. And so really understanding what is the holistic brand stand for and how can you create content and brand equity on a channel that checks off multiple priorities across the business?
(04:23):
And I think that that's kind of been the unlock and marketing versus comms, right? The priorities are different. Marketing is generally focused on selling that product, right? You're working with product marketers, they've got the list, they've got their tactics and they're ready to tell you what to publish. And on the comm side, it's more about reputation building brand equity, and I think the best brands on social do both, and I think you see that through the content, right? They're authentically being their brand in various ways. I think it's really clear. I love following other brands on social. It's always really clear on who owns the channel. To me, if you look at the content that's in the feed, and I think it's also really clear on where there's a tight collaboration between marketing and comms and you see a different type of content mix, and I think that's what we've always been striving for is even when our team was decentralized, because it's not possible to make the org change that we made everywhere.
(05:27):
I totally recognize that I come from consumer brands where we didn't make that org change, but we had that type collaboration. And when you have a collaboration and you share an ad cal, but ultimately you have to have one owner and decision maker for who approves the content and what goes out, but understanding both sides of the fence and what the priorities might be and understanding that to truly build brand equity, you have to do both. You have to be talking about your products and what you sell and who you are as a, but also that reputation kind of brand equity piece is important. And are your leaders on your channels? Are there voices there? What does that look like? And so I think it's always really interesting, but I think it's not always possible to do the org change. And so I think there's ways to do it outside of that that just kind of require tight collaboration and I think trust in each other's remit, but also ultimately finding sort of that social owner who's not afraid to take a risk. Social is always changing, so one post isn't going to make or break your company strategy and being willing to try something out. If it doesn't do well, no one probably remembers it. The feed moves fast, and so sometimes people get really stuck on the image and the copy and it's like, let's try it out. We can try it out again next week with a different approach.
Dino Delic (06:51):
Kirsten talked about the delicate dance between reputation led content and product centric posts. It's not always easy finding the right mix, especially when you're facing an internal tug of war over priorities. Do you push out that new product announcement or do you focus on thought leadership and brand building content? As Kirsten shares, the key lies in making sure your brand is showing up authentically without getting stuck in the weeds of perfection.
Stephanie Lerdall (07:16):
In my early part of my career, I worked at a hotel chain, and this was in the phase when everything was about social care. And so we were standing up a social care team that was building off of our call center and we were training people who were used to interacting on the phone and taking credit card payments, how to be empathetic humans that were responding in a customer service way on a different channel. It was an incredibly fun experiment because we gave them all kinds of surprise and delight budgets, and they had a total autonomy to do a bunch of fun things that made for great PR at the time. But we also had some cultural missteps. For example, if you're based in one of our US based call centers, you may not know that eggplant is aubergine in Australia, we had someone going through and showing pictures of a hotel buffet.
(08:10):
Someone had mislabeled the buffet as aboriginal instead of aubergine, and the social care team did not pick up on what was happening here. They thought like, oh, and so they wrote something kind of wrote like "Enjoy your meal," which made it worse. And we ended up being on BuzzFeed, which was a really big thing at the time. So I'm not saying that you can't make crises out of social where you're thinking like, oh my gosh, don't these people have cultural sensitivity trading or anything? And of course we did all that and whatever, but I also think that now that I'm part of a different kind of brand, more often I'm encountering that people won't take the risk that they should take because to your point, the feed moves fast versus making a mistake that causes a crisis.
Kirsten Echeverry (08:58):
I spent 10 years in consumer brands and I have the same experience in terms of customer care and training folks who have traditionally been on the phone to respond on social, which is a completely different way to approach things. I do find in the space I'm in now in the tech industry, specifically B2B, although we're kind of a B2C household name, people are more risk adverse than anything. And so I think we're always trying to push them to try something new. The one post doesn't make or break a strategy, and I feel like a lot of the crisis situations that we deal with don't actually happen from brand-led content. It happens from employees blogging about something that maybe we would want them to refrain from, or they're commenting on a political issue that we'd love to avoid that's kind of going viral or there's just tragedies happening around the world and for some reason people are bringing your brand into that conversation.
(10:03):
So I don't find that really from a brand led perspective. To your point, Stephanie, I think people are overly cautious on the brand side because social is now, I think if you looked at social 10 or 20 years ago, it was still sort of this playground and now people realize it actually can drive equity for a brand, it can drive reputation, it can drive sales. And so it's a very, I guess, well-respected marketing channel. And I don't feel like it was 10 years ago, if I'm being honest, I think people kind of thought like, oh, these social folks, eventually they'll go back into other areas of comms or marketing and now they realize social is crucial for brands. And so I feel like people are more cautious. And when I say people, I just mean my colleagues and business partners when we're selling them on an idea, they're copy editing for an hour when I just need to fact check. And so I think it's really interesting, obsessing over every little word then reduces our speed to feed and defeats the whole purpose. So it is interesting kind of creating content with folks who don't do this every day, but they've got their key messages that they want to stick to. But it's like how do you evolve that for social? How do you disrupt a feed? And sometimes people have to be willing to walk away from exact words or phrases that they've been using in decks and presentations if they truly want to drive performant content.
