How B2B Brands Build Trust with UGC and Video (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: It's been a slight technical issue, so we're going to wait for Neil to get back. But I had accidentally closed out of the session. Thank you for everyone who stayed on, because there is a lot more to get to, and I know that this is just kind of halfway through the session. If you did have any questions, though, please feel free to put them in the chat, and I will be getting to them as Neil comes back onto the screen. So feel free to sign off in the chat as we keep going here. Is there anything from the session that you found particularly helpful so far? Let's start with that as I kind of bring Neil back into here. I'm just bringing Neil back into here. Thank you all for staying with me here while I just get this ready. Hold on. We have Jeremy in the chat saying that he thinks that the lava lamp blew the breaker. That is a very good assumption to be making right now. Thank you for saying that and breaking the silence over here in the chat. Really appreciate it. I'll just go ahead and say that one of the things that I think is really interesting is the employee-generated content. And I think that a big point to be made here is that what I find as an employee that is asked to make some content for the company is that when I'm particularly proud of something, I'm so much more likely to be sharing that. So if there's something that I'm proud of making, if I joined in on a project, I think that there's just a lot of place there that you can ask your employees to write about on social media. And so it doesn't feel as much like an ad, here's what my company did. But it feels a lot more like this is something that I'm proud to work on, this is a new feature that I was involved in anyway, and that's something that I think has been very helpful to me as a creator within my own community and within my own brand. So there is that. We are just paused for a second to bring Neil back onto here. And apologies for the delay. As we're waiting, let me know in the chat if there is anything that you recommend that's kind of worked for you as far as creating video for your brand. So let me know if there's something there. And we have Neil.

[00:03:36] Speaker 2: Hey, hey. So how far?

[00:03:38] Speaker 1: Hello, hello.

[00:03:39] Speaker 2: Yes. I thought when I asked if there were any questions and there were crickets, I assumed something happened.

[00:03:45] Speaker 1: So we just had too many people joining the webinar today, huh? No, the react suddenly went out of the session, but we're back. So, so far, I think everybody's pretty caught up and we lost some time from that. So I think let's just dive right into it.

[00:04:02] Speaker 2: All right. If you can help me out here, I believe that this is where we got cut off. I believe I was talking about user-generated content. So yeah, just very quickly.

[00:04:17] Speaker 1: I will just say really quick, we have a question from Rebecca. Any advice for ways to help employees or customers be more comfortable on camera? Often, when I make content with non-professional people, I have to make sure that they're with non-professional speakers. It's very hard to get them to loosen up. So we could either keep going with the presentation. We can get to that question later. Or if you want to talk about that now, we can.

