Nine months ago I had my third baby. And because I have this thing where I tend to overshare online, I told everybody that I was going through some postpartum depression.

I don’t know if I’d actually call it depression. It was more like postpartum rage mixed with a whole cocktail of other postpartum stuff.

Because I decided to share that, people ask me all the time how I’m doing. A lot of you have checked in over the past several months, which I’ve always found incredibly kind. My answer is usually something like, “I’m doing good,” which isn’t a lie.

Outwardly, I am doing good. I’m flourishing at work. I’m spending more time with friends and family. I’m working out again. I’m doing all the things that, on paper, signal that life is going well. The fog that I felt from postpartum has lifted just enough that I can feel my life settling back into some kind of rhythm.

But I don’t think this chapter is really about “getting back” to anything.

If anything, what I’ve learned in these months of post-baby recovery is how to regulate my emotions better and reconnect my mind to my body. For months my body didn’t feel like it belonged to me. Sleep was touch and go (still is, actually). Honestly, I still feel like my brain is slower than it used to be, though I can’t tell if that’s from sleep deprivation, or the fact that I’m chronically online and doomscrolling whenever I have a spare second.

Every day, I’m still figuring out how to be more intentional with my time and where I spend it. I’m trying to read more. Or at least as much as my children will allow. I’m trying to eat better and be more mindful of my gut health.

I guess part of why I’m sharing this is because when people talk about hard seasons in their lives, the moment we tend to share is arguably the dramatic part. Everything is heightened. Emotional. Raw. When I wrote about postpartum, I think a lot of people responded with something like, “Wow, that’s a lot,” because I was inviting people into something that was messy and immediate.

But what folks don’t often see is what happens after that. What’s is the through line here?

The stretch where the crisis passes but things aren’t magically fixed. I mean, you don’t wake up one morning and suddenly feel like the old version of yourself again. As much as I wish it were so, the reality is much much slower than that.

I’ve been in therapy for months now. Since the summer. Three or four sessions a month. And one thing I’ve had to accept is that there isn’t really a finish line to “getting better.”

What I was feeling didn’t just disappear because I got more comfortable talking about it. It’s something I have to learn how to live alongside without letting it swallow everything else.

I wrote this in my notebook, “nothing in life should be all-consuming. Not motherhood. Not work. Not anything. Because when one thing takes up that much space, you start to feel this creeping anxiety that you’re not enough somewhere else.”

For a long time that thought sat over my head like a cloud. Am I doing enough? Am I being enough? I didn’t want to go on medication. For one reason or another, I felt like I just needed to work through it in a way that made sense for me. And a lot of that meant brutally prioritizing the things that actually matter. Which is way harder than it sounds.

What I’m learning now is how to exist as both a mom of 3 and someone who still wants to perform at a high level at work. And I think I’m better at regulating now than I was nine months ago.

But I also realize that I might not ever feel like my “full self” in the exact way I remember from before. And maybe that’s okay. Because the truth is, most of us are works in progress all the time. Life doesn’t move in neat arcs where you struggle, get help, and suddenly everything is fixed.

These days I feel good. Not perfect. Not fully healed. But good.

And good is good ✌️

It’s been over a month since I last shared here. Normally, that bit of a break would sit heavy in my shoulders and chest, with a low-grade anxiety humming in the background, telling me I’m failing at something (again). I’ve absorbed enough understanding about building an audience throughout my career in marketing to believe that consistency is the measure of seriousness, and seriousness is the measure of worth. And if you’re not consistent then your work is not worth it.

What a crap thought.

But realistically, a little over a month isn’t that big of a deal. I’ve been gathering my thoughts about life and work, keeping busy and chugging along. If consistency means anything at all, maybe it’s that as long as you’re continuing, then that’s enough. There’s no abandoning ship here, matey!

After I shared that my husband had been affected by layoffs, we were met with an outpouring of care. It showed me how grounding it is to belong to a community that shows up without asking for anything in return. A bit of an update there is that he’s taking time now to be with our kids fully and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t jealous. I suspect that when we look back on this season of our lives, we won’t remember the penny-pinching or the looming stress that comes with a mortgage and the ordinary costs of living. We’ll remember that he was present for our children at 13, 3, and 8 months old. Full time dad mode, activated.

What follows is a loose collection of notes from the last month or so. Moments from making content in different ways, with different stakes, and varying degrees of success. There are stretches where things clicked, and others where they (very) much didn’t. I’m writing this while my house is buried under 3ft of snow and my children are loudly living their lives downstairs.

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Since joining Slate, I started a video series called Recap & Ramblings which is loosely YouTube vlog-style-esque. It’s a bit unstructured, which is just how I like things when it comes to my personal work. This grew out of something I’ve always done naturally which is sharing what I’m learning as I go. I didn’t follow a traditional career path, and when I moved from social and community roles into a Head of Marketing position, people were understandably curious about how that happened. This series is my way of answering that.

Working at a company built for social teams also pushed me to think more seriously about how I show up creatively. I wanted a format that lived beyond writing, where people could see me as a person, understand how I think, and how I process stuff, etc. Recap & Ramblings is where I let my thoughts wander. I edit the videos myself, and talk through what’s happening as it happens.

This is the third episode. This series has no set cadence, but whenever our team does something that sparks conversation or attention, I’ll likely sit down and record one.

PSA: If you’re more of a reader versus a watcher, than read this section below. If you’ve watched the video then you can skip this section altogether.
One of the harder things about working on a fully remote team is figuring out how to make good content together. Not just more content, because lord knows that no one is starving for output, but work that we can be really proud of. We’re all swimming in content all day, every day. We’ve adapted to scrolling past hundreds of pieces faster than we can register what we’ve just seen. At a certain point, the volume of output is just more noise added to the feed. It starts to feel numbing. And I can already sense that people are craving for more flavor. Like they have a high bar of good, and it would take a lot to convince them to stop their thumbs.

“Good,” of course, is subjective. But inside a team, it still has to mean something concrete. It can’t just be a vibe. At Slate, our bar for good content isn’t about polish for polish’s sake. It’s about practicality. Can we move quickly without losing our identity? Can we stay visually consistent without overthinking every single detail? Can we actually get work out while it still feels timely, instead of watching it rot in drafts?

Those questions shape how we operate, and they’re what led us to try a content blitz.

Our marketing team is small—four people—split between Boston, SF, and Toronto. Like most remote teams, we didn’t have a shortage of ideas. What we lacked was shared momentum. Lack of F2F time had become the bottleneck. So instead of pretending we could solve that asynchronously, we decided to spend real money and real time getting in the same room and batching content together.

Toronto made the most sense. Two of our team members live there, which kept costs reasonable and logistics simple. Our goal was to give ourselves a concentrated window to work.

Here’s what the first blitz actually cost:

• Roundtrip flight from Boston to Toronto: $480

• Studio rental for six hours: $150

• Meals for the team: roughly $280

• Editing help: $3000

  

We didn’t pay for lodging, and we didn’t need to rent additional equipment beyond what the studio and our team already provided. All in, the investment was fairly modest, especially when you look at what came out of it.

From that one day, we walked away with six higher-production pieces and another ten to twelve UGC-style videos. Enough to comfortably carry us through to our next blitz in April. More importantly, it gave us more conviction. We could see how more considered, higher-effort content and looser, faster content play different roles, and how having both keeps things moving smoothly.

If you really want to be seen as a media company, then you gotta build that muscle.

The part I didn’t fully anticipate was how much time is needed for production. Setup alone ate more of the day than I expected. Lighting, stands, camera adjustments. While all were necessary, they all slowed us down. I also had to come to terms with the fact that I don’t actually know how to work a camera beyond setting it to auto and hoping for the best. I own a Sony A7RIII camera and I have a 35mm, and a 70-200mm lens.

Creatively, we were also a bit underprepared. We had an ideas page and inspiration references, but they were built for day-to-day social execution, not for higher-production shoots. We hadn’t fully flushed out scripts for the pieces that needed structure, which meant we spent too much time massaging lines and improvising on the fly. In hindsight, we should have come in with clearer goals for each piece and been stricter about timeboxing.

We also tried to do too much ourselves. We leaned heavily on for setup and filming, and that created a bottleneck that slowed everything down. Having dedicated production support would have made a meaningful difference. Six hours, too, was simply not enough. If we repeat this at the same scale, it needs to be a full shoot day, or even multiple days, to do more.

None of this negates the value of the blitz. If anything, it helped our understanding of how we can get better.. Planning and production discipline matter a lot with this stuff. Editing support matters if you want a speedy turnaround afterwards. And creating good content as a remote team isn’t about squeezing more output out of people. It’s more around designing opportunities where focus and attention can really be dedicated.

Woo, that was a bit of a doozy. If you’re still with me, I appreciate it. I have the tendency to get a bit wordy when I’m trying to explain “the how” behind the things we do.

Outside of my day job, I am a LinkedIn creator. I still blush and laugh nervously whenever I say that. Because of course my self-deprecation would make me feel embarrassed. TBH, I never expected LinkedIn, of all places, to be the channel that opened the most doors for me—but it has.

After my husband was laid off, I decided to be more open to sponsored posts again. I mean, we were suddenly a one-income household, and that familiar scarcity—the same one I grew up with watching my immigrant parents pinch every dollar—has a way of changing just how flexible I’m willing to be when it comes to finding ways to earn more money. And as much as I’ve always tried to avoid feeling like a walking advertisement, I’d be lying if I said money wasn’t a factor this time around.

Two of those partnerships ended up being the highest-paid deals I’ve ever done and neither of them performed well.

This is where I tell you just how pathetic I felt over it. I was manically watching the numbers too closely. I refreshed more than I should have, like an ungodly absurd amount. I wanted the posts to work because I wanted the rate to feel justified. When they didn’t, it just felt like a personal failure.

If I put my social media marketing hat back on, I can see very clearly why the posts didn’t work.

Both posts went through heavy revisions, one of them was 14 times! Which made the entire thing felt more transactional than collaborative. One required me to promote something I wasn’t actually a part of. And, unsurprisingly, sponsored content just doesn’t travel the same way. Whether that’s algorithmic or behavioral almost doesn’t matter because the result was just low reach.

Obviously this didn’t kill me. I’m stronger than a few bad posts. But I needed to stop licking my own wounds as I sat there in despair because performance isn’t a proxy for worth. Brands put paid spend behind underperforming creative all the time, and no one ever questions the value of the people who made it. Creators shouldn’t internalize that pressure differently just because the work carries their name.

Sponsored content is never a guarantee. It’s an agreement to try something together, under a set of variables most of us don’t fully control. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. The job is to learn without letting the outcome define you.

The silver lining is that this experience pushed me towards a different model altogether. I want fewer one-off amplifications, and more long-term collaboration. This led me to start building a few concept-driven projects of my own which is work that’s designed for collaboration instead of amplification. I’m still shaping them, but the excitement behind these passion projects is going to be the reason why it’ll do well. I just know it. I’ll share a bit of that below.

My overall desire is to come up with content formats in a way that they can act like containers that can hold peoples’ attention over time.

One idea I keep coming back to is LinkedIn Confessionals. It’s documentary-style, built around short, honest conversations with people who spend a lot of time thinking publicly for a living. The goal is producing something with a rich texture. Real thoughts, real tension, and truly relatable because every creator who has posted on LinkedIn has felt this way. We tested this on LinkedIn this last week and it’s gained some decent traction.

Another concept I’m stoked about is Food for Thought. It’s built around the simple act of sharing a meal while talking about work, but at the level of process and judgment. How decisions get made. How people think through problems. Different cities, different tables, different conversations. I want this to be grounded in something innately human like sharing a meal.

And then there’s Creator Couch, which is exactly what it sounds like. A small group of creators, in conversation, no filters. Swearing is allowed. So is laughing, pausing, and not knowing exactly what you think yet. I’m not interested in producing hot takes. Just good conversations.

All three ideas share the same instinct that I think a lot of consumers are feeling which is: can we please slow things down? Can we make room for collaboration? Can we build something that we’re actually proud of and is actually intriguing?

I don’t know exactly where they’ll land yet. Maybe they’ll just be the fun content I get to do. But if this is something you’re interested in be a part of, or if you’re a brand who wants to take a bet—LMK.

Alright, I’ll stop here. This is what happens when I let my thoughts roam a little too freely on the page. Content is never far from my mind, and I could spend days unpacking it. I hope something in here resonated with you, wherever you are. Until next time.

The day began the way most days do: with the second alarm. For once, the baby—our usual human alarm clock—had decided to sleep in, granting us a small mercy we didn’t actually have time to accept. But this wasn’t just any Tuesday. It was the Tuesday after a three-day weekend. MLK Day still clinging to the edges of Monday. Tuesdays like this don’t allow for mercy.

We started dividing the morning like labor. The teenager needed a ride. The three-year-old had a parent-teacher conference. Someone had to stay with the baby. Breakfast, lunches, shoes. Get your shoes on, please. A fight about a hat.

“Do I have to wear one?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not cold.”

It was 20 degrees farenheit outside.

In the car, my son turned the seat warmer all the way up—the same child who, minutes earlier, had insisted he wasn’t cold enough to wear a hat.