Dino Delic (11:31):
So we've been talking about the tension between moving fast on social media and obsessing over every little detail. For folks like Stephanie and Kirsten, years in consumer brands taught them a single misstep can spark a crisis, but being too cautious can slow everything down and keep a brand from standing out. And that's where Kirsten's experience in her role really comes in. Product posts like features and demos, roadmaps, they work in paid campaigns, but organically not so much. What really moves the needle is reputation led content, thought leadership, earned media, executive visibility, the kind of stuff that builds relationships and shapes how people see your company over time. Social isn't one post equals one sale, it's about the cumulative effect, the story you're telling. And in a big organization, owning that channel means juggling strategy data and a lot of other responsibility all at once.
Kirsten Echeverry (12:30):
Look, the product services piece when I stepped into this role was tough because we had product marketers with lists of tactics. They've got their product roadmap, and so every day they want you to publish product benefits and demos, and at the end of the day, that kind of stuff is really, it does really well in paid social when you can target your audience, it does really poorly in organic because it doesn't disrupt the feed. Everyone sees it as an ad. It's not really prioritizing the algorithm. The less engagement it gets, the less organic reach is going to get. And so that was really tough when I first came into the role because I get it, we have to sell products and make sales goals. I think on the other side of the house, the reputation led content to me is more of that thought leadership content.
(13:19):
And I hate to use the word thought leadership. I think it's overplayed and overused and everyone has a thought leadership blog they want published, and I think people kind of use it as a category that they feel like will get them on the calendar. But I think thought leadership is about your executives out speaking to clients. Did they post something on social that you could repurpose? Did they get a really great earned coverage piece talking about the company strategy and the vision and the roadmap? And I think when I had first pitched our CEO was featured in a few different top tier media outlets, and when I first took this position, I said, great, we're going to share it on LinkedIn. We'll do an Instagram story, the whole playbook of social stuff. And the team was like, oh, we would never share earned coverage. Why would we share something directing off of our website?
(14:10):
Why in the world would we not direct to ibm.com? And I was like, coming from a comms background, I just thought that was wild and crazy because at the end of the day, if our CEO, I don't remember the publication, but if our CEO, I think it was the New York Times, if he is featured in the New York Times, is the new visionary behind the transformation of IBM that's going to help us sell products right? At the end of the day. Does it drive to ibm.com in any way? No. And so I think it's like we had to kind of do some testing and then show the performance of that content. And now three years later, I've been in this role almost four years, everyone expects that of our feed. Everyone in this company expects us to show up in various different ways, showcasing reputation led content, values led content and reputation stuff.
(14:59):
I generally think of kind of thought leadership executives, what's our kind of vision roadmap, but also earnings that falls in that camp. And when you show clients on social positive earnings, if you have 'em and you report those out, they start to think, oh, should I be looking at IBM differently? What other products do they have? How could they benefit my company? And so I think you have to find those connection points. And social's not always one post equals a sale. It's like what's the relationship you're building with your audience over time? So I'm not sure if that answers your question, but I think you have to kind of find the right balance and then show the data. And we do a lot of benchmarking where I show top performing posts of the year, I have to tell you are generally reputation led content from the comms team.
(15:52):
I think that product marketing is now seeing, and even a lot of our marketers are seeing, oh, some of that earned coverage or some of that reputation led stuff is coming up in client conversations with executives and sales folks. And so they understand now the other piece of the puzzle has to be a part of the feed and we have to tell the holistic brand story. So it's taken a while to get there. I think it's been one of those things where it's easier if you truly own social because you can say, we really appreciate your feedback. We're going to go ahead and share it anyway and we'll share the results with you next week. We usually give things depending on a platform, at least five days of flight time to really get traction. And then the data speaks for itself. Data-driven strategies and conversations are the core of social, and then it just becomes less subjective because everyone has an opinion of what makes social great. That is truly the hardest part about this job.
Dino Delic (16:54):
I want to tell you that I have seven different things that I've written down that I want to ask you, but I want to make this choose your own adventure for Jen and Stephanie. So let me just read out to you guys what I've gotten so far and then you guys can pick what direction or you can jump in with your own. But a couple of things that I'm reacting to that Kirsten said. So reputation content ends up performing best. I'll just paraphrase it that way. But you have to do reputation based content. You have to do also marketing based, product based content. So that means that you have to be good at knowing what works well. You have to be so good at all these things. You have to be a super chef that knows how to make every kind of meal. You have to make grilled cheese and you have to make FLA grow.
(17:40):
I dunno, maybe that's a bad analogy, but okay, so that's one thing is there's some benefits to that, but I can only think about how burdensome that is and also how you get good at that. You also seem young and not stressed, so I wonder how have you not aged so much more having that much stress, but you also have a monopoly. People can't piss you off too much internally because if they keep harping on about something, say you are doing too much reputation and they have something that they want to talk about with the product roadmap. If they get on your bad side, they have no one else that they can go to because all their social stuff has to go through you at some point. And I know I'm simplifying and dramatizing, but that is interesting when in other companies where it's more siloed where somebody could go to somebody else and be like, I'll just get this other team to do it.
