S2 Ep 32 Return on Conversation: Brooke B. Sellas on social listening

Matt Wilkinson and Jasmine Gruia-Gray are joined by Brooke Sellas, founder of B Squared Media, for a conversation that starts with a charity bar crawl in Dallas and ends with the mechanics of proving revenue attribution from a social media comment thread. Along the way Brooke sets out return on conversation, the CARE framework, the BIC listening method and the triage system her team uses in regulated sectors. Jasmine and Matt push repeatedly on the same question, which is whether any of this survives contact with an industry whose customers guard their data and their unpublished results. Speaker turns have been lightly cleaned for clear transcription errors and duplicated cross-talk between recording channels.

Welcome and introductions

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [00:01]

Hello and welcome to A Splice of Life Science Marketing, where it is my great pleasure to welcome Brooke Sellas of B Squared Media to the show. As always, I'm accompanied by my co-host, Jasmine Gruia-Gray. And I have a big confession to make here, which is that I am unashamedly a bit of a Brooke Sellas fanboy.

Speaker: Brooke Sellas [00:26]

Impossible.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [00:28]

I just loved the enthusiasm, the empathy that you brought to The Marketing Companion with Mark Schaefer. And you've got your own shows now, the work that you do at B Squared Media, and I just love your take on social listening and everything you do there. So I've been a listener for so long that when we finally got to speak, I kind of felt I had an unfair disadvantage, that I kind of felt I already knew you, which goes to show why all of this is so important. It's also the reason why I've been so excited by being able to use deep research to really understand and dig into the voice of the customer. First up, tell us what keeps you busy.

What keeps Brooke busy at B Squared Media

Speaker: Brooke Sellas [01:23]

Well, life for sure keeps me busy. But my business mostly keeps me busy. We will be 15 next year, which I'm trying to wrap my head around. We have an amazing team of about 15 or so doing the work. And it's very busy keeping all of those team members happy and moving and keeping up with all of the changes that we're all facing right now. And same thing on the client side, right? Keeping the clients happy and keeping up with all of the changes that they're facing, but also, you know, the macroeconomics of it right now. Things are a little wobbly. And when that happens, we kind of put on the white gloves, roll out the red carpet and try to figure out how to add value every second of every day. So that keeps me very, very busy.

The Facebook fundraiser that raised twelve times the average

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [02:18]

Wow. Now you started in a non-profit, I think, watching a Facebook organised fundraiser outperform a $5,000 event by 12X. Can you tell us a bit more about that? And then maybe how we can translate some of those ideas into more of a conservative industry like the life sciences.

Speaker: Brooke Sellas [02:49]

Yes, yeah. So about a hundred years ago in another life, I was the director of special events for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation in Dallas, Texas. And I was responsible for raising about a million dollars a year. So I had 12 different events that I ran, that I managed, and that raised money for cystic fibrosis, which my sister has. So obviously I'm very passionate about the cause.

And they came to me one day and they were like, hey, so you need to figure out how to get young people involved because CF only affects 33,000 Americans. So not a lot of people know about it. Our donors are typically made up of families, like my family, people who know someone who has cystic fibrosis. So I was like, wow, that's a very daunting task. They wanted to basically become like cancer, where everybody thought it was cool to be involved and donate a bunch of money.

And that's a big task, because cancer, I mean, everybody can raise their hand on how cancer has affected them, but a lot of people don't even know what CF is. So I got some of my young friends together. We formed this little committee and we said, how do we get young people's attention in today's time? And beer was one answer. We were going after young professionals. So we decided everybody likes to have a little beer, especially in Texas. And the other answer was Facebook.

This social media thing that was very new. Outside of colleges, you could now sign up for Facebook, but there were no Facebook pages. There was no advertising or anything like that at this time. And we basically just said, let's just treat it like a conversation. Let's educate people on what CF is, talk about this really fun beer event. And very long story short, in about three to four months' time, we got 1,700 people to sign up using Facebook.

We were able to secure free beer from most of the bars in Uptown Dallas. We did a bar crawl, and our event ended up raising over $60,000, which normally first-time events raise five. That's the national average for first-time events. And so what I realised was several things, but I think the biggest thing was there's a business case to this whole Facebook thing, right? It's not just about cat pictures and sharing what you had for lunch. There's a business case here. And beyond that, what I realised was it wasn't just the beer, because after the event was over, we still had these conversations going. We were able to cultivate more volunteers. We were able to cultivate some of those young professionals into donors, into committees to help run some of these events that I had to put on.