My husband stayed home with the baby while I played chauffeur and mmhming earnestly through the parent-teacher conference. When I got back, he handed me the baby immediately because he had a 9 a.m. meeting, sharp. I breastfed her and scrolled through emails, easing myself into the day that was jam packed with back to backs.

I don’t know why I scheduled therapy for the Tuesday after a three-day weekend. Everyone knows that day is the most Monday of all Tuesdays. Tuesday on steroids.

He finished his meeting just in time for me to leave for mine. As I was halfway out the door, he mentioned that he had a random meeting with his boss Stacy1.

Stacy. The name alone tightens something in me. Nails on a chalkboard. Stacy is the woman who once told my husband during their 1:1 that she expected him to be more proactive and do but also didn’t have anything for him to do. The same woman who, when he was violently ill, asked if he remembered to send something over. She was the same woman who would cancel 1:1 last minute and not talk to him for 3 weeks.

My husband and I are different species. I am an oversharer. I am ambitious to the point of restlessness. I grow bored when days stagnate, when things start to look too similar. My husband is the definition of good enough—and I mean that with sincere admiration. He believes work is a means to an end. You work to buy back time. You spend that time on what matters. For him, that’s our kids, our house, our life.

For five years, he gave this company his steadiness. No raises beyond the small, annual three percent (last two years was even less than that). No bad performance reviews. No drama. He would have stayed twenty years if they’d let him. He is content. He is loyal. He trusted that if you showed up, did your job, kept your head down, things would be fine.

They were most certainly not.

Five years, and what they offered was this: We’re restructuring. Here are five weeks of severance.

Five weeks.

We have three children.

There’s a moment after something like this happens where the house feels off, even though nothing has actually changed. The day still carried on. The baby still needs to be fed. The laundry is still unfinished. The day keeps moving forward as if it hasn’t noticed what just happened to us.

My first instinct was math. How many weeks. How many bills. How much runway we actually have if five weeks is truly all there is. I kept opening my phone, clicking through random apps mindlessly, as if something would pop out and the numbers might rearrange themselves if I stared long enough.

Five years. Five weeks.

I kept thinking about how carefully we built this life. Two incomes braided together. Childcare schedules balanced like a Jenga tower. Everything working because everything had to work. And now one piece was gone, and I couldn’t tell yet whether the whole thing would wobble or collapse.

He didn’t spiral. At all. He was calm in the way only someone who genuinely believed in the deal can be calm. He kept saying things like, “We’ll figure it out,” and “It’ll be okay,” and I wanted to scream at the optimism of it, at the unfairness of how quickly five years could be reduced to a mere calendar invite and the added “oh but we’ll keep you on payroll for 2 weeks, too!” Like that’s some sort of consolation prize that we should be happy with.

I thought about all the mornings he logged on without complaint. The meetings he took seriously. The way he never asked for more because he was never trying to be more. He showed up. He stayed steady. He trusted that steadiness counted for something.

Apparently, it doesn’t.

So the day kept going. Dinner. Baths. Homework questions shouted from the other room. The baby asleep on my chest, warm and heavy and unaware that anything had shifted. I tried to stay present, but my mind kept skipping ahead—to conversations we hadn’t had yet, to decisions we weren’t ready to make, to the thinness of five weeks stretched across a life that can’t pause just because your employer did.

I’m not sharing this as a means to offer any kind of perspective. I don’t have any takeaways. I do, however, have the sharp awareness of how fast comfort can turn conditional, and how quickly stability can be revoked. Because that’s what happened today. We are still living inside it. Still standing in the middle of a day that began like any other and ended with everything slightly off.

Fucking fuckity fuck fucking A!

It’s always funny to me when people insist you need to “niche down.” And they declare this with such confidence, as if every corner of your life must have a business plan attached. As if anything you make has to serve an ulterior motive beyond “I felt something and wanted to put it somewhere.”

Alright, maybe that’s true if you’re monetizing your personality like a tech startup. But Substack, for me, is one of the last places where I don’t feel required to optimize myself. I don’t have to overfluff, or overexplain, or even pretend there’s any kind of strategy hiding behind every sentence. If two people read my ramblings, great. I save my business-brain for LinkedIn. That’s where I talk shop and share the marketing thoughts that have some kind of utility. Here, you get me as a WHOLE person.

So this is my tiny disclaimer: if you’ve wandered over from LinkedIn expecting another breakdown of “how to think about social strategy in 2026,” I’m afraid this won’t always be that. Sometimes you’ll get insight and other times you’ll get whatever thought was rattling around my head. TOTD (thought of the day, is that a thing? Anyhoo, I wrote this piece after a week where nothing seemed to go right, at work or at home.

Some mornings, like today, I wake up already negotiating with myself. The ambitious woman wants to sprint but the mother of three wants to lie down on the floor and let life simply happen around her. But instead, I do what most working mothers do, and I split the difference and feel guilty about both

My internal monologue is a rotating audit:

• Am I focused enough?

• Am I present enough?

• Am I layering on the generational trauma?

• Am I a dependable colleague?

• Am I even in my own body anymore?

It’s a pretty charming cocktail of ambition and guilt. Shaken nightly and served warm.

This is the first year I’ve tried to hold all of it at once. I’ve got an infant who treats my body like a public utility, a toddler whose independence is admirable in theory but definitely catastrophic in practice, and I have a teenager in the middle of a hormonal reboot that breaks my heart about 7 different ways because I can’t fucking remember the last time I picked him up.

Meanwhile my career has finally started to accelerate, which makes me think that life is nothing but a big fat joke.

Therapy has been clarifying. And if you haven’t gone then I think you should. I think—emphasizing that this is my opinion—that everyone should go to therapy. What I’ve learned is that none of this mess belongs solely to me1, and all of it moves forward whether I’m ready or not. I’ve learned that society may demand a lot of mothers, but it’s our internal auditor that is downright sadistic. She loves a red pen, and she does not believe in extensions.

Every November the burnout arrives like clockwork. People call it “a season of reflection,” but I’ve never found reflection to be particularly restful. It feels more like the month when every load-bearing wall in my life files a deeply worded complaint.

A friend sent me a clip of Indra Nooyi saying she doesn’t believe in “having it all.” Something always falters. Something always gets pushed, or delegated. But the trick is to find coping mechanisms. You need to find ways to cope or you’ll always be circling the drain.

So I’ve started collecting a short list of permissions. I originally thought mantras but I’m too tired for that bullshit:

1. Unless you work in an ER, the word “emergency” does not apply to your job.

2. Dinner is not a daily referendum on your competence.

3. Childcare does not subtract from your motherhood.

4. Hire someone to clean.

5. You can love your work just as much as you love your children.

6. Being inconsistent is not a crime.

7. Lower the bar, then lower it again.

Writing this obviously doesn’t solve anything, but it does let me vent to a bunch of strangers readers on how tired and overwhelmed I am, and not have to think about it again today, because I definitely won’t read this draft again. My final thought on this is that I don’t think the goal should be to find balance. I think, ultimately, we should stop feeling less at war with ourselves.

I’ve always envied people who say what they mean without rehearsing it in their heads first. I’m not one of them. Hi, I’m Christina, and I’m currently relapsing in my chronic need to people-please. It’s a lifelong condition, occasionally in remission, usually triggered by feedback meetings and Slack messages that start with “quick question.”

I grew up in a house where quiet meant respect. Where you didn’t talk back, and you definitely, most certainly didn’t correct your elders—not unless you were signing a waiver to your hiney and this broomstick. So you learn to survive by controlling yourself. Be docile. Be polite. Don’t give me that look, it’s not as sad as it sounds. My parents did the best they could with what they had, which wasn’t much besides a conviction that obedience kept you safe. I’m sure if they had the same resources as we do now then thinks would’ve been different. ANYWAYS, it’s a hard instinct to unlearn, especially when you step into a corporate world that ties respect with loudness.

In my twenties, I thought confidence was something you could grow into, like adult teeth. That eventually you’d wake up and stop editing yourself mid sentence because you simply knew more. But thirty five years around the sun, and I still find myself swallowing opinions. I’ve watched countless conversations roll by like trains I was supposed to board. On a good day, I chalk it up to professionalism. But the reality that I exist in is that it’s just a more expensive version of the same silence I learned at home.

There have been meetings where I knew the direction was wrong, and I probably should’ve asked the question or named the obvious problem. Instead, I took notes, waited, told myself I’d follow up later. Later always feels safer. It’s easier to risk being wrong with one person than in front of a room. But someone much smarter than me had said that the more you delay your voice, the lonelier the work becomes.

And that’s the thing, is that I did have a voice and an opinion but I wasn’t equipped on how to translate that outloud. Every thought still passes through a small customs checkpoint:

• Will this make someone defensive?

• Will they still like me after?

• Will I look stupid?

Years of trying to be the “good” anything—good daughter, good colleague, good friend, good boss—have conditioned my brain to prioritize peace over honesty. Which sounds noble until your therapist tells you that it’s just another form of self-erasure. And let me tell you something, that’s pretty soul crushing to hear.

There’s a certain kind of exhaustion that comes from speaking in drafts. Imagine feeling like you have to soften every sentence so no one misreads your intent. Use an exclamation mark, instead of a period. Add ‘lol’ behind that direct statement. Did your voice have an influx in pitch? Practice it enough and you’ll start to forget what unfiltered sounds like. But I promise that you’ll hate yourself because unfiltered is the privilege that you’ll crave.

I think about how much of work—of life, really—unravels because people can’t say what they mean. And I don’t think it’s done intentionally either. Maybe they’re like me, and their instinct was shaped by rooms where candor was punished. How often do we hear that people welcome “radical candor,” only to watch it get weaponized? We all want to be seen as agreeable, so we can be seen as part of the team.

Recently, I had to make a decision that involved a lot of people. It left me drained and physically ill and sitting at my desk, crying into the keyboard because I couldn’t say what I needed to say. When I finally did, the reaction wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d imagined. And it never is. The mind loves a worst-case scenario. But most of the time, we experience the moment, we survive, and we move on. We always do.

These days, I’m trying to practice something a little bit different. I wouldn’t call it boldness (that still feels too dramatic) but willingness. Saying things once instead of rehearsing them twice. Letting the room absorb what I mean before I start apologizing for it. I won’t always get it right. But I’m trying my darndest to lean into that fact that clarity, even when it really uncomfortable, is its own kind of kindness…to yourself.

You’ll probably get tired of how inconsistent I am when it comes to talking about work. Some days I love it. I tell people the small tricks I’ve picked up and insist you don’t need everything figured out to make it feel worthwhile. Other days I’m in front of the screen close to tears, convinced I’ve ruined my life, exhausted, overrun, not sure how to go on. There isn’t a single name for it. I suppose I’m just someone with too many feelings.

This morning the alarm was my four month old. She was angry, demanding, maybe teething. Sleep is already a hit or miss. Waking up at 6:50 instead of 5 felt luxurious. Then I ran through the house, pulling the older two into motion, because if we weren’t in the car by 7:30 my son would be late for the sixth time.

Three children at thirteen, three, and four months. It feels like triage, every minute of the day. Add the job at a startup on top and I’m almost done for.

The house was already loud. The teenager was fussing over his hair. The toddler hated the way I opened the yogurt. God forbid you pull the lid all the way off. The baby was crying without pause. My husband struggled with a crustable cutter thing, insisting there wasn’t too much jam, until it busted out onto the counter. I didn’t bother saying anything. Sometimes marriage is just silence that’s very loudly pointed.

I made the mistake of checking Slack, which was already filling with notifications. I had managed not to check all weekend. The younger version of me, the one who swore she’d never become a corporate sellout, would have laughed at the contradiction of me having to be forcibly intentional with not checking. Then the toddler began her shoe argument. She wanted to do it herself, which meant standing in the hallway and interrogating me as she went: is this my left foot? why are my socks upside down? can I wear the sparkly ones instead? do I have to wear both shoes? can I wear one sandal and one sneaker? can you tie them tighter, no, looser, no, not like that?

I was already late. I picked her up, still mid-question, and carried her outside. She screamed while I buckled her in, voice hitting that pitch that just about serves as permanent birth control. I pulled out of the driveway and was careful not to clip my other car this time (a story for another day).

At the top of the street I noticed my 13 yr old for the first time that morning. He was bent over his phone. I ruffled his hair and he groaned, told me he’d spent forever fixing it. I keep forgetting he isn’t a baby. By the time we reached school he was two minutes late. Enough to be rerouted through the office doors. The crosswalk monitor waved me off like she always does. I gripped the wheel and it took everything in me to not just flip her off.

The toddler wanted Frozen. She cried when I turned on the wrong song. Then she told me not to sing. And when we finally arrived at her school, she ran in without saying goodbye.

By 8:30 I was back home, the baby on my chest, the laptop open. Emails, meetings, more meetings. Mondays at a startup feel like a dare you never agreed to, everyone demanding time you don’t have. I worked through breakfast. Through pumping. Through the noise of a crying baby. By evening I had been on calls for hours, half-nursing, half-typing, telling myself I’d catch up later even though there is no later, only more of the same.