(18:22):
We'll do it on paid if we're not going to do it on organic, they can't do that with you. They have to deal with your point of view. That presents some challenges as well. Again, more stress. And then I like this point about earning media through social. A lot of people think about pitching, earning media and then blasting it on social and amplifying it, but I don't know if I'm just latching onto something that someone's already known, but at least you put it in an elegant way that made me think about it from a fresh perspective, which is, but what if the end game is to generate a narrative and a story on social that then gets the media to pay attention to something to make it easier to earn that story? And I'm sure, Jed, you guys are the practitioners.
Genevieve Brammall (19:02):
Yeah, I'm like you. There's so much going on here. I think you're very privileged when you have that monopoly and the buck stops with you because yeah, I see it less as something to fear, but more something to celebrate that there is that uniformity. And most businesses don't have that. So I'm thinking about our listeners. There may be those who just sit here being jealous really because most companies are not structured like that. And certainly I'm in a bit of a unique situation that the people that control really control the conversation on social with. Our consumers are journalists who in our newsrooms and they are at the coalface of using social largely. It has grown to be an amplification channel. So to reach audiences in other places with a view that they might click and come back through to us that's in its sort of simplest form.
(19:56):
I think that the algorithms of big tech and et cetera now are really changing the nature of that conversation. And that's what we're at the forefront of doing now is more looking for how we can use the channel not just as a shop front where someone might come in and actually directly come back to us, but more as that shop window where we are saying we might not see a direct click through, but if you look at the culmination of the totality of all of the things that we're doing across social, hopefully we build that brand equity. That's really challenging when you're not in control of that engine room. Because I think that for me, there's multiple, multiple brands. There's corporate brands that I don't impact at all consumer brands. I'm sitting there and helping formulate strategy, but not having any direct reports who influence the outcome.
(20:45):
And that means that job is largely stakeholder relationship management at scale and across a whole country, which is not quite the same as global and multiple countries, but it's still really, really challenging to get people to see commonality of experience and commonality of their consumer when most people who are in charge of a brand see their customer as being uniquely theirs. There's sort of a bit to unpack there. And I think to Dino's point, the earning media through social, that is part of, well, what we'll be trying to do in this campaign that I'll be launching in two weeks will be to try to start something on social that becomes so big that that becomes the story and that we are able to then generate more media and more interest off the back of what happens in that space. And we did that with a recent campaign called Let Them Be Kids in Australia, which was all AImed to encourage the government to increase the age of social media usage from 13 to 16. And that has been achieved and legislation has been passed and will be starting on December 10 this year. But what we did, we needed to make it everybody's problem and not just a government problem. The government responds when they understand that the community believes that there's an issue. So it's really important that
Dino Delic (22:03):
Here's what I have to say about what Jen is saying there and also what we're talking a lot about in this episode. Don't forget the grass is always greener. We always think about, oh, wouldn't it be great if I got to have a monopoly over social or if I got to structure myself in a different way or if I got to report to the chief marketing officer instead of the chief communications officer or something like that. And I do think that that's just human psychology, that we always look for circumstances that are better than our own and maybe we should just focus on how we can better our own circumstances or maximize what we're doing. That said, I know I'm also often the guy who's never happy with the circumstances and trying to change the circumstances. So it is tough to do, but I think it's easier to listen back to this episode and think, well, we're talking about a very unique situation in that Kirsten has the monopoly over social for IBM, but that's not everything that makes Kirsten so great at what she does. It definitely helps, but I keep saying throughout this episode, it does come with a lot of responsibility. It does mean that she really is the overseer of everything that goes out on social for an entire company of hundreds of thousands of people. So that's a lot of responsibility,
Genevieve Brammall (23:17):
That conversation that it's not just us telling people that this is an issue, but it's the consumer demonstrating that they believe it is also an issue. So when the conversation becomes so loud on social that governments can't ignore it, that's super powerful. And again, we have to make sure that editorially that is very much understood and they're the ones that are really driving that conversation. We can impact it in multiple different ways and ensure that other media are picking up on it, reverse engineering back that earned media into the social space. I certainly see that as a cyclical opportunity.
Dino Delic (23:55):
We often talk about now how the algorithm, or at least I think about it, and I was just listening to something this morning on my bike ride about phone addiction and outrage and all that sort of stuff, and the algorithm is geared towards engagement, but you guys were the original media companies, and so you also wanted outrage and engagement because you're covering a topic that everyone's talking about. So what, I'm not trying to turn this into an evil thing, but what you're trying to do in a way is create a social conversation about a topic, get the government to respond that makes a great media story that hopefully you then as a media outlet and an entity will cover. I don't think IBM wants to fire up people about those types of topics, but maybe you want to fire up the engineering community or something like that. It makes me wonder, how do you straddle a line between firing people up? I mean, IBM is pretty conservative as a brand, right? You don't want to get too exciting.