So the conversation, that's when I started to understand the power of conversation and that voice of customer data that comes from those conversations on social.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [05:46]

And what a worthy cause as well.

Speaker: Brooke Sellas [05:47]

Yes, for sure, definitely. Go donate.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [05:52]

Just as a fun fact, one of the research groups that found the CF gene was at the University of Toronto at the time I was doing my PhD there. So I definitely am very aware.

Speaker: Brooke Sellas [06:08]

Wow, that's a really cool connection. That's so cool. So they've made leaps and bounds. My sister is doing really well. They have a drug called Trikafta now that isn't a cure but is very much a control for the disease. So her life expectancy went from like forties, and she just turned forty this week, to living a pretty normal life somewhere in the seventies.

So again, fairly normal life now that we have Trikafta. So this research and these funds are so important, but it really just starts the same way every other business starts, which is through connection and relationship building. And how do you do all of that? Through these conversations.

Social listening as an alternative to the advisory board cycle

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [06:52]

And I think that point about connection is so relevant for marketers and product managers in the life sciences industry. And so the connection I'm going to make is social penetration theory says trust builds through eliciting opinions and feelings, which is exactly what we do with advisory boards, which are made up of key opinion leaders. But that tends to be very deliberate and slow. So why is unsolicited social listening better, or a stronger alternative, as well as running an advisory board?

Speaker: Brooke Sellas [07:35]

Sure. I love social listening because social listening, it's very nuanced. But I guess the basic definition that I can give you is on social, when you use that little at symbol and you use that little at tag, you mention someone. You can mention a Jasmine, my friend, or Matt, my friend, but I could also tag or mention a brand.

That is very reactive. It's like going to a party and just standing in the middle of the room, expecting everybody to just come to you and have the conversation, right? You're going to come get to know me, you're just going to love me so much, right? But that's how most people do social. We wait for people to come to us and have the conversation. Social listening allows you to go out and find conversations about your brand, your products, your drugs, your techniques, your frameworks, your stakeholders, your competitors, your industry as a whole. It allows you to go out and find all of those conversations that are happening and you can do one of two things.

To Jasmine's point, you can just passively look at that conversation and collect that voice of customer data. So you can collect what people are saying. I hate this product. I love this product. I wish this product had XYZ, right? That's very important voice of customer data that we can collect. But the other side of that, which we obviously very much push for, is joining the conversation actively. So going from passively listening and collecting that information to joining the conversation actively to then try to get to that connection piece. So conversation leads to connection, connection leads to conversation. Conversation leads to conversion.

That's what we found in our 15 years of work with middle market and enterprise-sized brands. You kind of have to follow that path. But we assume with social media, everything revolves around content. So we're just pushing out a one-sided conversation. We're standing in the middle of that room waiting for people to come to us. So it's very much a mindset shift. But if you do it, you'll see a lot better connection, trust, ROI through social, all of those things.

Return on conversation explained

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [09:43]

Fantastic. That leads me on to my next question, because you talk a lot about return on conversations. So can you explain a little bit about that, and then maybe why it varies between different companies and circumstances?

Speaker: Brooke Sellas [10:01]

Yeah, so what I've struggled with as a social media marketer for a million years, I'm a social media dinosaur, but what I've struggled with is the rhetoric from the C suite and leadership that there is no return on investment with social. And I saw that there was, very early on, as the story I just told you. I mean, that was my first foray into social media and we had a return.

So I kept wondering, well, why is this, why does this exist? Why is this becoming the narrative around social media? And what I found was most people are really, when you say what's your social media strategy, ten times out of ten, most people go right into what the content is. Nobody's thinking about the conversations themselves.

So I did my undergraduate thesis study, which is on social penetration theory. Very nerdy, terrible name, brilliant concept. But it basically says you have to go through these levels of self-disclosure to build connection and a relationship.

So return on conversation looks at human psychology, sociology, and says, okay, if we need to get to conversion, because when I talk to clients, that's their number one goal, right? We want sales from social, we want ROI from social. Then we have to start getting past those upper two layers. So there are four layers in social penetration theory. I'll try to be quick, but it's clichés, facts, opinions, and feelings.

Clichés and facts do nothing to move the relationship forward, but they're important in the beginning of any relationship to get to that connection piece. Where the trust and loyalty and relationship building starts happening is through opinions and feelings. So we try to train our clients on how to have more conversational content in the first place. And when they do that, what happens is now we've got all this voice of customer data sitting inside of these conversations.