At bedtime I did the checklist. Food, baths, the story they wanted to hear again even though I’d read it yesterday and the day before that, and the day before that day. What I was doing was rolling into the motions of presence. And then later, I found myself standing outside their door and realized my head had been somewhere else all day. Not with them. Just on work.

Last week I said I was only tired. But I’m beginning to wonder if it’s burnout.

I can love this job and hate what it takes from me. Both things can be true and coexist at the same time

I don’t have a fix, or any takeaway. Just this: that the part of me that isn’t attached to slack or emails feels worn. And admitting it, even in this very unorthodox messy kinda way, is the only relief I have.

I swear, it feels like every marketer I know is duking it out on LinkedIn to see who can out-virtue the rest. And not over politics or religion, but over something pettier, and somehow even more vicious: whether using AI makes you a “bad” marketer.

I’ll admit it: I use AI all the time. Some days it feels like an embarrassing dependence. And yes, I’ve wrestled with the guilt, wondering whether or not this reliance make me less creative, less rigorous, less me? There’s also that gnawing thought that maybe I’m single-handedly overheating the planet every time I type a lazy query instead of Googling like a normal person. But guilt and laziness have been around long before AI. And if you’re lazy with a blank sheet of paper, you’ll be lazy with a chatbot. If you’re thoughtful, you’ll still be thoughtful. Can’t say much about this planet—we’re doing the absolute worst, and nothing I write here will make that feel any better.

But I digress.

I can always tell when someone’s post was written by AI. Or at least, I convince myself I can. It’s not the em dashes (though I curse the day people started treating them like some kind of contraband), because anyone who actually reads knows they’re a stylistic choice. It’s more like being able to catch the rhythm of writing. Or noticing how paragraphs are sliding too easily into each other. Or sentences forming this weirdly perfect cadence. Which is exactly why it never feels human. It’s too perfect.

You know what I mean, right? In business writing, it’s the over-optimizing for corporate consumption. The faux hype of saying a lot while saying nothing at all. The rule of three, the fake rhetorical questions. Then the AI witch hunts: smug posts with virtual pitchforks, everyone acting like TSA agents confiscating a full tube of toothpaste. The poor writer swearing with their hand on the bible that they ACTUALLY wrote this themselves. The rest of us are left, existing with this low-level paranoia.

📌brought to you by Typeform (#TypeformPartner). they’re running a “get real” survey on generative ai — the paranoia, the guilt, the weird pride in insisting you’re still human. they want messy, unfiltered responses (text, video, audio, whatever). if you’ve got an opinion:

take the survey

That paranoia, and the guilt that keeps us up at night, is pretty much marketing in a nutshell. Most of us got into this line of work because we’re wired to be creative. We’re the kind of people who’d binge Mad Men and take notes on those perfectly brutal taglines. We’ll waste an hour rewriting a headline just to make it sting a bit harder for the mic drop. (I’ve rewritten the beginning of this essay at least 12 times and I still hate it.) We’ll argue about fonts like our lives depend on it, then get weirdly excited over a clever ad and spend the rest of the week debating with other marketers about whether the latest social stunt was brilliant or a total flop. The industry grows increasingly obsessed with volume and speed. More, more, MORE. Faster, faster, FASTER. The work itself turns into a chase for quantity over quality, and we’re strapped to the treadmill at an incline, cranked to a speed that’ll surely send us straight into cardiac arrest (ask me how I know).

Generative AI is lodged right in that mess, sitting comfortably and always available. It rescues us from the blinking cursor, sure, but it also fuels the content mill, spitting out drafts at a pace that makes the hamster wheel spin even faster. It frees up time for “strategy”—whatever that word even means when everyone seems to be doing the same shit with a different logo—but it also worms its way into our insecurities. We start leaning on it for reassurance, which, bluntly, feels pathetic. Tell me this headline works, tell me I’m being innovative. It’s no wonder we feel split in two. Between the work we want to make and the system that demands we keep feeding the machine.

For me, the part worth protecting is the only part that makes this work valuable: taste.

The flex of knowing what quality looks like. Knowing what to cut, what to keep, what’s worth saying. AI can spit out fifty one-liners, but it can’t tell you which one people will actually repost, or which one will stop a scroll. It can’t decide which words strung together make your voice stand out. That’s the human layer. The work of revising, reworking, re-seeing until it finally feels like you.

So yes, I rely on AI. And I’m not the only one—plenty of marketers in 2025 have already admitted the same. But that doesn’t mean you get to coast. This thing was never meant to replace the muscle, it was just supposed to keep us moving in a business already addicted to output. The job hasn’t changed. You still need to spot the bullshit, and cut the fluffy filler. You gotta trust the instincts that no machine can simulate.

Generative AI can flood the page with words. Our job is to make sure they don’t all blur into the same bland beige feed.

p.s. if you’ve got your own tangled feelings about ai in marketing, i’m partnering with typeform to collect them. same survey i dropped earlier — here’s the link again.

I’ve never been much of a crier. Though I pictured it many times in my head—the cinematic collapse into tears in a bathroom stall and someone running in there after me to tell me that they can relate. Nah, my breakdowns are much less interesting to watch. Someone says something that cuts a little too close, and instead of crying, I let it infect me from the inside me. Like ink pressed too deep, it stains the softer parts of my brain, the parts that should’ve come stamped with “handle with care.” I’d carry this new feeling around with me for weeks as it takes shape, and altering my entire chemistry.

I used to think I had a special tolerance for work. Maybe it’s the immigrant-parent thing. Work was the air we breathed. It’s the measure of whether we were good people. Effort was never optional, only assumed.

I could accept long hours, the projects that never ended, the managers who assumed I’d always pick up the slack on slack. I even believed that extra effort would eventually be noticed and sincerely appreciated. But that kind of belief builds that expectation around recognition which was the myth I fed myself to justify the grind.

But the longer I spent in the corporate cycle, the clearer it became: recognition is rarer than money. But unlike money, it doesn’t accumulate. You can pour yourself out and deliver beyond what was asked, and still find your worth tallied in likes, impressions, or some other metric designed to feel objective while stripping the human out of the work.1

The hardest lesson has been remembering that work is transactional. And take this with a grain of salt because I’m not being cynical. In fact, I think that’s probably the most unemotional way to describe work. If you look at it through a math lens, you’d see that it makes a lot of sense. You give your hours, your energy, (sometimes even your health,) and in return you get a salary.

The problem is when we keep trying to turn that transaction into a relationship.

We mistake the illusion of culture for care.
We think loyalty matters.
Then one small flaw—one human crack—and suddenly you’re a liability.

Companies are not families. Employees are parts to a machine that runs until they decide to swap out the parts.

And yet, I can’t stop wondering why the expectation only seems to flow one way. Employees are told to bring their whole selves, go the extra mile, lean in, step up. Companies, meanwhile, posts about a strong company culture but pinch at the part where they can offer something of value.

Maybe this will matter even more as our workplaces become less human by design. Screens mediating every interaction, AI reshaping the boundaries of what counts as “work.” I can already feel the hunger for something messier, more alive…for the bosses and brands and coworkers who don’t just play pretend when it comes to humanity but actually practice it. If we are, as everyone says, heading into an age where machines will do the efficient parts, then the value of being human will have to rise…right? At least, I hope it does.

Sometimes I wonder if marketers get more enjoyment out of poking fun of creators than actually understanding them. And maybe that’s because it’s just easier to roll your eyes at someone’s rates than actually admitting you don’t really know how to measure it. Well, I’ve been on both sides. I’ve signed off on partnership deals as a brand and I’ve been the one who was paid to post. Which is probably why I can’t shake this question: what are brands actually paying for when they partner with creators on LinkedIn?

first, let’s acknowledge the skepticism

Marketers are allergic to bullshit. And I’d be so bold to say most marketers don’t trust the value of creator partnerships. Which is why the moment someone drops their rate, the gut response is: “this much for one post?!” One creator quotes $200, another quotes $2,000, and both might have the same reach. And every so often, you’ll come across posts like Josh Durham’s, where a big number gets shaved down and the comments section cheers, feeding the idea that creators have been overvaluing themselves.

When you zoom out, the problem becomes obvious. There’s no universal pricing standard. No clean pipeline metric you can show your CFO. So of course it always feels inflated. And sometimes—if we’re honest—I think there’s a little bit of resentment baked in. Because while you’re out there grinding through briefs and budgets, someone else is getting paid thousands to “just post.” The reflex is: how is this even real work?

And I totally get that. It’s human. But it’s worth stripping the skepticism away for a second, because (and I’m gonna hold your hand as I say this) creators aren’t selling effort. They’re selling you access.

• Access to an audience they’ve spent years cultivating.

• Access to trust you can’t buy with ads.

• Access to attention in feeds that don’t want brands there.

So the question shouldn’t be whether or not this is worth it. The question should be: what exactly am I buying here?

the business case for creators

On LinkedIn, that access is unusually valuable because of who it reaches. Instagram is about aesthetics and vibes, TikTok is known for it’s easy virality, but LinkedIn? LinkedIn’s reach tilts toward decision makers and budget holders. The people your rev team is already throwing ad dollars at.

And LinkedIn knows it. They’ve rolled out Thought Leader Ads (where you sponsor an employee’s post) and BrandLink (bundling creator-led shows with pre-roll). They’re literally productizing influence. You don’t make infrastructure out of something that you don’t see potential in.

So when you hear a creator quote a rate that makes your stomach fall to your ass, just remember that the platform itself is already betting big that people trust people more than logos.

use the cpm model (but know its limits)

So let’s say you’re new to this and staring at a rate that just makes no sense, how do you even begin to price it? This is where CPM (media speak for: cost per thousand impressions) can help. It’s not perfect, but it’ll help make it easier to understand pricing.

Take the cost of the post (the rate) ÷ (impressions ÷ 1,000). A $1,000 post that reaches 20,000 people = $50 CPM. Compare that to LinkedIn ads, which usually lands in the $30–$70 CPM range. And suddenly, that “$15k vs. $2k” debate isn’t arbitrary anymore.

Marissa Vogelsang posted actual campaign data that proves the point where even when individual posts looked inflated, her team’s total CPM averaged $17. That’s cheaper than a lot of programmatic buys.

Using this CPM model is helpful, and put your initial skepticism at ease, because it makes the economics easy to understand. But do take it with a grain a salt, and don’t confuse it with the whole story.

beyond cpm, the hidden premium

What CPM can’t capture is the trust premium.

I know this firsthand. I’ve spent years posting for free. I’ve endured the grind of engagement metrics. I’ve built a brand around tinkering until I figured out what resonated. The hours I’ve spent commenting, connecting, showing up and just posting…that’s work. That work built credibility. So when I promote something now, people listen. They book demos. They try products. They do all this because I’ve built a relationship with my community.

That’s what you’re paying for when you hire a creator. It’s not just reach. It’s credible impressions.

Anyone who’s grown a brand page knows that you can pour thousands into ads and still see nothing. People don’t trust brands. They trust the people they chose to follow.

That’s why creators cost more than media inventory. You’re not renting eyeballs alone.

when brands get it wrong

I’ve also learned that mistakes don’t just happen at the campaign level. A lot of times, they start earlier with who you choose to partner with.

Brands get dazzled by a big following or high engagement and forget to ask the obvious: does this person even make sense for what we’re trying to do? I once had a data security company offer me a hefty fee to post about their product. But I work in social and marketing. Their product didn’t touch anything related to the risks of social data. No alignment, no credibility. It would’ve been wasted money for them and a total disconnect for my audience.

The fit matters as much as the execution. And if you don’t take that into account then you’re just paying for nothing, or worse something that becomes a PR nightmare.

how to partner without losing your stomach

And even when the fit is right, the work only lands if you give the creator space. If you hand over a script or a pile of keywords, their audience is going to smell it. I’ve turned down deals like that myself because I knew it wouldn’t land.

Here’s what I’ve learned works better:

• Work with the creator, don’t hand them a script. The stuff that lands best usually comes from their take on what their audience actually cares about.

• Pay for the post itself and then separately for the right to reuse it. Blurring those lines almost always leads to frustration later.

• Let them sound like themselves. If you try to iron out their voice to match your brand’s tone, you are gonna kill the very thing that makes people believe them.

When you treat it as collaboration instead of a transaction, you get work that feels so damn right.

the future of creator marketing???

Brands are gonna move away from one-off posts. I believe the future is smaller and more intimate, with always-on partnerships. Brands teaming up with niche creators to co-own a series, have recurring conversations, and maybe even embed them like an extension of the team.

Look at Jasmine Enberg’s point: influencer marketing spend is growing faster than nearly every digital channel (15% in 2025!). Platforms are consolidating more of it through creator ad products. Influence isn’t gonna be just an experimental side play anymore. Because it’s evolving into part of the core media mix.

If LinkedIn is turning creator trust into infrastructure, you can bet your bottom dollar that the rest of the industry will follow.

soooo what was the point of this again?

It’s easy to dismiss creators as overpriced freelancers with inflated egos. I get it. But I also know what it’s like to do what they do, because I’ve done it. Most people, including the brands, only ever see the shiny tip of the iceberg. They don’t see the years of unpaid hours underneath it. Or the endless rethinking of drafts. And, omfg, the second guessing your self worth when something flops. It’s the sting of being judged by engagement alone, and the persistence it takes to keep showing up.

