#38 - Jeffrey Zhao

Hi all,

This week, I sat down with Jeffrey Zhao, founder of Ordinal, the social media management tool. Many of today’s top B2B companies run their social programs on Ordinal, including Clay, Zapier, and all of the clients we work with at Good Content. 

Jeffrey has privileged access. He can see and study hundreds of B2B social programs at once. But when I asked him what separates the best social teams from the rest, his answer wasn’t what you’d expect (better content, better ideas, better talent, etc). 

The distinct variable is whether they have a system in place at all.

The content pickup game

Here’s what social looks like at a lot of companies: 

It’s Monday, somebody asks what’s going out this week. Three or four people hop on a call, throw ideas around for 20 minutes, pick the two that sound decent and ship them.

That’s the equivalent of a pickup game. Everybody meets at the court at 3, you pick teams by whoever showed up, you play, and you go home. Nobody ran a play or kept stats, and there’s no film to review, so next Monday the whole thing starts over again from zero.

It isn’t lazy so much as unstructured, and unstructured work has no way to compound.

Jeffrey said that this characterizes most B2B teams. Social is an afterthought. It’s intramural. “Plays” are executed haphazardly and learnings do not compound.

Posting like the pros

Compare that to a pro sports team, with a coaching staff, a roster of players who know their roles, a playbook, and practice sessions for running drills. The pro team runs plays, records and rewatches games, and not only keeps stats, but digs deep into them to uncover what worked, what didn’t and apply those lessons forward.

“Socials is a team sport. Most people are focused on the wrong things. They’re focused on the pickup game and how can I create a highlight dunk. But actual sports teams care about scoring 80 layups in a row and winning the game.”

Clay: the pro social team

One team, in particular, that runs its social program like the pros (and whose program we run on Ordinal) is Clay.

Around a dozen executives sit in a managed advocacy program. Somebody’s full-time job is working out what’s performing for each of those execs, what each audience responds to, and which of those threads ties back to a product goal, then routing the right content to the right person on the right day.

The difference shows up clearest on a launch. Ask most teams what the plan is for a big launch and you hear variations of hope-and-prayer. The founders will post. We’ll send an email. Our investors might engage. 

Ask Clay, and you get a spec. Six of the twelve execs posting at minimum, half the employee base reposting, two or three emails out to investors and advisors before launch day asking them to amplify, and analytics running the whole time.

Build your system in 5 parts

As you set out to build your social system and elevate your team from pickup to pro, it’s helpful to think about the different stages of the process. Jeffrey points to these 5:

1. Source material. Everything downstream depends on raw material, and most teams have underinvested here. Pull sales calls and the internal meeting recordings. Put a standing 30-minute call per week on the executive’s calendar to respond to questions and insights. Every good content program starts with great raw material, and you need unique raw material to stand out from today’s noise.

2. Creation. Somebody has to write. It’s either the executives themselves, someone internal, or an outside team like Good Content. Name that person, and make sure they have the power to hold executives and other stakeholders accountable to a target posting cadence.

3. Distribution. Take inventory of your various distribution nodes…company account, executives, employees, advisors, investors, influencers, partners, users. Come posting day, have someone dedicated to air traffic control, i.e. deciding who posts what, in what order, on which day, etc.

4. Conversion assets. Something worth having, offered on the channel, so the attention has somewhere to go: a playbook, a set of proprietary data, a teardown nobody else has bothered to do, an event or webinar with a real reason to attend. 

5. Measurement. Do the thinking before you build the dashboard. Decide who you care about reaching and what would count as this working, then build tracking for that. Platform numbers are part of it. So is influenced pipeline. Our personal favorite at Good Content is to look at content engagers who actually match your ICP.

Each of these 5 components requires advance planning and coordination. It matters who does what, when it happens, and how you’ll know whether it worked. That’s the whole difference between the pickup game and the pro team.

If you want help designing and running a content system like Clay’s → let’s talk.