And we built a framework called CARE where we look at these conversations. That's the C. And specifically we're looking for return on investment or return on conversation. So we're looking at acquisition and retention. Every brand, no matter if they're a scientific brand or a direct to consumer kitty litter brand, they all have these types of conversation. It's buying intent and friction or potential churn.

If you can close the buying intent, people, that's revenue you've brought in the door, new revenue. If you can save Matt or Jasmine from churning in that friction moment and keep them loyal, you have now, again, increased customer lifetime value. You've been able to save money for the company in that regard. So it's literally how we're proving return on investment through return on conversation on social. I hope that made sense. It's so nerdy, but I love it.

Why broadcasting fails to build relationships

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [12:57]

No, it really does. And our audience tend to be scientists and they love measurements. So I think it's perfect. But does that mean to say essentially if we go out into the world of social media and all we're doing is broadcasting, because we're not having a conversation, we're going to get that response that the C suite predicts we're going to get, which is there's no return on social, because they're not actually building the relationships.

Speaker: Brooke Sellas [13:21]

Exactly. Communication is a two-way street by nature, by definition. You cannot have what is by definition a communication if one person is saying something. So brands think they're communicating. They are not. They are broadcasting, to use your word Matt. And that's literally what we've been doing for 15 years, trying to help people understand it's really not about the content. Yes, content is hugely important, but the strategy, the holistic view of social should really be flipped into conversations and content that helps create or support those conversations, not the other way around.

Creating conversation when scientists will not post publicly

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [14:04]

Wow, that's really got me thinking.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [14:04]

Sorry, Matt. I get what you're saying, but I feel, having been in VP of marketing roles, that I don't have any other option except broadcasting, because scientists typically don't put things out on social media. Certainly don't use Facebook, typically don't use YouTube or TikTok or your typical consumer social channels, for two reasons. One, they're worried about confidentiality, and two, they're worried about their science being scooped by somebody else. So how do you turn that broadcasting into conversation in that kind of environment?

Speaker: Brooke Sellas [15:00]

You have to start asking questions. I think one of the simplest ways to get started is through polls. Every social media channel has a poll feature. That is a very low barrier to entry way to get people to start engaging. So the other thing I want to say, two things. One is I do teaching for Thermo Fisher Scientific. It's a global scientific brand. And they have bought into this. I've been teaching with them for almost five years now. They have really bought into this. And what they found is, again, this is one sample, so I'm not speaking for the whole scientific community, but their scientists do use social media to make purchases. What they found is that LinkedIn and YouTube are the top channels that those scientists use to help make buying decisions, research decisions. So they're leaning heavily into those channels and they're trying to get more conversational with the content that they have. So they've done things like using polls in the beginning.

Then they've done things like finding influencers within the scientific community who can come on to do a live or a YouTube video or something like that where they're just sharing information. But I think the biggest thing to understand is when you're trying to change your content from broadcasting to conversational, most content, if we think about branded content, is cliché and fact content. It's either cliché or it's fact.

That is not what moves the relationship forward. So how can you create content that follows the guidelines of not sharing too much or giving away scientific secrets? But how can you solicit and give opinions and feelings? So, how do you feel about the new CRISPR, whatever it may be, right? Or what's your opinion about this new technique that we've used to do XYZ?

Asking people their opinion, whether they're a scientist or just a regular old gal like me, we love to give our opinions, right? We think we're the smartest person in the room. Well, some of us do, not all of us, but we love to give our opinions. We love to give our feelings. These social media algorithms, this is the second part of what I want to say, have all been updated to look for meaningful engagement. So they want dwell time. Social media platforms want you to spend more time than ever on them, even though we already do. They want your 24 hours of a day.

So they're all looking for meaningful engagement. If you don't get that meaningful engagement, so not likes, not follows, but comments, comment threads, so when there's back and forth conversation, shares and saves are what they consider meaningful engagement. So if your content goal is just to broadcast facts and clichés, you're not going to get to ROI or ROC. But if your content looks for conversation, eliciting, soliciting opinions and feelings, creating those comment threads, getting people to save or share your content, your content will get seen by more people, based on the social media algorithms. A very, very long winded answer, but there's a lot of art and science involved. So it's not easy. It's very nuanced, but it's not hard either.

The biggest thing marketers have to unlearn

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [18:07]

No, I think that's very helpful. Just to sort of keep pulling on that thread, in the classes you teach with the Thermo Fisher folks, what's the biggest misconception a PhD trained marketer walks in with? And what takes you the longest to help them unlearn?