That’s what you’re paying for. The collapsed distance between your brand and the people you want to reach. You’re paying for credibility you can’t just buy through ads.

And yeah, it’s wild sometimes. But that’s how every new aspect of marketing feels. Don’t let the lack of experience and understand translate into cynicism. Let it make you approach with care. Measure the pieces you can. Respect the ones you can’t. And keep it moving. Trust has always been only currency that really matters in marketing.

This piece has been sitting in my drafts for three months. Three months! I mulled over every detail and sentence structure because I feared my writing kept falling into the very behavior patterns I wanted to call out. Eventually, I accepted that this is simply hard to articulate—which makes it worth exploring.

After many rounds of editing, I’ve positioned this piece around building yourself on social media, though the same rules apply in everyday life as a citizen in society.

I’ve noticed a trend on social (especially on LinkedIn, where I indulge my appetite for corporate misery) where we exist in a pool of lukewarm takes. Contrarian for contrarian’s sake. Comment sections full of people parroting the main post as if reciting a lesson they don’t fully understand back to the teacher.

It’s become boring. And frankly, annoying and predictable.

Here I am sharing my opinion, but I do think we’ve grown uneasy with dissent. We’re so reluctant to ask whether an opinion packaged as fact has earned that authority, and rarely demand or provide context. The result is a culture programmed to fall in line rather than staying curious.

If we don’t challenge, if we don’t question—how do we grow? Let’s diagnose a system where conformity is rewarded, dissent is punished, and intellectual courage has to fight uphill. Maybe we’ll both learn something from it.

Do you know yourself?

I like to think I know myself, or at least feel comfortable with who I am. But on social, my go-to saying is: No one really knows the real me, because depending on the channel, I have a different personality for each.

We learn who we are by seeing how others respond to us. If people laugh at your joke, you start to believe you’re funny. If your posts get ignored, you start questioning whether your ideas matter. Especially online, where we’re constantly measuring ourselves against others.

That’s human.

So when we don’t get the reaction we hope for, we adjust ourselves.

The sociologist Charles Cooley described this as the “looking-glass self”: we build our identity by imagining how others see us. And a whole century later, studies of social media show the same feedback loop in action—likes and comments amplifying that mirror until it warps.

One way to resist this is by recognizing the applause meter in our heads when we consider posting. Two questions help check your conviction:

• Do I believe this even if no one likes it?

• Would I still say this if it got zero comments?

A post doing well doesn’t mean it’s true, and a post flopping doesn’t mean it’s false. Treat likes, comments, and shares as signals about the medium, but not whole verdicts on your worth. Remember! Algorithms reward novelty and extremity, not depth.

Pluralistic ignorance

Do you know what people on social media hate more than being wrong? Being excluded. Most of us would rather be wrong together than right alone. Psychologists call this “pluralistic ignorance." Which is when you assume everyone else agrees with a norm, so you stay quiet even if you don’t actually believe it. Classic experiments in the 1950s showed that people would agree with an obviously wrong answer about the length of a line, just so they can avoid confrontation with having a different response.

And I get it. If thousands of people are praising a viral take, being the one that disagrees feels risky.

It is much much MUCH easier to fall in line. But easier doesn’t mean healthier. And the danger that comes from that is that this creates a false consensus where everyone thinks “everyone else” believes X, therefore that has to be true, or better to just not ruffle feathers.

That’s why anonymous forums like r/LinkedInLunatics or troll accounts come out to play. When disagreement feels too costly under your real name, anonymity becomes the go to. Sometimes it produces honesty. More more often than not, it mutates into cruelty, because the usual guardrails are gone.

Both outcomes stem from the same system: a public sphere where dissent feels too risky. So, is it easier to fall in line? Yes. But is easier healthy? Hell no. We've contributed to an illusion that erases nuance and leaves everyone lonelier in their doubts because we've refrained.

Performative opinions

You know how I know opinions online often suck? Because it’s too easy to change them. Take LinkedIn again. You might have a nuanced "hot" take, but you shave off the edges because the algorithm rewards snappier, b&w statements. This leaves us with two poles: contrarians whose entire identity is carved out of disagreement (“I’m the one who calls out the BS”), or bandwagoners who echoes the safe takes for easy approval.

And the much to obvious truth: social platforms are designed against you. They’re engineered to amplify extremes because extremes generate engagement.

What’s worked for me to fight against this is showing how I got to my opinion. Share the reasoning, the caveats, the uncertainties. Yeah, it feels riskier and much slower, and less meme-ready BUT that’s what makes it independent. A deeper thinker isn’t someone with lofty takes. We need to be willing to resist flattening.

And I've learned that you shouldn't put all your thinking in one algorithmic feed. If you do, you’ll get trapped in its reward system. Use different containers:

• The social feed for concise ideas.

• A newsletter, blog, or even private group discussions for longer reflections (like this!).

• Journals, or offline conversations, for thoughts without the performance layer.

This spreads out the weight of public approval so it doesn’t dominate your self perception. We just need habits that make space for thoughtfulness.

Uniqueness vs. belonging

Social media heightens our dual craving: to feel special and to feel part of a tribe. Researchers like Roy Baumeister have written about the “need to belong” as a core human drive, while others point out our equally strong desire for uniqueness. We don't need to go so far as to erase the tension but we should absolutely get comfortable living inside it.

History shows what happens when we don’t. The “spiral of silence” theory describes how people self-censor to avoid isolation, creating the illusion that everyone agrees. At the same time, studies of uniqueness suggest people still find small ways to signal difference like tiny tweaks to trends to give little flashes of individuality. Online, that tug-of-war is everywhere! Between trending audio and original takes, between brand voice and the one post that breaks format.

Teams run into trouble when they expect every post to strike a perfect balance. But it's damn near impossible to flex creatively under the constant anxiety of public judgment. So how to fix it?

Think in terms of a brand range instead of a brand line. Instead of one thin boundary, map a spectrum: safe zone, edgy zone, too-fucking-far zone. Populate each with examples, both your own and competitors’. It’s similar to exposure therapy in psychology where you gradually test boundaries to get people to build tolerance instead of fear. For teams, practicing within that spectrum normalizes experimentation and lowers the stakes, rather than treating every choice as a make-or-break move.

The consequence of silence

I keep coming back to this because it matters. When conformity takes over, we all lose something. Groupthink creeps in. We stop asking is this true? and start asking is this safe to say? It’s the kind of mindset Irving Janis was describing when he coined the term “groupthink” after watching how disasters like the Bay of Pigs unfolded. And it’s the same pattern Solomon Asch revealed in his experiments, where people went along with answers they knew were wrong, just because everyone else agreed.

David Myers, in How Do We Know Ourselves, puts it plainly: independent thought—and the courage to voice it—isn’t just about personal growth, it’s about collective progress. Silence might keep things comfortable in the moment, but over time it eats away at trust and creativity. If we want to move forward, we need more people willing to take the risk of being specific, even when it feels uncomfortable.

A healthier way forward

• Resist the instinct to curate only what you know will be applauded. That’s the conformity trap.

• Share views rooted in lived experience or knowledge, not just what “performs.” That grounds your identity in something sturdier than shifting consensus.

• Recognize silence as a choice. You don’t have to comment on every viral opinion. Sometimes independence is refusing to join the chorus.

I’ve been to a lot of work events (like conferences and dinner parties) in my career. Events where people spend months planning. The intimate ones, the stadium-sized ones. And if there’s one thing you always walk away with, is free shit.

And by free shit, I mean the branded stuff you collect like Costco samples. Like these tote bags that are having a bit of a marketing moment where every brand feels the need to virtue signal that not only do they want you to remember their brand and logo but they’re also the kind of brand that cares about the fucking planet. And it is nice, the first couple of times where people were doing this, and yes, I’ve also worn some of these totes to my local Trader Joe’s. But if we’re being totally honest, most of them end up stuffed inside another tote bag, and tossed under the sink. Never to be touched again. There’s also the gift of giving pens, which seems to never go out of style, despite the fact that they only work for like half an hour. Mugs. Logoed hand sanitizers. Socks, always the one-size-fits-all socks.

If you’ve ever been to one of these events, you know what I’m talking about. There’s always that moment where you grab something—anything—just because it’s there. And because it’s free.

As a quick aside, since we’re on the subject of totes. I went to HubSpot’s INBOUND last September. Just me and a single branded tote we’d made for our Plot Dinner Club event. Since we didn’t sponsor a booth, or plan any activation, I carried and passed this around like it was a massive game of show and tell. Then turned it into whole bit for social media. That overworked tote touched more hands than some of the booths with five-figure budgets. It certainly carried its weight in terms of driving brand awareness.

So here’s the part that gets me, the things that winds me up enough to write a whole substack about it: I feel like we’re not even trying to impress anyone anymore.

Swag isn’t inherently bad. I’ve gotten stuff I actually loved. Stuff I practically lunged for. But most of it feels like a marketing formality. Like it was a budget line item someone remembered at the last minute, right after someone said, “Should we send them something?” and someone else shrugged, “Sure.” Then it got handed off, checked off, and done. No further thoughts.

I still remember getting a hoodie from a small conference a few years ago in New Orleans. There wasn’t an obvious logo on it. Just one clean, embroidered line that made me laugh: “I got bourbon-faced on shit street.” And I wore that thing until it fell apart. It came with me on trips. It was comfy, and always a conversation starter. And every time someone asked, I’d tell them the story about the conference. That hoodie became a staple in my wardrobe because it resonated with me on an emotional level—it made me belly laugh.. The event planners didn’t need to slap a logo on it to drive impressions. It naturally gave me a story that I wanted to share.

People wear Harvard sweatshirts without ever having stepped foot on campus. Not because they have any deep love and care for the school. Because it says something. There is academia coded clout when you sports one around. So the brand isn’t necessarily the point, but the association sure is.

So when your brand sends out a tote bag with just your logo and some boring ass marketing line that’s just not relatable, what is it actually saying? Would anyone wear it if they didn’t have to?

We’ve confused “sending something” with “delighting someone.”

And I think it’s because we’ve been fed this idea that if you want customers to love your brand—really really love your brand—you just have to “delight them.” Turn them into superfans! Build lifelong loyalty! And then someone says, “Let’s order pens.”

Are we kidding?????

Real delight doesn’t happen because a company slapped a slogan on a mug. It’s something that makes people feel something. It’s something that shows you paid attention, or at least tried…even if it was just a little.

Here’s a real-time example—literally posted 16 minutes ago—by Emily Huffer, Social Media Manager at Best Western Hotels & Resorts. Canva gifted her a “black box,” and I thought it was actually really well done.

It wasn’t overly Canva logofied. It was thoughtful. A hat that says “not now, I’m posting”? That’s very social media manager-coded. Paired with a mic, that back-of-the-phone sticky thing to adhere to walls, and tech accessories like a mic—things that she’d actually use. It was clearly tailored to her, not just Canva’s brand.

And it felt personal, and relatable to her, she shared it. Canva’s branding didn’t need to scream at you. The post itself became the brand moment. This is what swag should do: make someone feel seen enough that they want to talk about it. That’s how you get recognition without forcing it.

That’s why I’m not dunking on swag itself. I’m shitting on the lazy lackadaisical effort. Because when the effort is there and when it’s done well—it works.

I recently partnered with Strän, a company that actually puts thought into branded merchandise. They sent me a gift box—not a cheap Temu special, but a curated set of things I’d actually use. Recognizable brands like GotBag and Moleskine. Household names. Useful. Beautiful. Thoughtful. Check, check, check!!

And it hit me because one of the items—the Moleskine book journal—was so specific to me. I’m always posting about the books I read. I’ve complained about the UI of Goodreads on social. I’ve talked about how I jot down quotes and passages I love by hand. So when I saw that journal, I didn’t just think “nice gift.” I thought, “Omg wait I actually needed something like this. How cool!”

It wasn’t extraordinarily extravagant by any stretch but the intent was felt. And the fact that that feels rare in marketing? That’s kind of the problem.

We’ve become performative. We build brand campaigns around “surprise and delight,” then send people socks that they didn’t ask for. It’s a total check box thing that we do to say that we did it.

Performative delight is so overplayed, and unfortunately, I think swag is the side effect of it. And it exhaustinggggg.

Swag shouldn’t be just about the item. It’s about what it represents. So if your brand is about pushing boundaries, why does your merch look like it came from an HR compliance seminar? If your campaign is about community, why are you sending a thin cheap tshirt?

I don’t want to start a battle of the brands on merch companies. This is more of a callout to the marketers (me included), who’ve gotten predictably boring and sloppy.

We forgot that gifts are a brand expression. And if you don’t know what your brand is, no mug’s going to save you.

Here’s how I’d think about gifting if I want it to mean something:

• Learn about the person you’re sending it to. Ask, or stalk a little.

• Only send things you would use.

• Don’t just design for function. Design for pride. Design with taste. People keep things that make them feel cool.

• Include a handwritten note. In a sea of AI-generated junk, analog wins

The bar is very low, because I truly don’t think it’s even about spending more more. It’s about giving a shit to put forth more effort And just a gentle reminder that the landfills are getting full.