[00:04:37] Speaker 2: I'm going to talk a little bit about that. This was a B2C company, but they reached out to me with this idea and they wanted my opinion. And they were basically training micro-influencers how to take better pictures, how to do better video. And they were actually bringing in influencers or content creators to teach them. Part of it is a training aspect. If they want to become better at doing video and a company is going to provide them free training, I find a lot of the times that is the key to success. The other one is, now I look for it online. I was looking for the image. I could not find it. But I've heard from a Microsoft employee that Microsoft has a type of self-recording video booth. I don't think they have it at every office. But they have this self-recording video booth, which means that employees, whenever they just want to record a minute or two minutes short, or they just want to share something on camera, it's self-serve. They just go in, press record, and the output becomes this video that then they can use in social media. I don't know the whole details. This is something that I think any company can provide. You may not have a video studio, but by providing them that environment where, hey, if you ever want to record a video, because sometimes for some people, they don't know, do they need to buy a gimbal for their iPhone? Sometimes the technology can be overwhelming if they're not a natural content creator. By making it easy for them, by providing them that infrastructure, combine with that training, and add a little bit of incentive to the mix. I think that's the golden way to get more people producing better videos and getting more user-generated content on social media. Hopefully that helps. I want to get back because I want to make sure we have enough time to go through the content and get any questions answered at the end. Kendall, I'm just going to go through and we'll just answer questions at the end here. The business impact of user-generated content. We know that user-generated content works. You can do a search in any one of these. The stats prove that it's just more effective than brand's own organic content. At the end of the day, people buy from people they like, know, and trust. It's really content that has this role. It's the accelerator. It builds likability, gets you known, builds trust. If your content is not doing this, user-generated content delivers on this. That's why I recommend brands to look at your content mix. How much of it is your own content? How much of it is user-generated content? Obviously, getting word of mouth through user-generated content is one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is surely using user-generated content to replace your own branded content. I'll talk a little bit about this. We see it a lot in the B2C space. I think the time has come for more B2B brands to experiment. You beat me to the question. How do you go about activating people? It's identifying, beginning with those that are already talking about your brand. It is enabling and training them. It is equipping them with prompts sometimes. Like, hey, we have a new product. Or a lot of people are talking about this topic. This is our perspective on it. What do you think? It could be a weekly newsletter. You can do this over Slack or Zoom. Then measure what matters. When you bring other people into your content, it actually becomes easier to measure their influence. I'm going to talk a little bit about that concept in a second. How do you go about sourcing user-generated content once you have a program? Obviously, are people already talking about your brand? If you have a branded hashtag, easy to do a hashtag search. There are some companies that have done previous collaborations, but they've just never published that content online. Obviously, your employees and events and webinars are a great way to generate user-generated content. I'm going to talk specifically about webinars in a second, but obviously, events are as well. I know companies that hold events for the sole purpose of generating user-generated content. It is that valuable. With an event, it might be in a casual, let's bring B2B creators together over a dinner at a nice restaurant. Talk shop and hear their opinions and get video recordings of that. It could be as simple as that. That event could be when you're at your annual industry conference, wherever that is in the world. It could be at night of inviting people and having those conversations, or it could be having conversations in your booth. One of the problems that you hit is distribution. The key bullet point here is the bottom one, that organic reach keeps shrinking, not just for brands, for people as well, but I think more noticeably for brands. So people control the distribution. Once again, social media made for people, not for brands. And the stats that 45% of LinkedIn readers that read content in the feed are decision makers, that the point about buyers consuming 10 to 15 touchpoints, that dwell time matters more than clicks from an algorithm perspective, that comments drive more reach than likes. We need to go deeper with our content in order to get engagement and get visibility in the algorithm. And once again, this is something that people and B2B creators, especially really excel at compared to brands. So how are brands doing this? Now, I'm going to give you some B2B examples in a second, but I first want to talk about the B2C. I talked about channels that are 100% user generated content. Disneyland, when they first launched on Instagram, way back in 2013, historical perspective, they launched one of the first documented channels that said, we're going to go 100% UGC and let our fans run the feed. GoPro is another example, right? UGC powerhouse. However, lo and behold, if you want to do a little bit of research on how GoPro incentivized and got all that user generated content, they did these million dollar contests. I believe the first one was back in 2018, where they were giving out a lot of money to a lot of people. And that just fueled this, you know, avalanche of user generated content. And that flywheel just keeps going. They still do that challenge every year, but the flywheel continues to today where they don't really have to publish much content. You know, Red Bull is another example. So we know that this works and there are a lot of brands that have been really successful with it. What you may not know about is in the B2B world because it's not as sexy and it's just not talked about like a GoPro or a Disneyland, but it is happening. One of the more interesting ones is Deloitte. And this is actually Deloitte in Germany. But a fascinating story. And if you were to do a little bit of Google search, you'll find out more information. But basically this woman on the right became the first corporate influencer. And what happened was Deloitte in Germany realized the potential here. So they started with one person and this internal content role, you know, emphasize content and especially video because it performs that well in the algorithm on LinkedIn. They scaled the program to about 250 internal creators and the employees, internal creators, shared expert insights because they're all experts. These employees, consultants, what have you. They shared expert insights across video and social content. It drove 400 million impressions, generated 10,000 plus marketing