Speaker: Brooke Sellas [18:28]

I think all marketers, myself included, and I do think this has something to do with the way we were trained and taught, like nature versus nurture kind of thing, but we go on our gut a lot. We use a little bit too much gut, even in the scientific field. And so my big thing is the more data we have, the better decisions we can make.

So if we're struggling with our social, start with listening before talking, because if we listen and we collect all of that data, when we talk, we know that people will care about what we're going to say.

The BIC method for social listening

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [19:09]

And you're talking about listening and that brings me to one of my favourite methods that you've branded, which is the BIC method. It's not the Bic biro, but it is the BIC method. So can you tell us a little bit more about it?

Speaker: Brooke Sellas [19:24]

It's the easiest social listening strategy in the world. Social listening is a little bit hard. So when I was doing my undergraduate thesis on social penetration theory, I was doing social listening, but it was before we had social listening tools. So I was literally in a spreadsheet, taking how many comments and likes and followers and all that and putting it into a spreadsheet. Social listening is this amazing tool that does this for you and listens, goes out basically into the socials and anywhere on the web that's open, you know, public, and brings that information back to you. So you don't have to go out and find it, right?

And what happens is there's a lot of noise that comes in, right? You have all kinds of conversations coming in about your brand, your stakeholders, your competitors, all of that. And so what we tried to do was break it into manageable chunks. And that is something I took from my non-profit days, because I had to raise a million dollars a year. And if I thought about that, I would never get it done. I had to break everything into manageable chunks. So the manageable chunks, or the framework for social listening, which is the easiest social listening strategy on the planet, I promise you, is to do BIC. You're going to listen for your brand keywords, then you're going to listen for your industry keywords.

And everyone's favourite is C, your competitor keywords. And so brand keywords would just be like B Squared Media, or how some people might say B Squared. Some of our clients don't separate it, right? They call it BSquared, like one word. So putting all of those different instances of the brand into social listening so that I can listen out for people talking about me, but not tagging that at mention, right? So for those dark mentions as they're called, or indirect mentions.

And then industry would be your industry. So I might put in terms like social media customer care, social media listening, social media management, right? Those might be some of my industry terms to find conversations where people are saying, hey, who does really good social media customer care? Well, I want to jump in on that conversation and be like, hi, B Squared does that, right? That's that proactive intent signal.

And then C, competitors. This is where you would go put in listeners around your competitors. And this is excellent warfare for social media, because yes, you can see all the positive things that people are saying about your competitors, but you can also see the things they really dislike about your competitors. And if you take what they dislike about your competitors and start a campaign that kind of says, well, you hate XYZ about so and so, but we do CYX, right? Now you're able to pull some of that market share away from your competitor because you're listening to what their customers have to say about their brand. Does that make sense? I know it's very nerdy, but.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [22:18]

I love that about being able to do that differential positioning based on what people are saying.

Speaker: Brooke Sellas [22:23]

Yeah. I give this example all the time. If you were a running shoe brand and you were looking at your top competitor and the number one complaint that you saw was that their laces break after like the third or fourth run, couldn't you create a campaign that was like, using your athletes and being like, I've run 300 runs this year and my laces are still fine, or whatever. I ran 156 and my laces are, you're not even calling out that competitor, but you're running a campaign against what their top complaint is from their customers. So you might be able to pull some of that market share away.

Confirmation bias in voice of customer work

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [23:00]

Brilliant, brilliant. So one thing I've been blogging a little bit about, and in talking to some of our clients have found is alive and well, is confirmation bias. Those who are doing VOC and maybe we'll call it social listening light are listening to confirm whatever their hypothesis is. How can we be better at avoiding that confirmation bias?

Speaker: Brooke Sellas [23:32]

Love that you said that, Jasmine, because we see this more often than I wish we did, where it's like we're listening and look, they say amazing things. And I'm like, but we're just looking at the, so what happens in social listening tools is they automatically categorise. I want you to come up with your own categorisation. That's a whole other topic, but they will automatically categorise the conversations as positive, negative, and neutral.

And what happens with social listening light, as Jasmine said, a lot of people focus on the positive of what's being said and they just kind of stick their head in the sand, or scoot the negative over to the side. And my thing is start with the negative.

Because that is the only place that you're going to get a catalyst for change. That is the only place where you will spot those friction points, those pain points of your customers, and actually be able to fix it so that you can save them. And we all know, I know it's cliché, but really, truly, it costs so much less to retain your customers than it does to acquire new. So if you can just go and listen, we literally did this with a credit union. We went out and listened against their competitors and we found that 82 per cent of the negative conversation around this credit union was their overdraft protection programme. People hated it. So then we went out and we listened to their competitors. We saw what the competitors did around overdraft, came back, brought that to the client. They ended up changing their entire overdraft protection programme, far outweighing what their competitors did.