Kirsten Echeverry (24:46):
Yeah, it is a tough balance. I mean, I have to be honest, I don't think the topics that come across my desk are crazy provocative that when we look at the priority map is really focused on our product roadmap and how we get there, how are we transforming the business to do that?
Dino Delic (25:08):
When you sit with someone like Kirsten, you start to see the full weight of what it means to own a company's social presence. It's not just posting updates or responding to comments. It's balancing product messaging with reputation led storytelling, it's translating executive vision into something the audience actually engages with and doing it all in a space where the feed moves faster than anyone can keep up. And yet even with all that responsibility, and yes, the monopoly over the conversation internally, there's a creativity there. It's about seeing social not as a checklist, but as a canvas, how do you take something that feels dry or overly corporate and make it feel alive? How do you make your audience care without crossing lines that shouldn't be crossed? That's where the next challenge begins, turning the ordinary into something that you want to pay attention to. Maybe I should flip the question.
(26:02):
If things aren't that exciting, how do you make it more exciting so you don't blend in with somebody else? You're in AI, let's face it, we're all getting bored. Well, until somebody like now the exciting thing about AI is like who's suing Sam Altman and all this other stuff? And so I, IBM is trying to be a leader in this space. And so for a while now, I think somebody the other day was talking about how at first there was excitement and now we're just getting the false promise and all this sort of stuff. So how do you deal with that? How do you take something that's seemingly boring and get people fired up to the point where you still don't get yourself in too much hot water?
Kirsten Echeverry (26:34):
Yeah, I think that's an interesting question because everyone's talking about AI, it's starting to become noisy on the feeds, and people don't even really know how AI, outside of personal use for it, how it can actually change their workday and change their productivity. Everyone's talking about AI agents, do you need an agent? And most people don't even really know what an agent does or what it is and how you can build them. And so I think the way that we are really trying to, and this is sort of a work in progress because all of our competitors and partners as we call them, because we work with them on lots of different integrations, we're all talking about the same thing. And that gets really tough. We all have sort of a different value proposition, and we are different companies and we serve different industries, but we serve a lot of the same industries.
(27:25):
To be totally honest, I think we can create all of this beautiful content for the feed. We can use the best product demos, we can do all these great videos, but at the end of the day, it just all starts to feel very salesy. And so where we've really reinvested a lot of time, talent, energy and budget is with creators. And so we are really focused on, and if you didn't know, influencer is the old term, creators the new term, that is what they prefer to be called. And so we have focused a lot of time, talent, energy on creators and how can they help tell our story in a way that only they can, they resonate with their audience, their audiences trust them, they look to them for inspiration. And sometimes when we get on the phone with these creators, they think about our product in a very different way that we haven't thought about it because we're all looking at the same messaging decks, the same priority framework, and sometimes we can't get out of our own way.
(28:25):
And so the creators kind of challenge us to do that. And so I think the creator led approach is a great one, and we use the creator content. Obviously they're sharing on their channels with their networks who are also our key audiences, but we also a lot of times will repurpose that content for brand channels. What I want to get to by the end of the year is I want a creator to break news. I want us to release a press release at the same time a creator is able to break the news for us. That's a hard sell within the business, but that's really where the industry is moving.
Dino Delic (28:59):
Are you talking about doing exclusives?
Kirsten Echeverry (29:00):
Yeah, an embargo with one of our top tier outlets in a press release, right? That's traditionally how you break news for a large company, and that's just been around for so long. But imagine if, and I want to do this specifically with some of our AI models. Granite is our biggest model. The next time we have a huge release, we work with let's say five developer creators. They do a bunch of content on YouTube and Discord and Reddit. We trust them to break the news.
Dino Delic (29:35):
If we all helped you convince your leadership to say, let's do it that way, who's like your perfect influencer? I'm just wondering what does that look like? Who's this developer?
Kirsten Echeverry (29:43):
Well, I think it depends on product and priority, but I mean there are influencers and creators out there who have millions of followers that they engage with every single day. And so imagine if you have an influential developer who has, I'm making this up, 10 million followers on YouTube, discord, all these different platforms, and he comes out or she comes out and says, this granite model will change your life, and here's how that's actually going to get a lot more traction than we put something on the wire. We hope it gets picked up. We do a bunch of media pitching, we get our agency involved. And so it just sort of flips the script on who can break news on your behalf, but it completely puts trust in that creator. And I think that's the biggest barrier is that I've got to get someone lots of leadership on board that we can trust this creator.
(30:39):
Obviously we're going to review the content, but they may not say the exact thing we want them to say, right? Because they're going to say, what's going to resonate with their community? And they're going to be authentic to themselves. And so that's ideal state, and that's a very specific product example. But I think where we don't have trouble getting creative is on the reputation led stuff because a lot of times it's earned coverage. It's a spicier headline that we're working with. We have a little more to play with in terms of like, oh, that's disruptive, like earning statements, right? People want to know how we're doing. Where we have a little trouble keeping things fresh is when we get a deck full of products, priorities and benefits and value props, and it's like, okay, there's a few other products in the market that do something similar.