leads, $13 million estimated earned media value. In other words, if the brand was going to promote their own content to get that many impressions, they would have had to pay $13 million, which was free. Now Deloitte has a lot of employees obviously, but the lesson learned is that human centered content amplified by video, which performs well on the feed from many internal experts can compound, reach, trust, and pipeline. LinkedIn is really big into this as well. LinkedIn has a program and a lot of you may not know about it. And it's something that I found through research as well, called brand link, where they are bringing together brands. They're basically creating video programs where brands are sponsoring and bringing together B2B creators. So LinkedIn has actually seen this and actually creating a product around this. And they are adding, they are letting brands do contextual video ad placements in these channels. But this is, they're really replicating the fact that B2B creators have the attention of LinkedIn users. And this really just proves that point, right? So the lesson learned here is that collaborative video formats built around authentic human voices will outperform traditional broadcast strategies by fostering that deeper trust and engagement that come from people that don't have an agenda versus a business that has a clear agenda. So on that note, right, if we want to bring all these people together and that question, you know, these people don't want to show up on video where there's a great way to naturally and authentically get employees, get customers, get partners, get B2B creators to show up in video. And that is using podcasting as a vehicle to create video. So by inviting these people on to a podcast, you are building real relationships. You're positioning your brand as a trusted voice, depending on the topic of your podcast, but assuming that you want to be representative of your industry and build thought leadership, it's going to expand your network through guests and collaboration because guess what? Everyone that you invite to be on your podcast will inevitably end up sharing that podcast episode with their network, right? So you're gaining the trust of having that person on, you're gaining the conversation, but from that conversation, you are getting a lot of user generated content that that guest might share, but that you can also share. And that months of content that you can post adds up to years of trust cumulatively. So you may think that podcasting is a fringe thing, right? And compared to the number of Facebook users or YouTube users, yes, it might be a fringe thing, but we're not trying necessarily to get a lot of downloads. Getting a lot of downloads is great, but once again, we can use a podcast as a vehicle to create a content flywheel to create a content engine because one 60 minute podcast episode can allow you to create video clips, can allow you to get blog posts, pull quotes for social media, newsletter content, and you're also deepening that relationship and you're also generating user generated content where it's not just you talking, but it's someone else talking. So this is how you create less, but distribute more and maximize every conversation in the type of formats that do well in social media, using real people as the center of your brand and some of these people not coming from your brand. So leveraging social proof. This is an example for those of you that don't know Riverside, or maybe you have an antiquated look at Riverside like I did. I thought it was just an audio platform, but they have been video first for some time now. They have a lot of AI tools. I was using a separate AI tool to upload a video to generate these clips. And then I realized that Riverside has what is called magic clips. This is a episode I did recently that I've yet to publish with Jim McLeod, the author of the visual marketer. And it automatically just created these clips when, uh, when the episode was done. So I can immediately just, you know, do a light edit and then boom, I can share these in social media. More importantly though, I can share these to Jim for him to share on social media, indirectly promoting my podcast. So this is how AI and specifically Riverside can help automatically turn one interview into multiple short form videos without you needed to be a video editor because I am definitely not a video editor. So webinars are an extension of that. If you can build this program of employees and customers and partners and some B2B creators that love your brand, that want to work with you, that want to collaborate, that they are content creators, and you can bring them into your podcast, then we can take that one step further and bring them into a webinar where then we can set up a landing page where we can get leads. But I just want to let you know, just like this webinar, which is it's really meta, but this is an example of a partner webinar that's just giving value, not here to sell product, Riverside or my own. Webinars require a 2.0 strategy, which is education first. Just like social media is value first and customer centric. Stop running webinars like sales demos. The best webinars teach first, sell second, or don't sell at all. So we want to shift from interruption to innovation and webinars work when they deliver genuine value people can't get elsewhere. Where people sign up and they actually want to attend, or they're definitely going to watch that recording because they know it's going to be packed full of insightful information. Hopefully those of you attending today will be on the lookout for future Riverside webinars if we provided you that, which is our goal for today. So we want to do webinars in a different way. And I already gave you some advice. Pick a problem worth solving. Don't think product centric. Think solution centric, problem centric. Bring in a practitioner, whether it be a customer, employee, a partner, or industry expert. Teach a framework ideally, or have that person teach a framework. Make it as interactive as possible. And then repurpose relentlessly because you're going to get a lot of value in that content. And this is how we can begin. If you see this as a type of user generated content, we can begin to replace some of our own branded content with this content. And I truly believe that's going to help you get more attention and get more visibility in the feeds. And, you know, a reminder, something I've also been saying for more than a decade is that content is the currency of all of this, right? We cannot exist online without content, but the content should be building attention, trust, and pipeline. So, you know, it's not just about what you say. It's about how it fuels a critical progression. And if your content isn't serving this, more reason why you need to be investing more and really accelerating a shift to incentivize and encouraging more user generated content. So obviously now we have one conversation, whether it is a podcast or a webinar, we can repurpose this everywhere on the different types of formats. And this is really important because short form video alone, we know is the key to get discoverability. I was recently at Adobe Max, Adobe's, you know, conference for content creators and LinkedIn had a booth there. It was all video. It was just encouraging. They even gave away these card decks, which gave you prompts to create videos for LinkedIn for professionals. Pretty