And their clients were thrilled. Not only did they keep those people who were complaining, we saw that negative sentiment, that negative conversation go away completely because there was nothing left to complain about, right? We overhauled the whole thing. 82 per cent of their negative conversations went away. And they were able to steal market share from their competitors because they made the programme better than their competitors. That's the power of social listening and voice of customer data collection. But the only way you're going to get to ROI or ROC is if it's actionable. And positive is beautiful and you can use it for UGC and all that kind of cool stuff. But the only real catalyst for change is with the negative.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [25:57]

Right, love it.

Where to start when nobody is talking about your brand

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [25:57]

Well now, for a lot of big consumer brands or places where there's a lot of chatter, yeah, I can see where social listening is really powerful. But what happens if you're a small scientific brand and people aren't talking about you yet? Where should you spend that attention actually listening? What should you be listening out for? How do you turn this into something where you go from, okay, we don't feature, but let's listen to the conversations that are happening and then look at how you move forward. Where do you start?

Speaker: Brooke Sellas [26:37]

Yeah, so I love that you asked that question. I swear y'all, I did not pay Matt to ask me that question, but I love that question because we get that question a lot. Well, nobody's talking about us, so it doesn't matter. Well, first of all, that's the first thing you need to change, because if no one's talking about you on social, we've already discussed how the algorithm now is going to completely start to ignore your content. So you better start thinking about that conversational content really fast.

Right, because otherwise the algorithms are going to say your content's not important, they're going to stop showing it to people, your reach and your impressions, all of that is going to continuously go down. But even if you're that brand and no one's talking about you, you still have I and C. You can go out and listen around your industry, your specific products, your frameworks, again, things that you're working on.

And then stakeholders, right? You can still usually find conversations about leadership or stakeholders or founders or owners. And then there's still that competitor piece. Even if you just went out and listened to your competitors and said, these are the top three things they hate about my top three competitors, you've now all of a sudden got nine different campaigns that you could typically run to hopefully steal some of that market share away while you're fixing your content to make it more conversational.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [27:55]

Love it. Thank you.

Reddit as the underused listening channel

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [27:58]

I want to pull on that a little bit more. Where can people go? What are some of the underutilised channels to do social listening? Especially when we're talking about the life sciences sector that isn't using Facebook and the traditional sources.

Speaker: Brooke Sellas [28:16]

Reddit. Reddit is my favourite place to listen in. I would be shocked if you couldn't find a conversational topic that you were looking for on Reddit. Reddit is also, I know there's been some rumbling over the last couple of weeks about how AI is pulling out from Reddit, but that was really ChatGPT. Anyway, Reddit is the number one place, by the way, that AI trains for AI visibility and answers.

It's looking at Reddit. I think Google pays Reddit about $60 million a year for their data from their platform because it's all voice of customer data. It's nothing but back and forth conversations from real users. Reddit kicks out bots regularly because Google's not going to pay them $60 million a year if it's full of bot conversations. So Reddit is the number one place I would start.

Look for these conversations. If you're brave and you want to go from reactive to proactive, join those conversations, because don't forget with AI visibility, AI is looking at that as a top channel to talk about your brand as well. So it's a great place to passively research, but it's also a really great place to actively start to get into those conversations and kind of shape how you want your brand or your products or your stakeholders or whatever it may be, be mentioned in conversations.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [29:48]

I absolutely love the labrats subreddit. It's so much fun.

Speaker: Brooke Sellas [29:52]

There are so many, my gosh. We were having this conversation at an event I was at a few weeks ago and I forget what the subreddit thread was, but we were just going around the table reading from this, it was like a funny thread, and we were just cackling the whole time. But literally it's like any conversation you can think of, I'm pretty much sure it lives on Reddit. Whether it's serious science or funny, ha ha.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [30:17]

Yeah, the one that disturbed me most, and this comes on to our mutual friend Mark Schaefer and his latest book, and he showed it to me, but there's actually a subreddit called My Boyfriend Is AI. And so this goes to show, you know, the impact that AI is having on all of us. And there are people that are out there quite openly talking about the relationships they have with their AI.

Speaker: Brooke Sellas [30:32]

What the fuck?