You don’t need to throw a million-dollar dinner party for every customer. But if you’re sending a gift, stop thinking like a checkbox marketer and start thinking like a human. It doesn’t have to be deep. But it should at least mean something.

That’s how you make someone feel like they belong to your brand, and not just that they got added to your drip campaign. That’s how you build awareness through intentional gifting.

And that is always good for business.

(And just to be clear—this piece isn’t sponsored by Strän. But their approach to gifting made me want to shout it from the rooftops because more people should be thinking like this.

If you made it this far, you either love marketing or hate it just enough to stick around. Subscribe for more thoughts like this, sent directly to your inbox when the mood strikes.

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Dear reader,

I didn’t go into marketing because I thought I’d be good at it. I went into it because I liked making things. Photos that made people feel something. Fragments of writing that traveled further than I expected. I liked curating—though we didn’t call it that yet—and watching what happened when something personal crossed into public space.

That’s how I learned social. Not through an online course, not in some mentorship cohort in college, not even in a professional context. I just grew up with the internet. I posted. I watched. I tweaked. I copied people I admired. There was no strategy behind it. No conversion funnel. It was just what I liked to do.

Eventually, someone said, “You should try running a brand account.” I was working at a nail salon at the time, sending out job applications with freshly printed résumés and no idea what I was actually aiming for. So I said yes. I mean, it seemed easy enough.

It’s funny how those little yeses accumulate. That first “why not” turned into a decade-long career. It was never something I chased, but I stayed. I kept showing up. People gave me more work. I did the work. And somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking of it as something I was experimenting with and started realizing it had become my actual career.

The title changed, and so did the stakes. I run marketing now. I don’t just grow accounts or be told to “make it go viral.” I lead strategy, manage performance, deal with metrics, justify results, allocate budget, try and forecast future performance and predications but the core of the job still comes down to making things and putting them into the world for people to respond to…or not.

Some people ask how I “broke into tech” or “built my personal brand,” and I never really know how to answer that. Those phrases sound clean and intentional. They make it seem like there was a roadmap like I somehow optimized for this. But the truth is, I just kept posting. That’s all it was. That’s all it still is.

And lately, I’ve been wondering, maybe some of you have too, what happens when the job is built on instincts you developed as a person, not as a professional? What happens when your eye for detail, your taste, your timing, your voice—these things that used to feel like you—become your performance indicators?

I write something and can’t tell if it’s actually good, or if I’ve just been on the internet so long I’ve internalized the cadence of what performs. I chase trends I don’t care about, because I don’t want to fall behind. I open reports and forget what I was even trying to measure, only to realize the post flopped because it went live during a breaking news cycle.

This feeling isn’t what I’d define as burnout exactly. It’s more like a simmering down of the boiling heat that I felt for this work. That sense of clarity I used to have of knowing why I liked something, or why I made it—that’s dulled over time. The things that once felt energizing now feel like more fucking noise. And I don’t think it’s because I’ve stopped caring. I think it’s because I care so much I’ve learned to second guess everything.

I keep asking myself whether any of this is still meaningful. Or whether I’ve just gotten really good at making it look like it is. And I don’t have a satisfying answer. I’m not going to wrap this up with advice about boundaries or make suggestions that you ought to be reclaiming your creativity or whatever else LinkedIn loves to peddle.

All I’ll say is this: if you started out as a creator, and your instincts were formed in that weird, vulnerable space of making things you loved without knowing if anyone would care—this job hits different. And it can feel lonelier than it looks.

Because now, all those skills you built in private are getting measured in public.

And some days I wonder if I’m still doing meaningful work, or if I’ve just gotten very good at performing the version of someone who is. But I keep showing up. I make the things. I post the posts. And maybe that still counts for something.

I’ll have twelve weeks of maternity leave to sit with that thought. We’ll see what comes of it.

—Christina

Are you listening to how consumers are duping luxury brands?

There was a time when counterfeits lived in the shadows. I mean, have you ever walked by Canal Street in Manhattan and felt that weird tension when you passed a guy selling knockoff watches from a trench coat? You knew they were fake. He knew you knew. But still, there was something intriguing about scoring a dupe for a fraction of the price—something you’d swear was good enough to fool your friends. There was also a little bit of shame that came with making a purchase. Because back then, owning a fake anything meant you were hovering just outside the elite club. You didn’t talk about it. And you definitely didn’t post about it.

Fast forward to 2025. You’re watching someone holding up an $80 Walmes Wirkin bag on TikTok, comparing it side-by-side with a $30,000 Birkin, and calling it the smarter choice. And the comment section is full of support. No one’s embarrassed. If anything, they’re loud and proud.

This is what the defluencing era actually looks like. Status isn’t about logos anymore. It’s about logic. And the logic sounds a lot like: “Yeah, I could’ve paid more, but why would I want to?”

I know what you’re thinking: why is a marketer talking about dupes on her Substack? Well, it’s because I find this to be interesting and very much tied to what could happen if brands did proper social listening. The shift in consumer mindset wasn’t subtle. It was loud and pointed. And yet, I’m willing to bet most brands still didn’t hear it. Not because they weren’t paying attention, but because they were listening in the wrong places.

So this post isn’t really about knockoffs or savvy shopping. It’s about how smarter social listening—real listening—can inform business strategy. Consumers are generously giving you the full lowdown, and their communities are buzzing.

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The state of listening: loud signals, mid tools

Legacy social listening tools are built to count things: mentions, hashtags, volume spikes. Great for campaign recaps. Absolutely useless for strategy.

Because while everyone is tracking noise, what actually matters is intent, tone, and the stuff people don’t say outright. And here’s what I keep noticing as an avid scroller: people are dragging brands without even naming them. But context clues, and a quick scroll through the comments, will tell you exactly who they’re talking about.

That’s the gap.

Most brands probably don’t even know a more modern solution exists. Because we generally feel more comfortable with how things have always been versus trying something new. They’re still paying for legacy tools that have slowed down while the internet’s sped up (thanks, AI). And I can say this with both confidence and conviction because I’ve worked in social for over a decade. I’ve used pretty much every product you can name. Most of them don’t help you listen with intentionality. They just help you summarize.

That’s why I joined a team building something that fills this gap. But more on that later.

The real issue here is that most teams are optimizing for what’s easy to measure—not what’s actually important to understand.

[Case Study] Our team used Plot’s Video Social Listening to research the Dupe Movement

From February to April 2025, Plot analyzed over 1,700 TikToks and Instagram videos and 24,000+ comments about luxury bag dupes. Here’s what surfaced:

• Post volume grew 10x in three months. And it wasn’t gradual. Literal floods.

• Louis Vuitton and Hermès were the most talked about—and the most criticized.

• Millennials drove the volume, but also led the pushback. Gen Z leaned practical.

• Comment sentiment was 2:1 in favor of dupes, with value and anti-brand sentiment as the main drivers.

• Coach and Tory Burch were praised for being real in a landscape full of luxury delusion.

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And contrary to my original thought, this wasn’t just another hype-driven trend. It felt more like a cultural teardown against capitalism and the whole system getting side-eyed in real time.

People weren’t just posting their hot takes either. They were posting receipts. Price breakdowns. Factory origin stories. And Plot surfaced all of it not by tracking hashtags, but by literally reading the room: in untagged videos, in offhand comments, in the content most tools overlook.

Let me put it this way: if you're simply waiting for the @ mentions to flag your attention, you've already missed the moment. Because you’re missing content where people are simply holding up your product and said something as offhanded as, “this ain’t for me.” but because they didn’t tag you, or mention your brand by name, it wouldn’t get pulled in…unless you have a tool that can detect objects and logos.

If you still think “Mentions = Strategy”, we need to talk.

Forget survey panels. Forget sentiment summaries. This is what modern consumer intelligence actually looks like:

• Source: Organic video content from real people, unprompted and unpaid

• Detection: Untagged brand cues, comment tone, visual product identifiers

• Interpretation: Thematic patterns, cultural sentiment, generational divides

• Strategy: Messaging pivots, value positioning, content tone, whitespace discovery

This stuff isn’t anecdotal. It’s structured pattern recognition from the rawest source of consumer behavior: video, commentary, and community discourse.

This model lets you see why it happened, where it’s going, and how your brand is positioned inside it. It’s not just a recap. It’s a starting point for relevance.

What you (the marketer) should probably be doing instead

If you treat social listening like a monitoring tool, then monitoring is all you’ll get. Mentions. Basic sentiment charts. A vague sense of “brand health.”

But if you actually want social to function like a strategic layer of your business, you need to treat listening as the first input into strategy—not the post-mortem.

Think of comment sections as real-time focus groups. Think of UGC (user generated content) as the most honest product feedback you’ll never have to ask for. If you listened that way, you’d start to:

• Catch when a pricing story starts losing believability

• Spot competitor whitespace before it gets picked up by press

• Adjust your messaging before your audience rewrites it for you

Listening shouldn’t just tell you if people like your brand. That’s the bare minimum, especially for something that costs this much. It should help you build a muscle for recognizing cultural movements. Because that’s what ‘staying relevant’ really is.

A listening exercise to try with your team

Here’s a simple way to start building that muscle:

1. Pick a cultural moment or trend that overlaps with your category. It doesn’t have to be about your brand. In fact, it’s better if it’s not.

2. Find five TikToks or Reels about it—real ones, from creators, not brands.

3. Ignore the post. Read the comments. What are people actually saying? What language are they using? What’s getting praised, or dragged?

4. Write down three insights you think your internal brand team or leadership would never hear in a standard report.

5. Ask: Would this change our messaging? Our value props? Our product positioning?

That’s the foundation. But to do this well—and do it at scale—I’d highly suggest ditching the manual labor and getting yourself a tool that doesn’t just summarize what happened. You need one that can surface sentiment, tone, visuals, and community language before you have to go looking for it. That’s what makes listening strategic.

God, Peter, This Wasn’t About DUPES!

If it wasn’t already obvious, the dupe report is just one of many reports we’ve done at Plot. The point isn’t the bags. It’s what they tell us about the power of social listening.

The core thing I want you to take away is this: most brand teams aren’t watching the content that drives perception. And TBF to them, who has the time to watch thousands of videos?? They’re watching dashboards. So that’s an opportunity—for you to build an edge while everyone else is still refreshing their reports.

Social is the most honest focus group you'll never pay for—as long as you know how to listen beyond the tag.

The signals that shape strategy aren’t in your brand mentions. They’re buried in the unfiltered, unprompted, untagged things people say when they don’t think you’re listening. That’s where your next insight lives. Don’t let it become a blind spot.

Someone said to me a long time ago, you don’t lose relevance in a moment. You lose it in the weeks you spent measuring the wrong things.

Want to See What You’re Missing?

I’m one of those people who needs to see it to believe it. So if you want to see what you’re missing—book a demo and we’ll show you how Plot listens differently.

There’s a heavy feeling that’s been looming, and if you spend any amount of time on social, you probably feel it too. It’s not burnout exactly. It’s not even boredom. It’s something worse, I think. A slow dissipation of meaning. A creeping hollowness. A fatigue that comes from watching the same recycled advice, the same performative “thought leadership,” and the same personal brand gymnastics play out day after day, like some bad improv troupe that doesn’t know when to leave the stage.

We’re living in a golden era of vapid content (YAY!). Which, in my mind, looks like a self-serve buffet of bullshit masquerading as value. Everyone’s an expert now. Everyone’s a founder. Everyone’s giving you the five things you must do to win. And if you don’t like it? The algorithm will make sure you see it anyway.

This is the part where someone usually says, “It’s just the game. Play it or get left behind.”

And lately, I’ve been leaning towards, “But what if we don’t?

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I’ve noticed myself pulling back from sharing for the sake of it. Not because I have nothing to say, the earth would sooner freeze over before that happens, but because I don’t want to say things I don’t believe. And that’s a harder line to walk than it sounds when the entire system rewards volume, consistency, and confidence (even if it’s unearned). There’s something backwards about a world that expects you to post with authority on Tuesday, and then turn around and say something “authentic” on Wednesday like your entire identity is some well managed brand asset.

From the consumer side, it’s really exhausting watching people try to out-brand each other into oblivion. “Just because you can” has replaced “maybe you shouldn’t.” And yet here we are: eyes glazed, still scrolling, still tapping, never-gonna-give-you-up way of existing. The algorithm doesn’t care if the content is good. It only cares if it keeps you here.

From the professional side, it’s harder to explain. There’s this low-grade fraudulence that burrows and hums underneath everything. It’s a kind of constant tension between wanting to be helpful and feeling like you're accidentally complicit in a system that rewards shortcuts and shaming…and then getting masked as motivation. And if you’re a person who actually gives a shit? Someone who wants to do this work without selling out your values? Then this is the kind of thing that wears you down by wrapping it’s virtual fingers around the your throat and tightening the squeeze until every ounce of that motivation is smothered out of your sparkling eyes.

This is just a vent. My friends would probably say that it’s more like a signal flare that I’m tossing into the void with the hopes that someone else sees it and thinks, yep, same.

Here’s what I know:

• I don’t want to create for the sake of “staying top of mind.”

