She Has 342K Followers, But Her Company Doesn't Make Her Post

How should a B2B company hire a creator or influencer?

Alexis Bertholf has 342K followers across LinkedIn, TikTok and Instagram. She came up as a Cisco solutions engineer supporting 50 to 60 customers, and she's now the first-ever Global Technical Evangelist at Megaport.

Her argument: a paycheck does not buy a creator's audience.

She's proof of it. Alexis has zero contractual obligation to post about Megaport, set up that way on purpose, and she posts about them constantly anyway. That's about half a million impressions and 55,000 profile views a week on LinkedIn, with visible spikes on the company page every time one of her posts takes off.

We get into what companies get wrong when they hire someone who already has an audience, and why posting quotas and "we own your image" contracts quietly destroy the trust that made that audience worth buying.

We also cover what a full-funnel campaign looks like when social is one channel instead of the whole plan, and why almost nobody pulls one off. After three years of posting nearly every day, her advice for beginners is blunt: fix your audio before you buy a camera, and with a sub-second average retention rate, your face is the hook, not your opening line.

The back half is the highs and the lows of digital nomading, and why it isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Alexis has been on the road for a year and a half, 15 countries, never more than three weeks in one place. In her words, "it's definitely not all that it's cracked up to be." We get into the 80-hour weeks built around 6am calls with Australia and US calls running to 2am, how she got her company to say yes, and what you quietly give up back home to keep doing it.

Full chapters below ⬇️
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Timestamps:

00:00 - Intro Trailer
00:56 - Welcome to the show
01:55 - 342K followers across four platforms
02:36 - Aerospace engineering to a Cisco sales program
03:12 - What a global technical evangelist actually does
03:55 - She wrote her own job description
05:13 - Community go to market, explained
07:02 - Companies hire the unicorn without the infrastructure
08:24 - Unused content is wasted money
09:17 - Creator, engineer and executive in one title
10:39 - She came to Megaport for more time to create
11:36 - The AI stuff moves faster than you can learn it
12:19 - Staying current is the real job
13:59 - The lifecycle of a piece of company content
14:25 - Scenario one, her own page
14:49 - Scenario two, a brand deal
15:21 - Scenario three, her own company
16:56 - Three weeks to a month for one video
17:26 - Why she still wants a second set of eyes
18:01 - A publicly traded company cannot wing it
19:06 - Align social with the rest of marketing
20:45 - Have you seen the Brita account
21:52 - What brand is killing it on social
22:51 - Why big tech is scared to be that bold
23:47 - The right way to hire an influencer
24:21 - They think they are buying your audience
25:09 - Megaport requires zero posts from her
26:03 - Do not give them requirements, give them time
26:38 - Half a million impressions a week
27:48 - Why Gong's model survives departures
28:47 - Your employees are coin operated
29:33 - The bonus ladder that gets people over the hump
30:28 - Social is not the campaign
31:40 - Employee advocacy and influencers
33:17 - Departments are fighting each other
34:09 - There is no incentive to align
35:25 - Rapid Fire: LinkedIn, TikTok or Instagram
36:03 - Rapid Fire: Why LinkedIn lost its energy
37:20 - Rapid Fire: Real people you can actually meet
39:01 - Rapid Fire: Advice for your 20 year old self
39:16 - Post every day or only when it is great
40:21 - Ding was insecure about Delilah
41:18 - How important is a hook
42:46 - Nobody buys a GPU cluster off a hook
44:06 - A year and a half as a digital nomad
45:59 - Advice for someone who wants this
48:21 - How do you tell your company
50:26 - Be online when your team needs you
53:06 - Be intentional about a season in a place
54:18 - Co livings and the nomad community
56:21 - The Dolomites, Switzerland, New Zealand
57:29 - Blowing up her life and hitting the road
58:28 - Travel taught her to let go of routine
59:15 - Could the founders go nomad
1:02:14 - Maslow's hierarchy of needs
1:03:06 - Am I investing in my friendships
1:04:11 - Jake had the opposite experience
1:04:44 - Relationships are trees
1:06:24 - The friend you fly to Norway
1:07:16 - A forest of skinny trees
1:10:10 - What is next for Alexis
1:10:49 - Where to find Alexis Bertholf

GUEST
Alexis Bertholf, Global Technical Evangelist at Megaport
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexisbertholf/

HOSTS
Jake Clare, Co-Founder and CEO of EventShark
Ding Zheng, Co-Founder and The Sales Rapper

The B2B Content Show is produced by EventShark, a B2B video agency in Austin, TX. Subscribe for new episodes on B2B content, video marketing, and building an audience in tech.

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