Speaker: Brooke Sellas [30:42]

With our AI. There's been a lot of speculation that this was going to happen with AI. So I'm surprised and I'm not, all at the same time. I mean, humans are so fascinating. This is why I think the psychology and the sociology is so important to understand, because that's really what social media is. It's a big sociology experiment, psychology experiment, all of that. And so if you come at it with that lens, I think you'll do a lot better. You'll have more fun for sure.

Response time benchmarks in regulated sectors

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [31:11]

Agreed. So coming back to the CARE method, you often say that it sets under fifteen minutes as a gold standard response time. But us geeky scientists are all about the details and all about getting a thorough response rather than a quick response, if those are the two ends of the spectrum. Does your speed benchmark break in this kind of sector?

Speaker: Brooke Sellas [31:47]

Yeah, so in highly regulated sectors, we work a lot in finance, healthcare, science would be another one. We typically extend that. So a best practice there we would say is about 60 minutes, which is still a very short amount of time. But we build response libraries for our clients. So anytime a conversation happens on our end, what this looks like, if I'm pulling up the hood and showing you underneath, is that conversation comes in.

The tool and the AI in the tool will tag it for that sentiment and maybe a few other things. But we go really deep on the conversation. So we're going to also tag it as positive, negative, neutral. We're going to double check the AI because AI is not very good at nuance. But we're also going to tag it with this is an acquisition potential, this is a buying interest, this is a retention.

And based on how we're tagging that incoming conversation, we know how fast or slow we can go. So if it's a pain point, for instance, Jasmine comes along and it's like, hey, I ordered your shirt and it came with no buttons. What the heck, right? That is a massive problem if we sent Jasmine a button-down shirt with no buttons, right?

So we want to answer that much faster than if Matt comes through and is like, hey, I really loved your webinar on XYZ, are there any other courses or whatever I can take? That's still buying intent. He wants to maybe take a course, right? But we can slow down a little bit with Matt. We do want to strike while the iron's hot, but I'd want to be faster with Jasmine, because social media is a spectator sport.

And as soon as other people see what's happening to Jasmine, they're going to glob on. This is just how social works. I hate that it's like this, but groupthink happens, right? People glob on and they're watching. They're the spectators. So the quicker we can get to Jasmine and say, my goodness, we are so sorry. That is absolutely unacceptable. Send us your details over DM and we're going to make this right.

Now we're going to solve the problem offline, but we've just shown everybody online who's watching, because they are, that we're quick and we really care about making it right. So it's very situational. We do a triage system, so we label, categorise these conversations as red, yellow, green. Red is we're probably going to have to escalate this internally. We're obviously going to have to escalate Jasmine, because how did she get a shirt with no buttons? That is just crazy, right? So Jasmine would be a red. Matt would be a green. We know how to answer Matt, because we know he's got buying intent. We've got a whole slew of courses that we can mention. And what we'll try to do is come back to Matt and say, hey, tell us more, what kind of course you're looking for. It's consultative selling. Consultative selling sells better than any other type of selling. That's all social media really is when you get into the conversations around social selling and buying intent. It's just consultative selling. Well, what are you looking for, Matt? Yeah, I see. You know what? You could take this course or this course. I'm going to send you these two links. And you know what? If you decide you want to buy, let me know and I've got this little promo code for you.

So Matt goes and checks out courses. Nine times out of ten, Matt goes away. But if Matt comes back and he's like, I really love this second course, this is excellent. Great. Here's a coupon for fifty dollars off. Here, use this code. He goes and uses that code. Now we've just got attribution for social media and we're proving ROI based on the conversation we had with Matt. So it is nuanced. It's like air traffic controllers. We're doing a lot of different things, but as long as you're tagging and labelling, you can start to slice and dice all of that stuff.

And come up with incredible data sets. You could use AI to help you find the trends and the patterns. What are people saying without saying? What are our top three brand love moments this month? What are our top three friction moments this month? You've got all of this at your fingertips in seconds now. So you're able to make those actionable decisions so much faster.

First time response and the spectator effect

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [36:01]

I'm pretty sure I saw on LinkedIn you talking about don't go direct to direct messages. Obviously there are certain things that we need to do offline, addresses, the deep technical stuff. But where do you draw that boundary between the online, I don't want to call it performative response, but almost, yeah.

Speaker: Brooke Sellas [36:27]

I mean, kind of, because the people are watching. Yeah.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [36:31]

Yeah, but that online response that kind of says, here's the process that we're going to take you through, but we need to do some stuff offline. How do you draw that balance there?