• I want to create when I have something real to say.

• I want to share the “how,” not just the “what.”

• And I want to do it without treating my own voice like a commodity.

I know that’s not how the game is played. But I think the game is rigged somehow.

Maybe we’re not supposed to win at it. Maybe we’re supposed to build something else.

Because the real takeaway that I’ve learned from ingesting all the content that’s been thrown at me from people sharing their hottakes about personal brand building, marketing, conferences, and what have you.

People are craving depth. Not constantly. Not every post. But sometimes. And when they find it, they hold onto it. Not because it was optimized, but because it was true.

Ladies, gents, and others—we don’t have to live like this. We can opt out of the performance. We can choose slowness. We can make fewer things, better. We can be generous without being prescriptive. We can be helpful without being performative.

We can give ourselves (and each other) permission to pause, to question, to not be content machines.

And when we do have something to say? At least there’s hope that it’ll actually mean something.

I've been circling an existential crisis around modern marketing. It started when our team at Plot began analyzing the rise of beef tallow as a skincare trend using our video social listening tool. We reviewed over 1,900 pieces of user-generated content that appeared grassroots—front-camera selfies, cheap lav mic’d audio, and casual product mentions. What we found, though, suggested something more deliberate. One brand sat at the center of the conversation, and a cluster of creators appeared to be driving the majority of the content. It probably wasn’t a coincidence. Patterns pointed to coordinated marketing efforts—maybe not full briefs, but certainly a strategy at play. [Here’s the full report for you to download if you wanna see it for yourself.]

It wasn’t deception in the traditional sense, like running a slick ad without disclosure or deliberately misleading people about what a product does. It was something softer. Strategy designed to feel accidental. And that realization has stuck with me.

We’ve industrialized UGC. What once felt like spontaneous customer love is now an entire production pipeline engineered to mimic authenticity. When you think about it, it’s similar to reality TV logic. The emotions might be real, but the stage is carefully set.

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Act I: The Performance

I’m not here to moralize any of this, because I can’t, not without being a hypocrite. I'm a Head of Marketing. I know how the machine works, and I'm part of it. This isn’t a rant against evolution. Marketing adapts—always has. But what’s unsettling is the pretending. It’s become an internalized choreography for marketers, creators, and even consumers playing along with the idea that something is organic, even when every detail has been massaged into place. We simulate spontaneity. And wrap coordination in front-facing, phone-recorded content and call it earned.

And maybe that’s fine. Maybe the audience doesn’t care. But for me, the dissonance hits every time I see a “just stumbled upon this” moment that I know was briefed and storyboarded.

Here’s the uncomfortable tension: something can look honest without being honest. And something can feel real while still being calculated. But does that build anything that lasts? Or just perform well for a quarter?

Act II: The Contradiction

I’m a full-stack millennial, born in 1990. Old enough to remember clunky commercials and magazine spreads. Young enough to have grown up through the rise of blogs, YouTube, and personal brands. I watched the shift from genuine product recommendations to early #spon deals, then watched the backlash, and then saw those same deals come back—just better disguised.

So when I see marketing engineered to look unpolished, my gut clocks the gap. I remember being told to “be yourself” and “build a brand” in the same sentence. That contradiction shaped my instincts because it basically taught me to perform, and perform well.

And that’s what makes this so hard to talk about. I’m not just standing on the sideline observing the manipulation. I’m one of the folks producing it. And I’m good.

Marketing today thrives on appearances. It’s not about truth. It’s about plausibility. We lean on the optics of intimacy because we know they work. We call it connection, but really, we’re perfecting illusion. And the line between authenticity and artifice gets blurrier with every scroll.

Maybe consumers are in on it too. Maybe they prefer the performance, as long as it’s entertaining. If that’s true, then the question isn’t whether we’re gaslighting anyone. It’s whether we’re okay with a job that’s largely become about making people believe in something we know isn’t real.

Act III: The Reckoning

Here’s where the real friction lives, brands used to be built on consistency and conviction. The ones that lasted—Patagonia, Trader Joe’s, even early Glossier—weren’t just fluent in aesthetics. They stood for something. They didn’t have to fake authenticity because they were grounded in actual values.

Now? Now, novelty wins. Discovery is gamified. Trust flickers in and out of relevance. We say we’re building relationships, but we’re mostly chasing reactions. And that’s a dangerous game if your goal is longevity.

Think about the brands that collapsed, like Sears, Kmart, Forever 21. Yes, brands disappear because of financial failure. But what’s often overlooked is how those failures stem from a slow loss of relevance. The cultural fade happens long before the storefront closes. These aren’t just businesses that didn’t make it. They’re brands that quietly stopped mattering. That’s the risk. If marketing becomes a series of well-rehearsed stunts, we may win short-term gains but lose the thread of what makes a brand endure.

And yet, here we are:

• We know how to manipulate perception.

• We know how to fabricate relevance.

• We know how to simulate emotional truth.

The deeper question is this, because I refuse to suffer through these thoughts alone, do we still know how to build something meaningful?

If perceived value can be conjured so easily, was there ever real value to begin with?

I think the answer lies in intention. Execution can be orchestrated but it matters what it’s in service of. If the product delivers, if the brand has some sort of backbone, if the marketing is rooted in something more than attention...then maybe, just maybe, it can still resonate and matter.

But that only works if we stay aware of what we’re shaping and whether the work is starting to shape us back.

Because if we lose that awareness, it’s not just the work that becomes hollow. It’s us.

It’s easy to convince yourself you’re listening when you have numbers to point to. I had the charts. The green arrows. The dashboards dressed up in a few pretty slides for the company wide meeting. Follower growth was up. Engagement rate, healthy. As I was reciting off the scribbled notes on how much our impressions had been green MoM, I thought this was proof that the hard work was working.

And all was good — until someone asked the kind of question I wasn’t prepared for: "So what does this actually mean for the business?"

I fully stumbled. Said something about brand awareness. Something else about community. I watched the little faces on Zoom, all of which were a mix of polite, confused, skeptical and felt the breath tighten in my chest.

Because the truth was, I had no fucking clue. At least not in a way that mattered.

I knew how to measure activity.
I didn’t know how to prove impact.

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You know monitoring is not actually listening, right?

Marketing, as it's commonly practiced today, rewards activity disguised as insight. We ship more content, chase more impressions, report more engagement, because the systems we work inside are built to demand motion. Motion looks good on paper. It fills slides for quarterly reviews. It satisfies the question, "what did marketing do?" even when the better question, "but did it matter?" goes unanswered.

For a long time, I thought motion would be the thing that makes me successful at my job. If the charts were green and if the numbers climbed, it obviously meant the work was working. In theory, when you show those things then no one should be asking the harder questions about whether we were growing in the right ways. Go deep: whether the audiences we were reaching still cared, or whether the brand we were building would stand through the next market shift.

We tell ourselves we’re listening because we monitor for brand mentions and track social trends. But monitoring isn't listening. Social monitoring is still very much brand-centered which is a way to feel reassured that our content, and therefore our brand, is still being seen.

Real social listening has to goes further than the surface visibility. When you’re using it the right way, you’ll can actually hear where attention, emotion, and logic are drifting. Way before it shows up in a campaign recap or a sales report.

What listening on social actually looks like

I swear, I’m even annoyed at myself for saying the same thing like a broken record but, because people don’t get it, you gotta say it a million times: Social media today isn't just a publishing tool. Ask anyone who works in the field and you’ll hear this same message framed 100 different ways. It's the fastest moving, and most honest, archive of how consumer behavior evolves. And if I may be so bold to say, if you're not building real listening into the core of your marketing—not just as a PR shield, but as proactive intelligence—you're not just falling behind your customers. You're building strategies for a version of them that doesn't even exist anymore.

Modern social listening tools, especially in the age of video content, can extrapolate far more than legacy text-based tools ever could.

Because it shouldn’t just track keywords or hashtags. It should able analyze tone, emotion, visual cues, and patterns across all the channels. Because that way, it’ll allow brands to not only pick up on sentiment but to deeply understand how people actually feel. And also what they prioritize, and what behavior is shifting underneath the content.

IMO, social media, as a business function, has grown up a bit from being that community management area. It’s consumer intelligence. It’s brand safety detection. And the list goes on.

The Sephora Spring Sale Report [Case Study]

You don’t have to work in beauty to care about what happened during the Sephora Spring Sale. I’m sharing this because it’s a live example of how quickly brand narratives can fall out of sync with actual buyer behavior and how social listening, when done right, can catch the shift before your strategy misses. The categories will differ. The sentiment won’t.

So, I work as Head of Marketing for this startup called Plot, and we’ve built our mission around the notion that social media teams deserve tools that can finally serve them. Of course, we wouldn’t be where we are if we didn’t practice what we preached. Since we’re building the next-gen video social listening platform that can extract real insights from video data, we are afforded the luxury of having endless data right at our fingertips. And most recently, we are toying with our AI analyst (launch coming soon) to help us develop these marketing reports on UGC that’s across IG, TikTok, and YouTube shorts. One of them being the Sephora Spring Sales’ report.

When we analyzed the Sephora Spring Sale, we approached it as a case study in how real consumer behavior can drift away from brand narratives — and how few teams are positioned to catch that drift in time. The data came from over 6,300 videos and more than 50,000 comments. What we found wasn’t just a list of what products sold well, but a bigger picture of how consumer priorities were recalibrating.

Here’s some quick hits from the report

• Face makeup showed up in significantly more conversations than skincare, despite the industry’s continued emphasis on long-term skincare education and brand-led storytelling.

• People weren’t leaning into new rituals. They were buying what worked.

• The language in the comments wasn’t aspirational, more so that it was functional.

• There was a visible pull toward products that were familiar, practical, and visibly effective.

• Dupe culture is also gaining ground.

• Mentions of "treating yourself" were low. Investment language was almost nonexistent.

• And price, not brand identity, was the most common purchase driver across organic content.

From a marketing perspective, this report shows a clear shift in preferences. There was a total tonal change in how consumers talked about spending — the comment section is a reframing of value that happened below the level of formal customer feedback. And it’s exactly the kind of behavior shift that most brand teams miss because they’re still building campaigns around category assumptions that stopped being true, like six months ago.

That’s the strategic value of listening at this level. It doesn’t just tell you what’s trending. It tells you when the story you’re telling is being rewritten by the people you’re trying to reach. It also lets you know when loyalty starts to look more like a habit. When aspiration turns into practicality. When your target audience is still showing up to buy… but for reasons your brief didn’t account for.

Download the full report

Addressing skepticism head on

Growth hacking culture didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s the obvious logical end stage of a marketing system that measures effort by output instead of relevance.

When you’re detached from real audience behavior, you’re left with one playbook: move faster, post more, hope to the algorithm God that something sticks. That kind of sickness (harsh, I know) is really just bad taste and terrible information flow.

Yes, real listening takes time and tooling. It costs more. But not listening costs more over time — in misaligned campaigns, wasted creative, and positioning that no longer hits. What’s the cost of launching with the wrong message? Of planning content around a consumer persona that doesn’t exist anymore? Those misses aren’t minor. They’re expensive. And they're completely avoidable.

What you can say to the Exec who doesn’t get it

We’re flying blind. Right now, we’re making decisions based on lagging indicators: sales reports, survey feedback, or vanity engagement metrics. But the real shifts, the shit people care about, what they’re frustrated by, what they’re buying instead, happens long before that.

Social listening gives us early signal detection. We can spot when pricing sensitivity creeps in. When people start talking about competitors differently. When new language around value shows up. It helps us de-risk launches. We’ll be able to adjust positioning faster, and stop guessing what our audience actually wants.

This is where we need to think about how we’re using tools to our advantage and if we don’t have a good social listening platform that can fit our needs, we’re marketing to the wrong version of our customer, and we won’t know it until it’s too late. Full stop.

I didn’t write this because I figured it all out. I wrote it because I know what it looks like to optimize your way into irrelevance while the numbers still tell you you're winning. I know how easy it is to believe that surface growth protects you from the harder questions underneath.

You can be like how I was and fill the charts, and greenlight the metrics. You can tell yourself that momentum is meaning. Or I’d suggest that you get serious about what listening actually demands which is sitting inside the discomfort long enough to hear what’s changing, and moving in time with it, not after it.

Only one of those builds brands that can outlast the next shift. One that’ll actually earn attention when attention gets harder to come by.

And you can’t sprint your way to it.
You have to listen your way there first.

It was 8:45 a.m. Five coffee orders were supposed to be in my hands five minutes ago. Instead, I was still planted in line at a painfully slow coffee shop, inching forward while the barista leaned against the counter, deep in conversation with two friends. They were laughing loudly about their weekend, something about Ben saying he wouldn’t show up, and then not only showing up, but arriving very high with a girl no one recognized. I didn’t know Ben. But at that moment, I hated Ben. Because while their gossip spilled freely, so did the minutes I didn’t have.

Back at the office, a 9 a.m. meeting was kicking off. I wasn’t supposed to be in the meeting, but since I was the intern who fetched the coffee, I had earned myself a consistent seat. In the back, quiet, but present. A fly on the wall in a room that could shape my post-college future. I was a junior at the time, and this unpaid internship at the Executive Office of Education felt like my big break. I wasn’t just grabbing lattes. I was basically networking by osmosis, soaking in everything from policy conversations to people dynamics. But right now, none of that mattered if I couldn’t get back in time.

