Hey, friends. Welcome to the second edition of Social Notes.

If you’re new here, welcome! This month, I’m gonna talk about boring social.

So, in my career, I’ve talked to enough social media managers from different industries to know that there is something that gnaws at nearly all of us which is, “how do we make content that isn’t shit boring? And how can we flourish if we work in an industry that is, objectively, (very) boring?”

By the way, I just got back from Drive, a B2B Marketing conference hosted by Exit Five, and I can tell you that that is very top of mind for a lot of marketers, even if they don’t specifically own social.

My friends, I’ve worked in some deeply DEEPLY unsexy industries. I’ve done social for a diesel fuel company. A VoIP service provider. A e-signature software! I daydreamed about working for a glamorous fashion brand like Vogue or a really unhinged, chaotic wild brand like Liquid Death. I foamed at the mouth at the thought of having more—more resources, more opportunities. Or even just having a household name that people already recognize.

But something that I realized in the midst of admiring all the glam bam things is that there’s a very specific skill that you develop from working in an unsexy industry with limited resources (I’m talking next to $0 in terms of budget) and still being able to find a way to make it interesting. And that’s something that I’m deeply proud of. If I have a claim to fame in this career, I think that’s probably it. And in case you ever need a reminder that you’re doing just fine, remember this:

There are more of us (boring brand-ers) than there are of them

When I say “them,” I mean that most of use are not running social for Vogue magazine or Liquid Death with household name recognition, ginormous budgets and a full fledge creative team behind us. For most of us, we’re just trying to make something that is objectively less interesting a little more interesting for people online.

Most social teams are hanging on and figuring things out as they go. They’re told to do more with less, and then to make it even tighter. They have limited resources. They get shit support. And when social doesn’t perform fast enough to satisfy everyone’s desperate need for instant gratification, they’re chastised for it.

I rarely meet a company that doesn’t want social to work. It’s 2026. Everyone sees the value of it now. They want more reach. More relevance. Everybody is begging for more attention. They just don’t always know what good social looks like for them and they’re so deeply terrified of screwing it up.

It’s the kind of uncertainty that makes this job really hard because it gets pushed onto social teams to try to “make it work” somehow. They say, “grow the channel,” “come up with (better) ideas,” “prove value!!!” and “also don’t do anything that would make us uncomfortable.”

When I consulted with brands, one of the first questions I’d inevitably get was, “why do you think our current social strategy isn’t working?” And I look at their bright eyes and curious faces and see how desperate they were to hear something profound. The secret sauce their team must’ve missed. The golden answer from the LinkedIn marketing girl!

And I’d demolish their soul by saying, “I don’t think you have a social strategy.”

It’s usually a distribution plan for a bunch of half baked content ideas. Or you have a social team that is spending more of their energy trying to prove that social matters to people who hired them. I mean, look, I could give people five new formats tomorrow and maybe, by some stroke of luck, one of them pops off. Maybe they’ll get a nice spike in engagement. But overall that’s a bandaid fix. A new format doesn’t fix a company that won’t take risks. It doesn’t fix unclear ownership and I will be the first to tell you that it doesn’t fix a social team that’s clawing at the bottom of the barrel for whatever scraps the rest of the company is willing to give them.

Stop taking social advice so literally

Sometimes I think we make things even harder on ourselves because we do shit like looking outside of our very ordinary operating environments for answers and then borrow tactics from brands that are playing an entirely different game.

We see other companies and people do things online and immediately try to copy their tactics. I’ll use an example from my industry, B2B SaaS. Everyone is pushing for founder-led content because “no one follows brands anymore, they care about the people behind the brand” and yes, there’s truth to that. But now you have all these founders hiring the same ghostwriters, filming their talking heads and becoming these glorified product marketers in a way. And maybe that’s great when you have a founder who already has an interest for sharing online. But if you have to drag a founder up, kicking and screaming, just to post then that’s not a great use of anyone’s time. Same with a founder who absolutely looks miserable on camera, but everyone is saying video is king.

A broader example is when we tell teams to jump on trends because another brand did it. We show them a gorgeous feed and tell them their content needs to look just like this. But we don’t acknowledge that they probably have a team of photographers and designers behind the scenes, helping them look that way.