cool idea, but the stats are already out. 80% higher engagement versus non-video posts on LinkedIn. LinkedIn has a separate tab on their mobile app dedicated to video. So, you know, long form is great as well and there are some people that prefer the horizontal, but there's also a lot more people that prefer the vertical short form reach. So short form really does matter and everything I showed you here should give you the ability to actually be able to create more and more short form video. Cause it can be hard for brands to all of a sudden try to become like TikTok creators, right? But when you bring in people that are digital natives that are already doing the creation and they find ways of talking about your product, your industry, your solution in a digital native way, it could be extremely powerful way to break through the noise and get more visibility. And I mentioned that, you know, record once, publish everywhere in the different formats. It's important because search is not just Google, it's everywhere. And even if we look at chat GPTs and large language models, they are sourcing content and citations from podcasts, from YouTube, from social media, you know, in addition to Google and YouTube. So all of this, all this content I'm talking about, yes, you know, it helps you get attention in social media, but it also helps inevitably get seen more and more by the LLMs as search shifts from more traditional search to what we are calling conversational search. So AI is the content multiplier. It's not just about repurposing the content. There's a lot of other things we could do like helping us take that long form conversation, build transcripts, or maybe even build scripts beforehand, caption writing, clip discovery, and obviously help us publish content at scale. But, you know, I want to remind you that it accelerates the execution, but AI itself is not a strategy and it doesn't replace your strategy. And just one little slide here on my thoughts about AI is that everything I talk about here, the output begins with great input. So this is specifically when we talk about repurposing this content, obviously Riverside allows you to do it really easily, but if you want to get even more formats, or if you want to get a second opinion from Claude or a chat GPT, you really want to do your best to train AI on your voice. You want to feed it as much of your own real content as possible. You want to give it as much context as possible, and you want to treat it like a teammate. Would you ever fact check a teammate? Obviously you would. You need to fact check AI as well, and you need to have iterative refinement. I would recommend using Google Gemini, Claude, and chat GPT. I would not rely on one LLM. You have three of the smartest people in the world in your room. Why would you only rely on one of them? And just by doing that alone, you're going to improve the quality because you're going to see the differences and get different ideas and different outputs. So just want to throw in some AI advice because we can't not talk about that today in 2026. So what I've talked about today, you know, going into summarizing is this content flywheel that compounds. Big fan of that, that concept of flywheel, you know, have conversations, bring those conversations into podcasts and webinars, clip and repurpose distribute everywhere, build audience, repeat and compound invite deeper engagement. This isn't like a one-off campaign. It is a system. And I believe with every conversation it gets better. I know of companies that have had conferences where like user conferences, and they recorded every one of their customers speaking and they turned that into a, its own podcast. So there's many ways to actually repurpose content into a podcast or into a webinar and AI just makes it easier to do this as well. But always remember this content flywheel that compounds. So I know we're going to have questions at the end. I think a lot of B2B teams get stuck with waiting for perfection. I love one of my favorite podcasters always says do B minus work. It's better done than not done. So I'm a big fan of that. And we're always iterating and improving upon that to try to get to a plus over time, obviously over planning, under shipping, too many tools, no system, no clear owner. And most importantly, inconsistent execution. So these are not strategy problems. They are system problems. We really want to try to create a system with this content flywheel at the center. So I challenge you. I give you a 30-day action plan. Week one, audit and activate. Pick three to five internal champions, employees, customers, partners, and let's activate them. Let's audit our content, our Google analytics, our social media analytics. Let's look for some hot topics. And then let's launch a show. We can just record internally. And I recommend you actually start with your internal team, maybe with your employees because it's going to be a little bit easier to do. And you don't even have to publish a podcast or a webinar. You can simply do a recording. It could even be over, obviously, Riverside, but any video messaging software that you use if you really want to get comfortable. And then repurpose and distribute. And then week four, plan on whether it is a webinar or you want to launch a podcast, get into planning about, okay, who are the guests we can have? What are the topics we can talk about? You do not need a massive budget or a huge team to do this. You do need to start, learn, and iterate quickly. So some common mistakes. This is not a campaign. Over-polishing defeats the purpose. Let it be authentic. Creation is 30%. Do not ignore the distribution. That's the whole idea of gaining attention. Don't sell too early, lead with value, but also measure. And I know that you might not be able to get budget for this, which is why start small, measure, and report back on the impact. And I do think you will see the impact, whether it is the email addresses that are added to your marketing automation sequences or the conversations that are generated from user-generated content. It's going to be a combination of anecdote and data that you can begin to paint a picture of the ROI of doing this. I'd like to say you don't need more content. You do need better conversations. Have them, record them, share them, repeat. And attention is not bought anymore. There are still some that are successful doing paid ads, but man, it is an expensive way to go. I'd rather you earn it through consistency, through authenticity, through real value, a combination of leveraging those around us and also bringing them into our own content. So what's your next move? I believe the brands that are winning, they're not the loudest. They're the most human and they're the ones that are engaging with the most humans. So the question is, how will you earn attention? I'm hoping that some of the key takeaways, just further reminder to summarize social media is a relationship channel. Your ecosystem is your content engine. AI will amplify, but humans connect. And this is a flywheel, not a campaign. Hope I didn't repeat myself too much at the end there. I want to leave a few minutes. So, hey, let's bring on the questions. And if we don't have time to answer your question, or if there is something that you don't want to talk about publicly, feel free to reach out to me on social media or I have my email address right there. So Kendall, how are we doing?