(31:25):
How do we break through the feed? And so we're doing that through creators and then executives. I think we are putting our executives to work in a way on social that they've never quite experienced. It makes some of them uncomfortable and some of them are embracing it. So we have a few folks on my team that just focus on executive social. They consult with these executives, they help them think through content that feels authentic to them. We put them in touch with platform partners like LinkedIn and truly let them hear from the platform partners and not just us. And I always tell the team, go where there's energy. If an executive wants to be on social, let's leverage them. Trying to make an executive who doesn't believe in social be on social is never going to feel authentic and performance will follow, right? You can just tell when a comms person has written a bunch of posts on LinkedIn versus is that really the executive?
(32:24):
Did they even review that? Did they look at that? And there's a lot of agencies out there that do executive social for companies. Some are really good at it because they make the executive have a certain level of ownership and some are just checking boxes. And I think the content is inauthentic and you can tell that. So I think when you've got tough topics, leaning into creators and executives to tell your story, I think is the way to make it the most interesting because they end up saying it differently than you would say it from a brand. A brand is a little more buttoned up and social's becoming increasingly conversational. The feed is not what it used to be.
Genevieve Brammall (33:04):
One thing you said around the ownership of that partnership, so say you were to break news with this creator, you said, oh, of course we'd be able to review the post and we wouldn't be able to control everything, which we know to be true, but if you were to give it to a wire service or you were to give it to your number one tier one media, you have no control. You give your press release and then you give up control. But what you have faith in is their reach, for example. So this is why I find creator posting so interesting because you have the same faith in their reach, but we don't have the same faith in their ability to talk to their audience the way that we would if it was Wake Up, USA or something. Do you know what I mean? So I'm intrigued by that and convincing the C-suite to take that leap of faith, but also intrigued by what you might do afterwards.
(33:59):
So say you were to give up this news breaking with a creator, do you then have your traditional news breaking funnel ready to go in the background? So that follows, and how much do you let that traditional media know that you actually gave the news to the creator? So I wouldn't want that to be a sponsored post. I would want to give them something and go, you know what? I'm completely hands off. So you are completely independent. So if you actually give this product a review of seven out of 10 instead of 10 out of 10, I actually prefer that because it's more authentic than us going, Hey, look what we did. We collaborated on something that's really important for our brand. That feels like marketing to me.
Kirsten Echeverry (34:43):
Yeah, I think you can work with creators in two ways, and we work with them in different ways. You can work with them on an earned basis, treat them like a reporter, give them an exclusive, and oftentimes they welcome that, but it has to be a real exclusive. I think sometimes when I tell my marketing friends that they're like, yeah, we'll give them access once it drops. I'm like, then it's already public, right? That's not an exclusive. It has to be a real exclusive. So I think you can do it on the earned side if you do it as a paid opportunity, to your point, it feels a little more salesy, but that's where you have the control. And so it's like maybe it's a mixture of paid and earned creators. I think that media know, journalists know now that creators, they're not journalists, but they are influential in their own right and way and they are respected.
Dino Delic (35:34):
This point is interesting to me because the best communicators often know the audience that they're pitching a story to. So it's kind of like in sales, and I've grown up in sales pretty much all my life, but once you start to understand how someone's actually going to use the product that you have, then you stand a much better chance of figuring out how to make this work. As Kirsten just described it there. Yeah, let's give 'em an exclusive after the story's already come out. Well, the way that the media works is that people are always looking not just to tell a story that someone else has told but to tell a unique story because the way that they make money is by attracting an audience. And why would an audience come to their publication if they've already seen the story somewhere else? The way that Kirsten speaks here is a reminder that you really have to understand the flow on effect, the journey of the story and really how someone is going to use the product that you're selling. In this case, a particular story.
Kirsten Echeverry (36:28):
I always pull up stats sometimes for my leadership team and colleagues on these creators have built a viable business. There are so many that are millionaires at this point. And so we have to respect that they understand how to do business. And I will tell you, every time we work with a creator, they are professional. They want to do a good job for your brand, they want to partner with you. And so I find them very easy to work with. Obviously, they're going to push back when it doesn't feel authentic. And you know what? Sometimes that's the check we need to be put in our place sometimes on maybe we have a checklist that we're giving them that it's just not going to land on social. And so it is interesting, but I do feel like creators just given where the industry has moved, people respect them in a way that they probably didn't five or 10 years ago.
(37:25):
I think it's hard to, because a lot of the creators, some of them are quite young because they have been digitally native most of their life. And so I always find it interesting, sometimes I'm in a room and somebody will talk about a creator that their kid follows and they'll say, why aren't we working with them one time in a product meeting? And somebody said, why aren't we working with them? Why is the social team not collaborating with them? And I knew their price because we had explored this creator and I said, we'd be happy to work with them. One 92nd video on YouTube is a million dollars, so if you have a million dollars, we would love to get in touch with their agency and their agent. And the person was like, there's absolutely no way. And I found an article on the creator that Fast company had featured him, and it sort of was one of those moments where people are like, oh, okay, creator.