Finally, the barista looked at me. “I’ll take five drinks,” I said, rapid-firing them from memory, the same way I had every week. I didn’t need the notes anymore. I didn’t even blink. Before she could ask, I added, “Yes, I’ll need a tray. One is enough… four on the edges, one in the middle.” She nodded.

I grabbed a fistful of creamers and sugar packets, shoving them into my jacket pocket like a caffeinated raccoon preparing for winter. After what felt like a small eternity, she slid the tray toward me. Everything was snug. Lids on tight. I checked my watch — 8:55. Cue the adrenaline.

The building was just across the street. I booked it, tray in hand, praying I wouldn’t trip on the curb or slam into a pedestrian. At the front door, I jammed the elevator button. It dinged. Miraculously empty.

Up to the 9th floor. Deep breath. In. Out. Doors opened. I slid into the room just as chairs scraped the floor and people started settling in.

Slightly out of breath and only moderately sweaty, I handed off the drinks. Two people smiled. One said thank you. The other two didn’t look up, just gestured to the table in front of them. I placed their coffees down gently, then made my way to the back corner, sat down, and pulled out my notebook.

Showtime—or, intern-time.

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Looking Back

I’ve had three internships while working on both my bachelor’s and master’s degrees. I was a legislative aide, a communications writer, and a social media coordinator. And in all of them, it wasn’t the actual job that made the experience valuable. It was observing how people worked—how they pitched ideas, collaborated, solved problems, and earned trust—that gave me the leg up.

Each internship was unpaid, a trade-off for college credit. And none of them felt like they were structured to help me land a full-time job. The best way I can describe it is that I was mostly a glorified office assistant: stapling paperwork, grabbing coffee, jotting down meeting notes, fetching lunch, snapping photos. Honestly, I don’t think anyone planned to give me real responsibility… until I started asking for it.

I’d bug the intern manager (read: my corporate babysitter) to see if there were any projects I could support. Most of the time, when I asked, the answer was yes—and a small sigh of relief. And when it wasn’t, I at least learned what wasn’t on the table yet. But those moments? That’s where I got to actually learn.

It would’ve been easy to clock in, do what I was told, and leave the rest untouched. I was unpaid, after all. But I felt this very real pressure to stand out. The job market was scary—and still is. College is full of people who are smart and capable. What would make me top of mind? What would make someone recommend me for a job?

So I did what I thought was right. I showed up early. I stayed until my manager left. I brought work home, not because I had to, but because I wanted to be better prepared. I studied the workplace, the mission, the values. I wanted people to think of me as someone they could count on—and definitely not just “the intern who grabs coffee.”

The Pendulum Swing

Here’s where the tension lives.

I’ve been very vocal about not subscribing to hustle culture. I don’t believe your identity should be your job. I don’t believe in sacrificing your health, your family, or your worth for a paycheck. That system was broken. It needed to be challenged.

But now I’m seeing something else that’s equally troubling.

I’ve been wrestling with this feeling that the workplace pendulum has swung a bit too hard in the opposite direction. For a long time, hustle culture had us glorifying burnout. Bragging about 70+ hour work weeks. Wearing sleep deprivation like a badge of honor. That era deserved to be dismantled. No argument there.

But now, I think we’re seeing a pretty extreme swing—and I’m not totally sure it’s serving us either.

I still remember the first time someone I worked with mentioned how upset they were that our manager had messaged them after hours. They were genuinely bothered. And I get it—people deserve boundaries, and no one wants to feel like they're on call 24/7. But in my head, I remember thinking, wait… that was a big deal???

I wasn’t defending the message itself. I just didn’t think twice about it. I’m the kind of person who fires off thoughts as they come to mind, not because I expect a reply, but because I’ll forget it otherwise. I’ve since learned to use scheduling tools (a true gift to us chaotic brain dumpers), and I try to be intentional about respecting people’s off hours. But that moment stuck with me—expectations around work are changing, and they’re not as universal as we think.

Another popular refrain I see all over TikTok:

“If they want me to do something outside of my job description, they better compensate me for it.”

And again, I don’t completely disagree. People deserve fair pay and recognition. But sometimes, that line gets blurry. Because in reality, a lot of growth happens just outside your job description. That’s where you stretch, experiment, learn new skills. That’s also where you make yourself indispensable. If everything has to come with a formal line item and a pay bump, it leaves little room for curiosity. Or initiative. Or just… trying stuff.

We all want growth, but sometimes we expect it to come without friction. We want fulfilling careers, but not the parts that feel inconvenient or uncomfortable. And maybe that’s what I’m reacting to. Not necessarily the boundaries themselves, but the subtle message I sometimes hear behind them: I don’t want to do more. I don’t want to be asked. I’m fine where I am.

It’s a lot different from how I used to see opportunity…something I had to actively chase down and prove I was ready for. Not because I was a martyr for unpaid labor, but because I really wanted to earn my seat at the table.

I think the swing away from hustle culture came from a good place. But it might be time for a recalibration. Boundaries are healthy. But so is ambition.

What Effort Actually Looks Like

There’s this idea floating around that you can kind of fake it. Blend in, look busy enough without actually stretching. But anyone who’s managed a team for longer than five minutes can tell you that it’s not slick. We always know who’s putting in the work and who’s just clocking in.

And let me be clear before y’all come @ me: there’s nothing wrong with coasting if that’s what someone wants. Not everyone is trying to sprint toward the next title or raise. Some people are perfectly happy where they are. And I can respect that.

But ambition is a different game.

Ambition, to me, means putting in the effort to fill your own cup. Not necessarily martyrdom or burning out. But being willing to raise your hand, look around the room, ask questions, offer ideas. And doing your actual job really well—and then being curious about what else you can take on.

And I’m going to hold your hand when I say this… but no one is going to stretch their neck out for you just because you’re there. If you’re waiting for someone to “notice your potential” without showing your work, you’re going to be waiting a long time.

You know how every career book ever written says some version of, “Do the job before you have the title”? There’s a reason that advice gets recycled. It works.

We need to reframe around the notion of thinking where this would mean doing more for less. But rather focus about proving that' you’re ready. Earning trust before you’re handed responsibility. And yeah, sometimes that means stepping into ambiguity. Or taking initiative outside your job description.

I wasn’t in charge of strategy in those early roles, but I paid close attention to who was. I’d jot down how they presented ideas, how they handled feedback, how they sold something up the chain. That kind of learning didn’t show up on a resume, but it changed how I carried myself in every job after that.

The people I’ve seen rise fastest weren’t the loudest or the most polished. They were the ones who consistently made themselves useful. Who solved problems without needing to be asked. Who weren’t above doing the small, boring stuff if it helped move things forward. (No joke, I had someone once tell me they weren’t paid to grab coffee—I laughed thinking about my internships.)

Just think about the kind of effort that sticks with people. The kind that makes you top of mind and makes someone say, “we should loop them in.”

Especially in social media, in this economy, with how fast things change—you can’t afford to be passive. You have to be nimble. Proactive. Willing to experiment, fail, and try again. The algorithms change weekly. The tools change monthly. And the only constant is the energy you bring. No one’s going to spoon-feed you a playbook.

Effort isn’t always glamorous. But it can be magnetic.

How Leaders Can Help

I don’t think everything should fall on the individual—especially not junior folks just starting out. That’s not how growth works. And it’s definitely not how leadership works.

When I read The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhuo, there was a line that stuck with me. It wasn’t flashy, but it hit: “Great managers are made, not born.”

If that’s true, then we don’t get to sit back and critique the new wave of workers for not doing things the way we did. We have to ask: What are we doing to shape them?

Like teachers, we have an outsized impact on how someone feels about their role, their growth, and even their potential. That’s a responsibility we shouldn’t take lightly. If someone isn’t showing initiative, is it because they’re lazy? Or is it because we haven’t created an environment where initiative is safe? Or valued? Or even noticed?

We need to reframe how we think about leadership and check our ego and emotions at the door.

Some of the interns and junior teammates I work with now are clearly hungry. Some are still figuring out the rules. Some are just… quiet. And that’s fine. I’m not trying to mold everyone the same way. But I do believe in creating a workplace where effort is noticed, feedback is shared often, and curiosity is rewarded—not shut down by power dynamics or process.

We have to stop babying our interns and start mentoring them.
We have to stop hoarding context and start sharing it.
We have to stop assigning just admin tasks and start inviting people into the why, not just the what.

That’s what passing the torch looks like. Not simply waiting until someone “proves themselves,” but lighting the way a little earlier. Give people the resources, the space, and the encouragement to step into more—and let them surprise you.

The best leaders I’ve worked with didn’t just make room at the table. They pulled out the chair, handed me a notepad, and asked, “so, what do you think?”

That’s the kind of leader I want to be. And the kind I hope we’re all becoming.

Before You Go

Boy, that was a lot. But that’s the thing about reflection…it sneaks up on you.

And you know what? I don’t think my generation worked harder than anyone else. Lord knows the boomers are still crapping on the millennials. We just worked differently. And now things are changing again with this next wave of youngsters entering the market.

I hope we’re not too late to meet somewhere in the middle. Between quiet quitting and overworking. Between boundaries and ambition. Between waiting to be chosen and choosing to step up.

This definitely wasn’t meant to be a “back in my day” piece. It’s more like a “let’s get curious about what effort looks like now” piece.

And if you’re an intern/junior trying to find your way, I hope you’ll consider taking the initiative to fill your own cup, and look for the people who’ll hand you the torch.

And if you’re a manager: be the kind of leader who makes them want to carry it.

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Recently, someone whose perspective I usually value shared something with me that caught me off guard. They said, “You can’t have it all. Being fully committed to your career while also being a devoted parent—especially a mother—is impossible. Your attention is always divided.”

Then shortly after, I came across a clip from the recent Call Her Daddy podcast where Chappell Roan echoed a similar sentiment. She mentioned that she doesn’t know anyone her age (she’s 27, by the way) who’s genuinely happy and also has kids. To add a bit more salt to that cut, she added, “anyone with a spark in their eyes, anyone who's well rested, probably isn't married with children.” lol, k 🙄

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These comments bothered me, and not because they're sweeping generalizations that’s not uncommon, but precisely because they're so pervasive. They reinforce the stereotype that parenthood, and motherhood in particular, is an inevitable sacrifice of happiness, ambition, and professional growth. This narrative is frustrating, and boring, to say the least but it’s also pretty damaging. When you bring these thoughts into the workplace, it influences who gets hired, who gets promoted, and shapes the conversations we casually have around coffee tables and conference rooms. It imposes unfair limitations, especially on mothers, whose capabilities are questioned simply because they chose to have children.

Parenthood is difficult. Extraordinarily so. I can obviously attest to this, but mothers face emotional and hormonal challenges that are often invisible and deeply felt. Yet, even in those challenging moments, becoming a parent has filled my life with profound meaning. My days are richer. My connection to life is deeper. Choosing parenthood, for me, has meant choosing a life that is less lonely and more purposeful.

It was a conscious decision, and one I've never regretted.

I want to make something very clear: if you don’t want children, that’s valid, and you shouldn’t feel pressured to have them. I’m staunchly pro-choice. But there’s a significant difference between making a personal decision and imposing your perspective as universal truth. To make such a bold claim that parenthood inherently diminishes happiness or professional ambition is both misguided and unfair.

Rather than fixating on whether parenthood is inherently good or bad, we should push our efforts to building a society where everyone's choices are respected and supported—where being child-free or having children doesn't define your potential, or your happiness. Parenthood doesn't have to compromise those ambition and joy, just like deciding not to have children doesn't indicate a lack of fulfillment.

Can we please move beyond the assumptions and judgments? It’s 2025 for goodness sakes. I thought we were past this. Fulfillment, happiness, and success are personal—they come from authentically living according to your own values, whatever those might be.

Some helpful readings to help you think about parenting:

• Motherhood meets ambition: mastering the art of balance

• Redefining Motherhood and Breaking Free from Traditional Narratives

• Navigating Culture and Mental Health in Motherhood: Traditions, Boundaries, and Carving Out Your Own Path

• Study: Parenthood goals in youth linked to later life happiness

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This post was inspired by what I shared on my LinkedIn last week about some of the hard to swallow pills that social media managers need to swallow if they want to have a long lasting career in this field.

Social media marketing is one of the most significant functions in modern business. That’s not a boast or an opinion—it’s just how it is when brands are constantly engaging with audiences online. So why, even after a decade in the field and leveling up to a senior role, do I still feel a little embarrassed when people ask what I do?

It’s something I’ve been grappling with lately, especially when I’m in rooms with founders, engineers, or other “serious” professionals who seem to carry more inherent gravitas. I’ll say, “I work in social media,” and notice that subtle shift. The polite smile that’s just a little too polite, like they’re humoring me. If I were to sum it up into a feeling then it's like being the only one getting carded at the bar, like my role doesn’t quite measure up.