[00:26:09] Speaker 1: We are doing great. That was such a, like there was so many tips, great actionable steps packed in there. We actually have Cynthia in the chat asking if we're going to be getting the slide deck after the webinar, because this is gold. So with your permission, I'd love to send a copy out of the slide deck actually. Approved. Awesome. So if you registered, which is how you ended up in the session, we'll send you a link to the slide decks that you can refer back to it later, along with a recording of this full session. So you'll have the slide deck and some of the commentary from Neil, which is really, really helpful. So any questions that we have here? Rita has asked, ownership in my company fears that featuring our actual employees and content could lead to poaching our best people, but featuring consistent people builds trust. Is there a best practice? Very interesting read. What is your take on that, Neil?

[00:27:07] Speaker 2: Yeah. You know, every company has a different philosophy. There are some that consider employees, employees for life. They want to train them on personal branding. They want to train them to become content creators, knowing that, hey, they may not stick with us for life, but they become a lifetime advocate of the brand. They introduce people to us in the future. They introduce customers. There are other companies that say, we don't want our employees on LinkedIn. They're going to get poached. If your employees are going to get poached, they're going to get poached. Whether they're on LinkedIn or not is really the message here. With everything, there is an advantage and a disadvantage. The disadvantage is, yes, they become more publicly known. The advantage is all those business advantages that I talked about. At the end of the day, I think it comes down to education. All of this, some have been educated more on this earlier than others, and that's why some brands are more progressive. It really comes down to educating on, look, your employees, you cannot prevent them from being on LinkedIn and telling them about your current role, but the best way to keep an employee, the best way that they don't get poached, is to make them a happy employee and make them feel part of your mission. I do believe bringing them into this employee program, employee influencer program, and investing in them and training them, will only increase the chances that their net promoter score goes up and they're a happier employee. There's a lot of different ways, half glass empty, half glass full, but hopefully that sort of advice, at the end of the day, it's going to come down to a conversation and recognizing the perspective that they have, but also saying, hey, have you ever looked at it this way? Or these are the advantages. This is what we're missing out on. And I believe if you're able to find a competitor in your industry that's already doing this, that is usually the way to convince senior executives to do something differently. So look for competitors or people that you can draw attention to so that it doesn't look like you're smoking weed, talking about something that, you know, someone on a Riverside webinar mentioned, and that's all talk, but, you know, real case studies of companies that are already doing this. I think it's easier and easier to find those case studies.

