Everyone is chasing AI efficiency. Fewer people are talking to their customers. That gap is where brand moats are built right now - and the companies that figure it out before everyone else wakes up are going to win the next decade of B2B marketing.

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David Walsh sits down with Mark Jung, founder of Known, to break down what's actually broken in B2B content, how LinkedIn's algorithm has fundamentally changed, and why the brands that get emotionally close to their audience will be on every buyer's day one list when it matters. Mark has driven over 1 billion organic LinkedIn impressions across hundreds of B2B brands. He is, in David's words, the LinkedIn scientist - and this conversation earns the title.

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Mark pulls from six years of LinkedIn data, hundreds of brands, and a near-obsessive study of LinkedIn's own engineering papers to explain what's changed, why it changed, and exactly what to do about it. He also gets specific about the mistakes most creators are making right now - and the mindset that separates the ones who compound from the ones who plateau.

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Guest Bio

Mark Jung is the founder of Known, a full-service organic LinkedIn agency for ambitious B2B brands. Alongside business partner Daniel Murray of The Marketing Millennials, Mark has driven 1,016,918,065 organic impressions on LinkedIn across 2024 and 2025, grown a combined 2.19 million GTM followers across personal brands and company pages, and scaled to $1M+ ARR in 47 days after launch. Known operates as a stealth agency - they don't name clients - but their results speak for themselves: net-new pages grown from zero to 25,000 followers, brands taken from 2,000 to 50,000+ company page followers, and LinkedIn's Top Startup Award won on behalf of the brands they work with. Mark has spoken at HubSpot's INBOUND and advises a range of B2B startups. He currently lives in the Cayman Islands.

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What We Cover

1. Why boring is how you die: Mark's core philosophy from management consulting to SaaS - great marketing doesn't feel like marketing, and the moment it does, you've lost. He explains why brands chasing AI efficiency have traded proximity to their customer for productivity, and why that's a dangerous trade.
2. The chicken dish at the wedding: Mark's framework for brand positioning. Chicken is safe. Nobody remembers it. Brands that refuse to take a stance, offend their non-ICP, and show up with real conviction are the only ones that build raving fans - and a moat.
3. Three tips for more authentic LinkedIn content: Be capital-YOU (your lived experience is the one thing AI can't replicate), mine your winning comments using Toyota's Five Whys to find the emotion underneath, and apply the Rule of One - one audience, one key point, one emotion per post.
4. How LinkedIn's algorithm actually works now: Mark breaks down LinkedIn's shift from separate compute-heavy systems to a unified LLM-based model built around a MoE (Mixture of Experts) architecture - and what that means for how your content gets ranked and distributed.

The Executive Brief: Laura Erdem on The Death of "Safe" Marketing

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Most B2B marketing strategies fail because they rely on "safe" playbooks: automated outreach, generic paid ads, and risk-averse branding. In this episode, host David Walsh is joined by Laura Erdem, the US Sales Director at Dreamdata, who dismantles the myth that professional means boring. She reveals how a single critical comment from an industry influencer drove their highest week of MQLs ever, proving that attention—even controversial attention—beats silence every time.

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Laura breaks down the mechanics of "social selling" beyond the buzzwords. She explains why over-automating your outbound (like the "barista" LinkedIn bot strategy) destroys trust, and how true revenue attribution requires tracking the "dark social" funnel that most tools miss. You will learn how to activate your internal team into an army of advocates, why "safe" marketing budgets are actually the riskiest investment you can make, and how to leverage offline signals—like billboards and in-person events—to drive digital pipeline. This conversation is a masterclass in bridging the gap between sales and marketing to prove exactly what drives revenue.

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About the Guest

Laura Erdem is the US Sales Director at Dreamdata, a B2B revenue attribution platform. Joining as employee number nine, she played a pivotal role in scaling the company from a Danish startup to a global contender, recently leading their expansion into New York. Laura leverages her storytelling background to bridge the gap between sales and marketing. She is a recognized leader in social selling, demonstrating how personal branding and employee advocacy directly impact the bottom line.

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Inside the Episode: The Knowledge Map

1. The "Barista" Mistake: Laura shares a cautionary tale about a growth marketer who used fake profiles to automate LinkedIn connections. She explains why this "bland" automation fails and how to add intentionality to your outreach.
2. The Troll Effect: Discover how a critical comment from a major influencer about Dreamdata's product terrified the team but ultimately led to their best week of MQLs. This segment proves that visibility often outweighs sentiment in the early stages.
3. Activating Employee Advocacy: Laura categorizes employees into three groups: the creators, the abstainers, and the "middle group." She details her strategy for empowering that middle group to share content without fear or friction.
4. The Ethics of Side Gigs: David and Laura discuss how Dreamdata leadership approved her brand partnerships. Learn why allowing high-performers to build personal brands externally actually strengthens their internal sales credibility.
5. Beyond IP Lookup: Laura introduces "Signals," Dreamdata's evolution of attribution tracking. She explains why standard IP identification is now a commodity and how tracking specific intent signals maps directly to pipeline velocity.
6. The Paid Social Multiplier: David shares data showing that turning organic creator content into thought leadership ads is 11x more effective than traditional ads. Laura validates this by explaining how to boost creator posts for measurable...