I ran a workshop recently where I talked about how we use creators at Slate, and afterward someone from a compliance company came up and asked, “so how would I find compliance influencers?” I thought that was interesting because he had framed it almost as a reason why they couldn’t work with creators. In my head, I was like, why would you specifically need a “compliance influencer”?? Couldn’t you just find someone who could speak credibly about the problem that your audience has? And then I realize that he was trying to figure out how he could replicate my creator strategy literally. And to be fair to him, I was probably not clear enough about why the program worked which ultimately made it harder for him to translate this idea into his world.

We do this with social content all the time. We copy the artifact instead of the thinking behind it.

We tell our team to jump on trends because others did it. We point to some unhinged campaign that went viral and say, “why don’t we do this for our launch?” We see people say that founder-led content work and now every CEO needs to add “chronically online” to their resume.

The better thing to ask in cases like this, when we’re feeling the pressure to jump on the bandwagon, is why did it work for them?

• what was so interesting about this specifically?

• was the idea that good, or was it the person/brand behind it?

• what did they have going for them that we don’t?

• how much time/money/help probably went into making this?

• and realistically, what part of this could actually work for us?

These seem obvious. They’re SO obvious that we would often just skip over the basics of asking ourselves these questions. And I think this is probably where a good social strategy would start. You shouldn’t even blindly copy someone else’s playbook and expect it to work 100% the same way it did for them. Because most of us are not operating in the same environments as the brands we admire, so why should we keep prescribing their tactics as if we are?

Alright, but enough ranting from me. Something that I’ve always find to be extremely helpful is hearing stories that actually show what I mean. You’ve already heard plenty from me at this point, and I could probably keep going on about how we approach this at Slate, but I think ideas get better when you hear how other people are solving the same problems in completely different environments. So, I wanted to ask other folks who are actually working under the conditions that I’m describing here, which involve small teams, limited resources, and industries that aren’t well known. I wanted to know how they run social within their means.

How Breadcrumb got its employees to help make the rebrand feel bigger

Last month I got to chat with Esther Dawson, the Global Brand and Content Lead at Breadcrumb. In case you didn’t know, Breadcrumb is a construction safety and compliance platform. Extremely important work, but you know anytime you hear the word “compliance,” it doesn’t exactly scream “naturally sexy social brand.” Which makes them the perfect folks to talk to.

In my conversation with Esther, I learned a lot about how her global marketing team works. The entire team is made up of 6 people, with 3 working across brand and content. As you can probably imagine, social falls within that function.

We talked about so many things, from how she leads a lean team to how they’ve operationalized the work in a way that makes them look bigger than they are, the story that stood out to me most was about their rebrand.

Now, let me draw this picture for you.

When we think of a company doing a rebrand, something marketers say all the time is that the only people who really care about your rebrand are you. And I don’t think they’re wrong. It’s obviously a huge moment internally, we’ve experienced this ourselves at Slate, but trying to make everyone else online care that you changed your logo or colors and stuff is hard.

Of course, the right thinking is to lean on your employees to help carry the message but I think the biggest grip that people often have with this kind of thing is that no one wants to see the same regurgitated post from 30 different employees because some poor social media manager (who is also the team copywriter) handed everyone a doc with 6 variations of “I’m thrilled to announce” paragraphs.

And as I mentioned above, Breadcrumb didn’t exactly have a giant team sitting around waiting, just waiting for a massive social campaign to happen. At the height of the rebrand, the core marketers were already stuck in the throes of rewriting 64 website pages in roughly 6 weeks. They had to update the product and brand across multiple regions, and were already creating assets for more than 70 employees and managing all the internal comms that came with that. Then, about 4 weeks before the actually launch, they remembered that they also need to make something for social.

This would be the time where small teams like Esther’s would start scrambling to produce something fast. They would be pushing the designers to create more graphics. They’d start typing away at the launch copies and then probably spend hours rewriting for each person’s individual tone and voice. They’d probably also be working on how to make it make sense across different channels. All’s to say that this would literally take up way too much time that they didn’t realistically have.

Esther knew there would be no way that they could personally make enough content to give the launch the energy it needed. So instead, they just needed to figure out a way to make this as easy as possible for other people to create.

Their 3-part system

• Give everyone context in one place. Esther created a notion page called rebrand hub. It became the centralized spot to house all the information for their team to have context about the rebrand. They included things like FAQs, new brand assets, before & afters of the old vs the new look. This is also where the key messaging lived, and the explanation of why they were dropping the “1” from the company name.