(38:21):
It's a whole industry now. It's not just people having fun with social media. They have agents, they have agencies representing them. And so the world is just different. And I will tell you, I think journalists, they see that, right? And a lot of times when we even have media events for a partnership we're doing with the US Open or an activation, we invite media and influencers and creators to the same event. We treat them as one kind of group of influential influencers, and they are the people that help build brand equity for the company. Sometimes I do a little research on the side, send them articles. There's a ton of information about the creator industry, and that just kind of helps validate your POV. But yeah, I think you can go either way.
Dino Delic (39:04):
I want to know why it's so difficult and interesting to sort of validate your point. This work was done under an NDA. It never came to fruition, but there was a media company, massive one that wanted to come with us, come to us and say, we want your data. We have data on influencers, like what your team uses to assess threats, Jen and Steph. So IBM does crisis monitoring through Meltwater. That's how I became involved with that team. This media company came to us and said, just like we do the ranking of the richest athletes, we want to do a ranking of the richest creators. It was a fascinating project to undertake together because they wanted to write stories about, well, this person focuses on brand partnerships and this one gets content. This one gets sponsored, this one does events, so on and so forth.
(39:48):
It really is. I think when a media company wants to produce a list of the a hundred best and introduce dollar figures as a measure, not just engagement, then it's big money. And once we saw the data, it was crazy. But I want to go back to if we know that, why is it so hard for you, and correct me if I misheard this, you're saying it's harder to convince people to take a risk on the safe stuff than it is on the risky stuff. And by safe stuff, I mean marketing and comms for product announcements and acquisitions versus reputation, there's a lot more to lose reputational stuff. So there, as Warren Buffet said, your reputation could be destroyed in one post significantly. And the gains that you can make on the other stuff is especially in a noisy world of AI, I'm actually really shocked to hear that that's hard to get people to want to take a swing on creators on the safe stuff because it'll probably have less of a reputational impact. But when you're doing something that's, and I don't know to give you a specific, I'm guessing, let's say, I don't even know what would fall into that reputational bucket, but why are people more confident in using creators there? We're talking about your brand reputation that will take so much more work to undo if it goes badly than a bad product announcement.
Stephanie Lerdall (41:08):
Does it come down to budget? In my world, back in the day, these are brand integrations with USA today or whatever you would pay to show up in their morning show or whatever. They'll serve your product in the audience or whatever. And you can only do that because that's when the company has money. When there's a launch, they've bucketed marketing dollars for that launch, whereas everything else, they're like, oh, Stephanie, just give me that for free. You can do that,
Kirsten Echeverry (41:39):
Right?
Stephanie Lerdall (41:40):
Yeah, I think
Kirsten Echeverry (41:40):
That's part of it. I think if I'm being totally honest, I think it's the mindset of the professional you're working with on the comm side of the house. They're less risk adverse. And even a crisis comms person, to your point earlier, when you pitch to a reporter, you've let go of control. You stuck to your messaging. You put an executive in the hot seat, they said a few things you don't love, you had to set it free. There's nothing else you can do. That is the world that comms has been operating in for decades. And so we are used to letting go of control. I think when you work with marketing on their side and in their defense, they haven't had to do that. Everything in marketing is generally paid and very controlled. A TV spot. You are not just putting someone on and hoping that they say something good about your ad, you paid them, you wrote the script, they followed it, media partnership, same thing.
(42:43):
You reviewed it, you copy edited it. And so I think the marketing side of the house, it's not that they don't want to take a risk. They haven't had to in the same way that comms has to every single day. And I think as a comms person, you are in the hot seat a lot because you have an executive putting pressure on you to make sure the story's good, and you're like, well, the pressure's on you too to make sure that you show up for this reporter, but this reporter might find some information digging and talking to employees that we can't control that. And so at the end of the day, it's what will the reporter do? And so we give up control a lot on the comm side of the house. I think that's the biggest difference is I don't have to convince my comms colleagues on, let's just try it. Let's see if it works. Let's weigh, does the reward outweigh the risk? That's usually kind of what we use. Whereas in marketing, they're used to being able to control every message. And so everything feels risky when you put your control, you give your control to a creator or someone that you haven't worked with before. So I think it's that budget obviously comes into play, but budget is kind of part of that is like if you have budget, you get more control,
Dino Delic (44:02):
Sit tight, here's what you need.
Genevieve Brammall (44:05):
What I'm hearing is social is sophisticated, social is more than just a channel. I think you said something like it's more intricate than just a checklist. And I think that as comms leaders, part of our job is to share that message internally that there are elements and aspects that you can control through marketing and collaborations, and there's aspects that we can't control. So maybe the lesson is don't try to control the uncontrollable, but to play in a space where you can control messaging, which ultimately leads to reputational benefits that you can't control. You don't know what that emotional connection is going to be or what that response to your posts is going to be, but ultimately that's the power of the platform. So understanding what are the aspects of social to control and those to let loose. You spoke a lot about being authentic and working with leaders who embrace their own authenticity and maybe not forcing it if someone doesn't want to be on the platform. You also mentioned that it was really clear who owns the channel. The real takeaway for me is how to try to make the channel as seamless as possible regardless of ownership.
