Author: Emily Copp / Source: Hootsuite Social Media Management
LinkedIn is one of the biggest social media networks in the world—experiencing a 1,000 percent growth rate in just over 10 years and boasting over 530 million users.
At the helm of this powerful social network’s marketing department is chief marketing officer (CMO) Shannon Brayton. Brayton has over two decades of experience working for some of Silicon Valley’s most disruptive tech companies, including Yahoo!, eBay, and now LinkedIn.
In this episode of the Hootcast podcast, our CEO Ryan Holmes chats with Brayton about lessons learned from her time in the tech industry, along with social media tips for business professionals.
In this episode you’ll learn:
- Brayton’s leadership tips from years of industry experience
- What you should and shouldn’t do on LinkedIn
- How to be authentic on social media
Press play to hear the show in its entirety, or if you don’t have a set of earbuds handy, read the transcription of our conversation below.
Q&A with LinkedIn’s CMO Shannon Brayton
You’ve been working for a long time in Silicon Valley and spent most of your career in PR and comms. In 2015 you took the role as the CMO of LinkedIn, previously working as their communications executive. What has it been like moving from communications into marketing?
It has been fun and challenging. The fun part is really the fact that I’ve learned more in the last two years than I have in the previous 10. It’s been the most condensed version of marketing that you could ever imagine and I have absolutely loved that, even when it’s been really hard.
And I say challenging because I had essentially done just corporate communications for 20 years, so I had a bit of a bias against marketing because as your listeners probably know, comms and marketing bump into each other quite often and for me to get rid of those biases and then learn more about the team. It was definitely challenging but highly interesting, and at the end of it, and it’s been two and a half years, it’s been incredibly rewarding at the same time.
It’s a really interesting era that we live in when you think about the breadth of an executive role. You need to have all of these arrows in your quiver and right now we’re seeing a lot of different perspectives being demanded by leaders. How are you helping CEO Jeff navigate the communication needs that he has?
Part of the reason Jeff wanted me to take the role was because he was one of the first CEOs that I’m aware of that really saw that convergence of comms and marketing, and decided to put it under one leader at the company. Comms was creating a lot of content that was essentially bumping into the same type of content that the marketing team was creating.
I think Jeff realized early on that those narratives and the way that you tell your company story and your brand, it’s essentially the same thing, and we’ve actually gotten quite a bit of synergy by having it all roll up to one leader. And it is true how many arrows in the quiver, as you said, you have to have. My current team is 500 people and I have everything from pricing, everything in-between, and then social impact.
I think that’s one of the hard things about being a marketer these days is you really need to understand a little bit about a hundred different things.
I absolutely see that. You mentioned Jeff briefly and I think he’s been known as a very authentic leader. You recently wrote a really interesting article about how you won’t hire someone until you’ve had lunch with them, are there any tips you can share with people on how you can have authentic interactions on LinkedIn?
One piece of advice that Jeff will give to CEOs that ask him about how to approach social is to make sure that no one on your staff is responsible for writing your stuff, and that’s sometimes hard for CEOs to hear because they think, “Oh my gosh, how am I possibly going to find the time to do this.” Jeff does all of his own social media himself. I think you can really sniff it out when CEOs or executives in general aren’t being authentic or are having somebody write their stuff for them.
And so that’s my number one tip is to do it yourself. It’s amazing what it can do for both recruiting and retention of your own employees.
What are some best practices on how people can remain professional and authentic on social? Any personal strategies that have really helped you in your career?
On the professional side, you need to think about the guardrails between Facebook and Instagram versus LinkedIn. We really do encourage people to make sure that the content they’re posting remains professional on LinkedIn. So, things that are political in nature or pictures of your baby don’t belong unless you’ve got a way to dovetail it back to your professional life.
I see a lot of people who will make that mistake and post something that’s highly personal and not as professional and people will respond in the comments and say things like, “This is not Facebook” or, “This doesn’t belong here.” And so I really encourage people to think about their social…
Peter Bordes Jr
Founder & Managing Partner Trajectory Ventures. Lifetime entrepreneur, CEO, Board Member, mentor, advisor and investor.
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