Speaker: Brooke Sellas [36:43]

We try to solve what we can in that first time response. So FTR. So we're measuring, that's the metric, first time response. We're looking at how quickly we got that FTR out there, but we also lean really heavily on the scripting that we go into, which we never copy and paste, but we do have scripts that we follow. That first time response is some of the most important part of the conversation. Because I need to do a few things at once. I need to tell Jasmine, oh my God, I'm so sorry. I don't know how that happened with the shirt with no buttons. That's just crazy. Oh my gosh, so sorry. Right. So I want to acknowledge, align, empathise with Jasmine. But if I do all those things with Jasmine, I'm also doing that with my spectators. So once I can give at least that first or second acknowledge, align, empathise, then I can say, hey, you know what? Let's move to DM so we can get your details and make this right.

So I always want to give some sort of solution, even if it's like, I'm so sorry this happened. Let's make this right for you. Get to DMs to give me your details, right? It could be super simple, but a lot more thought goes into that because we know people are watching and how you respond dictates how those groupthink people are also going to come back and respond. You can create a firestorm. And I know we've all seen this, right? When a brand comes back and they're like, not our problem or whatever. And then everybody's like, all right. So yeah, it's just empathy. You said it earlier today, Matt. It's just empathy. We spend a lot of time finding team members who really have a lot of empathy. They come from non-profit. They've worked in hospitality. They volunteer. Empathy is such an important part of what we do and part of what moves this connection piece forward.

Where emotion enters an eighty thousand dollar buying decision

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [38:37]

Yeah, I love that you're bringing in emotions and feelings. The three emotions that we talk about a lot in the life sciences sector are fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and how to reduce that for prospective customers. So you've argued buying is 95 per cent emotional. Doesn't matter if we're talking B2C or B2B, it's B2P, right? Business to people. When you've got a scientist that's trying to make a business decision, a buying decision on whether to buy this $80,000 piece of equipment or this other $80,000 piece of equipment, and they're basically looking at specifications, they're glomming and focusing in on the facts. Where does emotion actually enter that decision? And where doesn't it?

Speaker: Brooke Sellas [39:39]

Yeah, so the 95 per cent is a Harvard study. I'm so sorry, I forget the professor's name at the moment. But it's a Harvard study that was done that basically shows that 95 per cent of the time we buy based on emotion. Only five per cent of the time is it based on logic, which makes a lot of sense to me. But for people like scientists, they're probably like, are you sure? Listen, it's not my study. It's a Harvard study, but it is out there. I think the emotion part comes in especially if we're dealing with facts. If I'm looking at two different spec sheets or two different tools or two different kitty litters, right, again, it doesn't matter which sector we're in, and they're both the same price and they're both pretty much the same ingredient. Where am I going to look next? Customer experience.

I want to know that when I have a problem or a question or I need someone to walk me through it because I'm just not that savvy to do it on my own, then I know that those opinions, feelings, those conversations, that support where somebody's saying, I have a problem and the brand is coming in quickly and being like, oh my gosh, Jasmine, we really messed this up. Let's fix it. That is going to be what pulls people to the other side. There's an old Salesforce quote around this.

It's so old now, I can't even remember the stat. It is older. I'll have to try to find a new one that I can start quoting. But essentially a couple of years ago, they came out and said that basically the experience matters more than price to buyers these days. And I don't know if that's true with the current economics. So again, I need to find a new stat maybe. But that to me makes sense, right? Because I don't care, if I'm going to spend the $50 anyway, I'd rather spend the $50 or the $80,000 with someone who I know is going to give me a good experience in using it. Because a lot of brands, when it ends at purchase, they're like, we got the purchase, we're done. No, that's not where it ends. That's really where it begins, because now you have usage. How is that usage going? If the usage isn't going well, if your support's not there, you're not going to get to loyalty. If you're not going to get to loyalty, you're not going to get to high customer lifetime value, you're not going to get to repeat customers. So I think the emotion plays a part in all aspects of it, but especially after conversion when usage starts.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [42:07]

I think that really applies to the life sciences, whether you're talking about reagents or especially instruments, where the instrument needs to be installed, whether you need to be trained on that instrument, when you do your first run. And for sure you're going to have an issue during that first run. Is the support there? What is that experience like?

Speaker: Brooke Sellas [42:28]

Of course you are. Murphy's Law. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense to me, but I also think even if you're not a scientist, we feel the same way. I'm trying to look for something on my desk. I have this, this is my mum's that I stole. And I have had this for literally a thousand years. Like thirty years maybe. But if I'm going to buy this calculator, I'm going to buy a calculator regardless, right? You're going to buy the machine regardless. But I want to buy the one, and I'll even pay more. And that's part of what that Salesforce study said. I'll even pay more for the calculator if I know I'm going to get excellent support in using it.