Kirsten Echeverry (45:23):
Yeah, I think you can tell sort of the content themes and when the mix feels a little more unexpected and kind of like multiple priorities, you probably know it's a good collaboration between marketing comms. But I think the business of social is what I constantly am educating partners on every single day that social is a business, and everyone has an opinion about how a brand should show up on social because they use LinkedIn personally, they connect with friends and family on Instagram, they use acts in different ways, and using it to drive business priorities is a whole different ballgame. And so I think it's really educating people on the business of social, and that's the hardest part about the job, but it's also the most fun and also quite honestly gets you the credibility, right? We're not here just tweeting all day, right? There's a lot of science that goes into social and leaning on your platform partners and research to help make your case and educate people on the business of social, the algorithms and what's really going to drive engagement.
Genevieve Brammall (46:32):
Something you just said then around everyone's on social, everyone's got their own LinkedIn, everyone's got their own experience with social. That is I think, a bit of an Achilles because back in the day, you could be an expert at comms, media relations, et cetera, and your stakeholders really didn't understand with any deep expertise how to play in that space. And so you could be the master of your domain. Now everyone thinks they're an expert because everybody is playing on that space. Everyone can post. Everyone's got the keys to that engine room. And so the real trick is to be able to convince people that there is still professional expertise in that space and that the business of social is more than just the business of posting or the business of having a presence. There's so many layers and nuances to it.
Dino Delic (47:28):
The one thing, we didn't talk about data.
Stephanie Lerdall (47:31):
No, she did. She was talking about how the data speaks for themselves and you have to show it to your partners to say, no, we will not post that webinar again.
Dino Delic (47:40):
What I wanted to ask about there though then we didn't really unpack the who and the how of the way that you leveraged that because you own the entire social team, so that means the content, I think you were talking about the producers, the videographers, so on and so forth. So what is your headcount 50 in your team?
Kirsten Echeverry (47:58):
We have 56 I believe people globally, data analysts. I have three dedicated. They do social listening on the crisis side as well as data. But all of my community managers and content strategists look at data every day. They have to look at the data to make data-driven decisions on content strategy, and they have to know what is our audience engaging with, what do they care about? How are we moving the needle? We do obviously kind of daily data analysis in the platform. And then we do a monthly call for one hour every month as a full team on let's look at influencer, let's look at brand channel, let's look at paid. What were the takeaways? What would we do differently? So for us, it really drives our strategy. And then social listening is a different part of that where what are people talking about on social agnostic of IBM and how can we meet the moment?
(48:58):
Instead of going in with our checklist, we're going to talk about these five things. What are people actually talking about? And does IBM have a place in that conversation? And if we do, great, let's find our way in, because if we can do that and actually tap into a relevant topic, our content will outperform 10 x. We know that, and we've tracked that. That one is always really interesting for people because I have one person on my team who's an expert in social listing. He's in Meltwater all day long and in a few other tools, it's someone on Jay-Z's team, you probably know like, Hey guys, we're talking about this, but everyone else is talking about it in this way. And I'm like, okay, we need to rethink our approach and we still have a place in that conversation, but we have to flip the messaging.
(49:51):
And so we did that with when we introduced Granite, which is our AI model, everyone said, we have to lead with watsonx. That's the platform. We pulled a bunch of social listing insights. All of our competitors, our key audiences are all talking about models. They're not talking about platform. And so now we've shifted, of course, platform is a part of our story to secondary message, but we generally lead with model because that's what people are talking about on social. And so we use a lot of that data and insights to help steer the messaging conversation and platform. So there's kind of two sides of data. How did the content perform? And then what are people actually talking about on social and how can you meet the moment? Those are kind of the different areas I would say. And then what's the sort of IBM mention volume out there? Are there crisis happening that we need to kind of mitigate, which are generally employee led?
Dino Delic (50:47):
I have heard Cosby's name a lot. Yes. So now this is a final thought, and it's very selfish because I am working on, we're designing the data-driven communications playbook, and the last three chapters are about getting out of the rut and the pitfall that a lot of people get into, which is they serve the same insights to different audiences. So when you want to talk about the performance of social to the C-suite, people with low maturity tend to just talk about engagement rates and things like, then you have to explain to them, well, what's good, what's expected versus serving them different types of insights. So the last three chapters are creating the difference between insights for your messaging team, the people who decide how we message. For example, if we're going to get granite out there, which channels which created, so on and so forth.