I keep asking myself why this happens—why social media marketing, despite being integral to brand strategy, still feels like it’s perceived as juvenile. I think it’s partly because social media itself is inherently relatable. Everyone has an Instagram account. Everyone and their kids are making TikToks. It’s easy to assume then that anyone could manage a brand’s account too, right? By that logic, I guess I should be considered a chef because I can make a decent avocado toast with some Celtic salt.

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The problem isn’t just how outsiders perceive us, though. As practitioners, we sometimes lean a little too hard into that perception. Early in my career, I fully embraced memes as a quick way to build engagement, and to be seen as relatable af. It worked…until it didn’t. Pretty soon, I was known as “the meme girl.” And while humor and relatability aren’t without value, I realized I wasn’t presenting the full scope of my work: the strategic planning, the data-driven insights, the nuanced understanding of audience behavior that actually drives growth. I had flattened my role into a punchline, and people responded accordingly. I wasn’t getting invited to speak at conferences. I wasn’t getting ample job offers via DMs. I got hundreds and thousands of ‘likes’ and that’s cool for the daily dose of dopamine hits for my ego but that was it.

It’s natural to reduce complex roles into digestible snippets. Social media thrives on pithiness. But when we lean too hard into the chaos, we accidentally train others to see us as just that: chaotic. And if that’s all people see, they’ll struggle to imagine you doing anything else.

So how do we shift this narrative? For one, we need to start showing the full scope of our work—not just in the content itself but in how we present our role publicly.

Here are a few ways social media marketers can start demonstrating strategic value

‣ Connect the Metrics to the Outcome.

It’s easy to get caught up in vanity metrics—likes, views, impressions—but if you stop there, you’re missing the bigger picture. About a year back, when Plot was in its infancy, we faced a challenge where we needed to generate buzz for our beta launch despite having minimal brand recognition and a limited LinkedIn following (under 1000).

We decided to invest in a high-fidelity creative video to position Plot as that next-gen social media tool that gets it right from the start. We also leveraged influencers, like Tameka Bazile and Christopher Cox, from the social space to add credibility. To maximize reach, we launched a partnership program with 12 LinkedIn creators who shared the launch, collectively bringing in about 2 million impressions and hundreds of sign-ups.

But we didn’t stop at counting likes or shares. Instead, we positioned the outcome as proof that LinkedIn could be a growth lever for Plot. We analyzed the campaign’s cost against the volume of demo sign-ups and found that our customer acquisition cost (CAC) was surprisingly low. That insight validated LinkedIn as a strategic platform for future campaigns.

This campaign was also a turning point for me personally because it solidified my value as a creative advisor at Plot, focusing on LinkedIn strategy. Eventually, this success played a key role in me landing the Head of Marketing role. This kind of deeper understanding and ability to analyze not only showed the team that social could drive real business results but also helped shape our strategy moving forward. Again, social is just sparking engagement— it’s about finding opportunities that can influence long term growth.

‣ Share the 'Why' Behind the Content

Social media managers often have a strong gut instinct for what will work on social. But relying on instinct alone isn’t enough to get buy-in from leadership. You need to push for experimentation, analyze the results, and iterate quickly. Being nimble is one of our strengths—so let’s leverage it to prove that our actions aren’t just driven by intuition, but by a clear strategic plan.

Here’s an example: At Plot, we knew that TikTok could be valuable for brand awareness, but as a young, scrappy startup with a limited budget, we had to be strategic. Initially, we partnered with Mila Holmes, a contractor who not only specialized in TikTok but was also an influencer in the social media marketing space. She became the face of our brand on TikTok and Instagram, and her presence helped us grow our following and increase brand visibility.

When we analyzed the data, though, we saw that while TikTok was driving awareness (gaining reach, and followers), it wasn’t leading to demo sign-ups like our LinkedIn efforts were. As a B2B SaaS company, brand awareness alone wasn’t enough—we needed a more tangible impact on the business. That insight led us to shift our strategy: we kept TikTok as an awareness channel but moved away from higher-level content creation as the primary focus. Instead, we leaned into proactive engagement by bringing on two interns who can focus specifically on community interactions.

This change in approach revealed something important: the engagement itself was creating more meaningful touchpoints than the content. Comments were getting thousands of likes, signaling that proactive engagement was resonating. This insight led directly to the development of a feature in Plot’s Video Social Listening tool that tracks the lifespan of outbound engagement. Today, that feature is widely used by big brands like Empire State Building, CAVA, and La Roche-Posay because it addresses a real need—measuring the impact of engagement, not just content.

Demo Plot's Engagement Tracking

The key takeaway that I’d like you to take here is that our instincts might get you started, but you need to back them up with results and a clear strategy. Experiment, analyze, and be willing to pivot. It was the ability to articulate the ‘why’ behind our shift in TikTok strategy that helped us not only improved our internal approach but also built a product feature that serves the broader community.

‣ Use Your Personal Social to Show off your Skills

If you work in social media, you should flex your strategic chops on your own channels—because not for nothing but one else will see the depth of your thinking unless you put it out there. It’s one thing to be the go-to person internally, but if you want to be recognized as a leader in the field, you have to make your insights visible.

Personally, I’ve leaned into LinkedIn for this because it’s a business-first platform where strategic thinking is valued. Early in my career, I didn’t have mentors within my workplace, so I used LinkedIn to connect with other social media professionals, learn from them, and validate my own ideas. Initially, it was coffee chats and picking people’s brains. Eventually, I started sharing my own perspectives—calling out how social media roles are often underappreciated despite the high expectations and pressure. I was honest about the brutal challenges and shared my thoughts on how to address them.

That’s when things started to change. As I built in public and shared more candidly about the realities of social media work, I not only saw my following grow but also started building a community around those discussions. I even set a personal goal for myself that if I was going to post on LinkedIn, it had to be purposeful. I wanted to build a reputation where my work spoke for itself so I’d never have to apply for a job again. Periodt.

And it paid off. People started reaching out for coffee chats, contract work, and even full time roles. I stopped having to chase opportunities because I’d positioned myself as someone who knows the social space inside out. That visibility became a form of career security which is especially important now, in a time when layoffs are frequent and job stability is uncertain.

So, don’t just do the work—talk about it. Build your personal brand by sharing your insights, and the honest takes on the industry. This’ll not only sets you apart but also contributes to the collective effort to make social media work more visible and respected. If we all make our strategic thinking more public, we’ll collectively elevate the perception of our field. WIN-WIN!

‣ Balance Personality with Strategy

Us social peeps quite often get praised for our creativity and humor—it’s part of what makes our work fun. But leaning too hard into the “funny, chaotic social person” persona can undermine the strategic depth of what we actually do. It’s something I’ve noticed a lot, whether it’s how we present ourselves at conferences (everyone is touting being ‘authentic’ online) or how we post about our work online (don’t @ me..i’m just a struggling smm). We use ourselves as the punchline, and while it feels fun in the moment, it doesn’t necessarily drive the respect we deserve.

Humor and personality are valuable soft skills in this field. They help humanize brands, build communities, and make content more engaging. And I want us to keep that because brand social used to be so buttoned up and polish. But if that’s all we’re showcasing, we risk being perceived as the “personality hire” rather than as strategic thinkers. We’ve got to strike a balance. We need to demonstrate that our instincts for humor and creativity are rooted in a deep understanding of audience behavior, brand positioning, and business outcomes.

One way to do this is to be intentional about how we talk about our work. If you post something lighthearted or self-deprecating, consider following it up with a brief breakdown of why it works. For example, if a meme post blows up, use that momentum to discuss how humor can increase brand affinity or engagement rates. The point is to show that you’re not just being witty for the sake of it—you’re leveraging creativity as part of a broader strategy.

Social media marketing can be both clever and calculated. We don’t have to choose one or the other. Being strategic about how we present our work—both online and in professional settings—can help shift perceptions and make it clear that social media roles are actually multifaceted and valuable.

Leaders building social teams should also push back against the idea that social roles are inherently junior. (Seriously, enough with the tweets after a brand fail that’s like, “oops, sryyy I’m just an intern.) We should look for solid practitioners who balance creativity with analytical thinking. These are people who can make a witty campaign but also measure its impact on brand equity. It’s our job as leaders to acknowledge that balance.

We’re in an era where social media marketing sits at the intersection of creativity and strategy. We just need to break the cycle of presenting our work in ways that reinforce misconceptions. Leaning too hard into meme culture dilutes the more strategic aspects of the job.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with being the meme person. Please never kill memes because it’s the best aspect of the internet. But let’s make sure that it’s balanced with insights that demonstrate how those memes are part of a larger strategy. We’re not just good at social; we’re good at leveraging social to drive tangible outcomes.

So, here’s my gentle nudge that I wish to implore on all you social media folks who want a long lasting career in this field: think critically about how you’re presenting your work. Are you focusing too much on being likable at the expense of showcasing strategic value? Maybe it’s time to stop shrinking ourselves to fit a punchline and start owning the complexity of our roles.

If we don’t take our roles seriously, why should anyone else?

Hey, I’m Christina. I’ve written a dozen introductions across different platforms, but somehow this one feels different. Maybe it’s the blogger in me, but Substack feels like the right space to write longer thoughts—less polished than LinkedIn, more personal than a tweet, and definitely less filtered than anything I’d send through slack.

So here I am. New platform, same me: a Head of Marketing who still thinks like a social media manager. Same voice, same radical candor, same habit of figuring things out in public.

This newsletter isn’t going to teach you how to go viral. It’s not filled with growth hacks or frameworks to optimize your morning routine (sozzz if that’s what you were hoping for). And I’m definitely not here to play guru, or rockstar, or whatever those job descriptions keeps pushing for.

What I am here to do is tell the truth—about what it looks like to build a career without a playbook. When you didn’t follow the traditional path, and still found a way forward.

Because if there was a one-size-fits-all path, we’d all be viral. Or we’d all be VPs, living the dream.

But that’s not how it works. Most of us are learning on the job. Writing our own chapters as we go.

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How it started

These days, there are a dozen job titles in social: strategist, content creator, data analyst, community manager, social producer, etc. But when I first started? There was intern, coordinator, and manager—and most of the time, they all did the same job.

I got my start because I was the youngest person in the office. I applied to be a legislative aide intern, but the job quickly turned into posting on Facebook for a state representative. Why? Because I was the only one who actually used social media.

To give you a sense of how far behind everyone else was: they didn’t know you could access Facebook from a computer outside the office, let alone from a phone. Meanwhile, I was out there taking photos of the rep at events, writing captions about his schedule, and replying to constituents in the comments.

It worked. Not because I was some genius—but because no one else was publishing daily or treating social media like a two-way conversation. The bar was on the floor. I just showed up with curiosity and a camera roll.

We posted photos of him shaking hands with party leaders—and also grabbing McDonald’s at the drive-thru. Suddenly, people were paying attention. Other reps started hiring social interns. And just like that, I became a social media manager… without the title.

The in-between years

After that came a leather goods company. I learned how to turn social into sales. I juggled FB and Instagram, ran ads, battled Facebook Business Suite (RIP), and became the govto “iPhoneographer”—writing copy, editing images, publishing content, and measuring what worked. All from my phone.

Then came a fuel company. Different industry, different goals. I ran larger campaigns focused on recruitment but it was also where I learned about team dynamics, managerial red flags, and why workplace happiness matters. I started wondering if I should stay in social, or pivot to a generalist marketing job. That question haunted me for a while.

I was burned out. I felt boxed in. And I had no one to vent to, so I started sharing more on LinkedIn—not to build a brand, just to feel less alone. (Spoiler: it worked.)

Why I’m still here

I could give you the full play-by-play of every job I’ve had, but what I want to say is this:

There will be moments in your career where you feel untouchable. And moments where you’re crying in a bathroom stall wondering if you should quit altogether.

But every one of those moments taught me something I couldn’t have learned from a textbook. Because there is no textbook for this. No perfect path. No certification that prepares you for all the emotional labor, instinct, and ambiguity this job requires.

Social media changes constantly but one thing stays the same: it’s never boring. You get to be nimble. You get to build. And if you stick with it, you start to realize that it’s not just a job for interns anymore.

It’s a career. A complex, but valuable one.

And for a long time, I was embarrassed to say I worked in social. It felt unserious, and so easy to dismiss.

But now I’m the Head of Marketing at Plot, a company building tools for social teams.

Social got me here.

And if this newsletter helps shift someone else’s perspective—whether they’re doing the work, leading the team, or wondering if it’s all worth it—then that’s the dent I want to leave.

What you can expect here

I want this newsletter to be useful. Personal, yes. But not just a journal. So here’s what you can expect:

• Lessons in real time from my experience leading marketing for a startup—the good, the messy, and the completely made up on the spot shit that I get to do.

• Honest reflections from over a decade in social: building from scratch, burning out, bouncing back, staying sharp

• Opinions on the industry that push back on trends and conventional wisdom (like why 'going viral' isn’t a strategy)

• And, of course, encouragement and reminders that this is a real job, a great job, and yes—you do deserve that raise

If even one post helps you feel less alone in this work, then it’s doing its job.

Thanks for being here.

If you want to follow along as I keep writing TheseChapters—subscribe. I'd love to have you.

-- Christina

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