What surprises Brooke most about scientific brands

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [43:09]

So my final question of the day is, what surprises you most when you're working with scientists and kind of regulated industries? What's the thing that surprises you most about the industry, about the way that social is perceived?

Speaker: Brooke Sellas [43:29]

To brag on Thermo Fisher Scientific, because their programme is just so cool. So I've been teaching with them for like four or five years now. I teach a marketing 1.0, 2.0, and an AI for marketers class. And of course there are marketers in the class. That's normal. But when the scientists come and take the class, they're so engaged and it's so interesting to me because it shows how invested they are in these products that they're producing, or cures, or machines, or whatever it is, right? But they want to know what happens when it leaves their part of it, which is very early on, and goes to market. And I think that's why Thermo Fisher Scientific is such an outstanding brand, because they want everybody in the organisation to understand what happens from conception to end, and they're willing to put the education into these employees.

And I just think that is surprising, number one, because I don't feel like we see a lot of brands who put that kind of time and effort into their employees, but I think that must make them so much more productive. I mean, the AI class alone, watching the aha moments come on and people being like, I'm going to go back and create an ICP for this product with AI. And learn how to better market this product and sell this product to this ICP. I love teaching. It's surprising, but it warms my little heart.

Closing

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [45:09]

This has been a fabulous conversation. Thank you so much for sharing all that you know and all of your experiences. It really means a lot to us and to our listeners.

Speaker: Brooke Sellas [45:21]

Thank you so much for having me. I love it. I can nerd out with y'all all day long. Again, sorry for all the nerdiness. It's just who I am.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [45:29]

We absolutely love it. Thank you, Brooke. It's been a fantastic fanboy moment for me, so thank you.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [45:37]

And that also means we'll just have to have you back so we can continue the nerding.

Speaker: Brooke Sellas [45:40]

Yes. Well, let's just get as nerdy as we can. I love it.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [45:44]

Excellent. Well, thanks again to our guest, Brooke Sellas. And for those of our listeners who'd like to message you directly, how can they get in touch with you?

Speaker: Brooke Sellas [45:57]

Yeah, if you are a social media person, I hang out on LinkedIn the most. That's the easiest way to engage with me, or you can email me. I'm just brooke at bsquared.media, or you can go to bsquared.media to find out more about the brand.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [46:19]

This has been fantastic. Thank you so much, Brooke.

Speaker: Brooke Sellas [46:23]

You're so welcome. Thanks again for having me.

Q&A

We have no social listening tool and no budget for one. Can we still start next week?

Yes. Brooke built her original thesis work in a spreadsheet before listening tools existed. Pick one person, give them two hours a week, and run the I and C halves of BIC manually. Search three industry terms and your top three competitors on Reddit and LinkedIn. Log every complaint verbatim in a shared sheet. Inside a month you will have a friction list that no tool subscription was needed to produce.

Our scientists will not post publicly. How do we generate conversation without breaching confidentiality?

Move from asserting facts to asking for opinions. Polls carry the lowest barrier and reveal nothing proprietary. Ask which sample prep step wastes the most time, or which specification buyers actually distrust. None of that discloses unpublished work. Run one poll a week for six weeks on LinkedIn, then use the comment threads as your voice of customer file. The engagement also signals to the algorithm that your content deserves reach.

Where do we look first if we only have time for one thing?

The negative sentiment on your two closest competitors. Positive comment is pleasant and rarely actionable. Complaints are where the campaign angles live, and where your own roadmap gaps become visible. Brooke's credit union example turned one recurring complaint into a product change that removed 82 per cent of their negative conversation. Give one person a fortnight to catalogue competitor complaints and rank them by frequency.

How do we prove any of this to a finance director who thinks social is a cost centre?

Stop reporting reach. Report two numbers instead. First, conversations tagged as buying intent that reached a sales conversation. Second, friction conversations resolved where the account renewed. Attach a code or tracked link to intent replies so attribution survives the handover. One quarter of tagged conversations with revenue attached will do more for your budget than a year of impression graphs.

What response time should we commit to in a regulated environment?

Sixty minutes for a first response, with the substance following later. The first reply acknowledges, aligns and empathises. It does not need regulatory sign-off to say that you have seen the problem and are looking into it. Build a triage rule now: complaints about product performance escalate immediately, buying intent gets a consultative reply within the hour, everything else waits. Write the acknowledgement scripts before you need them.