(51:35):
And then the comms leadership and the marketing leadership, and then the business leadership. All those three audiences have to have different views of the data, different context, different data, different context, different actions and different decisions. And one of the things that I was discussing today was a colleague asked me, she goes, what is decision making protocols? And it was AI taking something that I had said and just over-engineering it. I said, well, basically there are certain decisions that you make every day and different people make different decisions. Your messaging team, the people that push on publish on social content, they decide what's the final wording look like? What's the timing? Those sorts of things. The people that set the strategy at a high level, like yourself and Sarah, they decide, okay, we're going to shift more into video or more into podcast or something like that.
(52:24):
And then the business leaders, they decide, you know what? We're going to go less AI as a business. We're going to go more on this regard, or we're going to acquire companies versus something else. And all of those people can benefit from knowing what's happening on social. They just have to have different information. And so this reminded me of a specific story, and I bring this up in front of you, Stephanie, because you're talking about news jacking and trend jacking, which everyone wants to get good at. And that's often where the pressure for social comes from. Why aren't we talking about this? Everyone else is in this conversation. So there was this financial services company based here in the us, but I was talking to their team in London who were sitting down over there talking to APAC and the mayor, and they said, well, we have experts that want to talk about tariffs.
(53:09):
And so every day Trump does something crazy and gives us a media opportunity. It makes a decision. No one knows what's happening. They want to hear from an economist. So we ask Bob, Bob, do you want to make a comment? No, ask Ken. Ken's not available, but you find out an hour later, Ken says, go talk to Jenny. Jenny says, all right, fine, I'll do it. Can you get me the questions that BBC wants to ask? You? Finally ask the questions. Then you get the answers, and then the company decides, we don't want to talk about these tariffs. And now as a comms team, tying this back to decision-making protocol, there was one thing that they forgot to do, which was to decide with their team, which are the safe topics, and which are not because they've burned all this energy and now they've looked silly in front of the BBC because they've missed an opportunity.
(53:51):
And now the BBC is going to be like, I'm not going to engage in an email back and forth with you if you're not going to provide someone with a comment. And so that team's particular challenge wasn't necessarily using data, it was just sitting down and figuring out, if you want me to get more awareness because the sales team is complaining that awareness is low, then what topics can I talk about instead of getting swatted away at the last minute? So my question to you is, have you already done that thoroughly? I know you've created a list of topics that we want to avoid, but in order to stay on top of the conversation and AI is so fluid and moving all the time, do you all have already a well-defined list of these are the spaces we want to play and these are the angles and these are the spokespeople, and if this opportunity comes up, let me know. And we've already vetted these people. They've said that they want to do that.
Kirsten Echeverry (54:38):
We have the topics. Do I have exact spokespeople attached to them? And do we have a rigorous process in place to get it activated? No, I think where we continue to get pushback, and there's a little bit of slowness is so we pull listening reports every week on topics are being talked about within our key priorities, how we could show up differently. I think what we have control over is how that affects our content strategy on the brand channels. How are we positioning content differently? Check we're doing that. I think what we haven't done yet, which is kind of our aspiration, is how are the social listening insights actually driving a different marketing strategy for the company at large? And that I think people are not willing to rip up maybe what they have on paper that they've already communicated to the C-suite and a whole bunch of product marketers and leaders for a social listening conversation, data that they feel like is going to change next week anyway.
(55:45):
And so I think we're kind of on a little bit of a mission to, yes, we'll use the insights to inform our strategy on social, but how can we use those insights to inform the entire marketing strategy for the company? Because people are talking about our products on social. That's where 90% of these conversations are happening outside of events and maybe client meetings. And so the social conversation actually should be driving strategy more than just the social strategy. It should be driving a larger marketing strategy. We haven't gotten there yet, if I'm being honest. I think we share the insights and we hope it lands, but we're also working in a very large marketing organization that when we drive change, we move things forward exponentially, but it takes a while to drive change. That's just because of the sheer volume of the business is just so global that it's a large ship to kind of steer forward. And so we haven't gotten there yet, but I mean that would
Stephanie Lerdall (56:47):
Be the end goal. And the timeline is just so much longer, right? To shift a product strategy or a business strategy takes over a year, maybe depending on your product roadmaps. And so I wouldn't expect my leaders to change something based on social data. I would expect them to change it based on a whole variety of data. And maybe social data just confirms something that they see in the financials or whatever. So I would think it has to be part of a broader business intelligence approach for that kind of timeline, whereas you could change your content strategy pretty nimbly.
Dino Delic (57:26):
I think this is a perfect place to end the episode, but before you press stop, let me give you a little more. Kirsten's insights are a testament to how fast social has come as a key driver in business and her experiences has proved that it's no longer just about pushing out content, but understanding the bigger picture of brand equity and customer relationships. So as we wrap up, remember this, social media has transformed beyond being just a tool, but a platform for building connections, sharing stories, and evolving with your audience. And while you can't control everything, you can manage your approach, keep your brand authentic, and always be ready to pivot when things don't go according to your plan. Earning your seat isn't about passively absorbing, it's about executing. And take a moment and reflect and think about how you can use what you've just learned in this episode to grow, recalibrate, and improve. Thanks for listening. I'm Dino Deli. We'll see you next time on the next episode of Earning Your Seat.