[00:29:13] Speaker 1: Absolutely. And I will say as somebody that is on our LinkedIn and is doing a lot of video content, I think that the trick here about the poaching and everything they were talking about is that you, I feel as from my own experience, as first of all, happy at my employment and happy to, it makes you feel valued as an employee to be asked by a company to want to put you out there and want to put up your, put your voice out there and want to boost you really. So I think that that's one way to look at it is to think that these people can be poached, but I think that this is an incredible way to make an employee feel appreciated and accomplished. And somebody that is just really seen within their company. That's from my own personal experience. Absolutely. Yeah. And so with that, we are at the top of the hour. So Neil, I just want to say thank you so much for this presentation. This has been incredibly helpful. I have a whole list of things that I want to take with me and bring back over to Riverside. So I also, as we're, as we're ending the session, I do want to say that you are watching the session on Riverside and we are, we've launched a webinar platform so you can host your webinars on Riverside and we have a 14 day free trial. So I'm just going to put up here. If you have this, if you could see this poll just let us know here, if you want to get, Oh wait, that's a demo of Riverside webinars. Hold on. I'm going to end this poll and just say quickly, would you like a 14 day free trial? Yes or no. The answer here, the correct answer is yes, but I'm just going to put this here for a 14 day free trial of our webinar platform. So if this is something that you would be interested in learning more about Riverside, specifically for webinars, feel free to answer that poll here and we'll reach out with some more information on how you can access 14 days for free as a trial of Riverside for webinars. And with that, Neil, again, thank you so much for joining.

[00:31:25] Speaker 2: Thank you for the invite. I'm honored to be, you know, with a leading brand like Riverside and I encourage, you know, everyone stop using separate tools, put them all into one tool. I was not paid to say this. I, I, I subscribed to Riverside using my own, my own company budget. But it really, it really has saved me a lot of time. And obviously a lot of takeaways from today. I hope we'll continue the conversation as well. Feel free to reach out on social media, what have you.

[00:31:50] Speaker 1: Amazing. And thank you all for joining live. And if you're watching the replay for watching there, And we really cannot wait to see what you do with the session and how you apply it to your own B2B marketing strategy. So thank you very much. Have a good rest of your day.