Johnas is the senior global social media manager for Cadence Design Systems and created an award-winning social campaign for Cadence which more than doubled corporate channel followers and a significant increase in engagement, and while Johnas can’t take credit for Cadence’s stock going up during this period, there is a clear correlation 

What you’ll learn in this episode:

• How to perform a social media audit
• How to get your executives involved
• How to repurpose written content to video
• How to humanize your social content

Johnas’ recommendations:

1. You need to understand where your audience is - not just channels, but also location - and focus on those core channels
2. In B2B, decision-makers want to buy from businesses whose leaders they believe in
3. Don’t guide executives on which channel to engage in, but instead encourage them to go after the channel they are already most comfortable with.
4. If you are in a technical business, you need to humanize the content

You’ll need to listen to the full episode if you want to hear the Lightning Round, but here are a few highlights:

• Johnas is all about short-form video
• Johnas can’t live without Sprout Social

Proofpoint’s POV:

Johnas is 100% correct in saying that people want to buy from companies whose executive leadership they trust. You don’t have to look much further than Elon Musk. His personal brand presence is a huge reason for the success of both Tesla and SpaceX.

Now it doesn’t have to be the CEO, although that does help. But having executives like your VP of product, VP of engineering and CMO out there evangelizing the company narrative is huge. 

But, as we talked about in this episode, it is hard to get executives on board. Here are few recommendations, in addition to those that Johnas shared, to help:

1. Explaining the impact in business metrics, not marketing metrics. Your executives don’t care about engagement rates, page followers, and website traffic. They do care about revenue and customer acquisition costs. So show them the power of a personal brand by comparing cost-to-acquire from organic channels to paid.
2. Find one single executive champion and use them as an example. Ideally, this should be someone who is already active on social, where the impact will be quicker to see, and you won’t have to do much coercing to get them to commit.
3. Make it easy to track the impact, by using trackable links through something like bit.ly and tracking pre and post-performance trends.
4. Make it easy for them. Offer to identify topics and even provide rough outlines for written content. Provide talking points for video content. 
5. Get them into communication situations where they already want to be, like speaking events and customer summits, and record them.
6. Get them onto podcasts and ensure to ask for the transcript and any audio/video footage. You can then either repurpose this content directly or use it to create blog/article content for them.

A bit more about Johnas:

Johnas Street is not just a marketer, but also an actor and an American Idol finalist. He even opened a show for Usher as a teen. Johnas is the Sr. Global Social Media Manager and Senior PR Specialist at Cadence and is responsible for the corporate social media strategy and global plan to increase awareness and preference for the company, the brand, and products. This role is part of the Corporate Marketing team. Johnas is a father to three, two of which are twins! Johnas was also recently nominated as part of the Adweek Rising ‘21 mentee program. You can find Johnas on almost every social media channel!

Helpful Links & Resources:

• Johnas’ LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnasstreet/
• Johnas’ Twitter Profile: @Johnas_Street
• Johnas' IMDB Profile: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm7862928/
• Johnas' YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoHM-oQ2EMci10J2lpID_uQ
• Johnas’ Company: https://www.cadence.com/en_US/home.html

Connect with Mike & Gaby at Proofpoint:

• Mike’s LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikegrinberg/
• Gaby’s LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabriellaisrael/
• LinkedIn Company Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/proofpoint-marketing-llc
• Proofpoint YouTube Channel: http://bit.ly/ProofpointonYouTube
• Proofpoint Website: www.proofpoint.marketing