• Give people a reason to participate without telling them exactly what to make. Breadcrumb's Content Manager, Anna Fensom did this by creating an internal competition around their launch to encourage employee participation. And instead of rewarding the post that got the most engagement, they said the winner was whoever made the most creative post. Which basically encouraged people to not make the same thing.

• Support people making things, and then hype the hell out of them. Esther made it clear that the marketing team would still help when people needed it. And sometimes that meant jumping in to help edit audio, or helping with copy, filming, etc. But the caveat is that the employee had to raise their hand and ask for help rather than the marketing team proactively creating for them. And as the posts went live, they celebrated them internally, which got even more employees involved over the 2 week period. She also mentioned that leadership joined in too which was a big win.

This operating decision led to more than 50 posts in two weeks! And the engagement that they got through their employees’ personal profiles ended up being 5x greater than anything they got through the company page. Esther mentioned that they hadn’t ever done anything like this before, so they didn’t have a benchmark going into the launch. Now this has been something they use internally and carried into other launches.

Now I know a lot of you reading would think that the obvious takeaway here is probably something like, “alright, cool, so let’s do employee advocacy.” Sure, but I think that’s again taking the tactic too literally.

What Breadcrumb did here to make this successful was change what the marketing team was responsible for. They did not own every post. They were responsible for giving context and guardrails, and then they provided any necessary support where people needed it. Then they gave everyone else room to flourish and I think when you have a team member recreating the infamous scene from “Love, Actually”—you’ve won.

And that’s the important takeaway/lesson/whatever you wanna call it here. When you’re running a lean team, you don’t always simply need more people on marketing to create more output. For the most part, the smartest teams get clear about what marketing actually needs to own and then they build enough context and trust to get those folks to help carry some of the work.

Esther’s advice for lean marketing teams

If you read up to here, I’m really impressed because it means you care about this topic a lot. Look, we spend so much time looking at what everyone else is doing that it becomes very easy to feel like we should be doing all of it too. But maybe running a good social team, especially a lean one, is being really about being honest about what you actually have to work with.

Anyway. Here’s to making our boring little corners of the internet a little less boring!

And if you want to hear more from other social media marketers around topic of boring social you should tune into this month’s Social Social Club on Wednesday, September 23 @ 12pm EST.

We’ll be chatting with Tomas Budin (Video Content Creator at TL;DV), Brianna Chapman (Senior Social Community Manager at Apollo), and Jenna Kamal (Events and Community Lead at Passionfruit —three people who consistently make me LOL on LinkedIn—to talk about how they make content interesting when the subject matter isn’t doing them any favors.

Sign up here!

Today I’m launching a new section on my substack called Social Notes. This is where I’ll pen (sometimes lengthy) essays about what I believe social teams actually needs. I’ll share my pov and opinions, and you can take it with a grain of salt that these are just working theories. It’s informed by what I see in my current work at Slate and peppered with more than a decade working in social knowledge.

Before we dive into this ragebait topic, I should tell you where I sit before I tell you what I think. I run marketing at Slate, a content creation software for social media teams. I’ve spent an enormous amount of time looking at tools that promise to help brands create more content, including ours. When people complain about AI slop, they are complaining about an economy I participate in. I make money when teams buy tools. Weigh everything I say accordingly.

I have been posting on the internet since 2006, which is a decent amount of field research, if I do say so myself. I was definitely a user long before I made social a full time profession, and the question has always been the same: What can I share that another person might actually care about? After nearly twenty years of being chronically online, I have scrolled enough to be able to depict when things stop working because the content is just meh.

And lately, a lot of it does feel that way.

There is more content than ever, and a surprising amount of it seems to exist only to fulfill the requirement of being on the internet. It covers a slot on the calendar, giving someone a screenshot to paste into the weekly report for their boss that still refers to TikTok as the mint. It gets it’s 2 seconds of attention on the feed and then it disappears amongst the thousands of other posts created for roughly the same reason: to check a box.

Generative AI has become the obvious suspect and I totally understand why. Once you get duped by your first “Is this AI or not?” post, you develop a certain disgust and distrust. You start seeing it everywhere. You question the credibility of everything and everyone.

Is anything even real??

But most of what we consider as AI slop actually starts before anyone opens a prompt. It begins when a company decides it needs to show up everywhere, all the time, without giving the people doing the work more time or support. Publishing expectations have grown tremendously in the last couple of years. The teams have not. The pressure is more positioned on volume, and quality becomes something everyone still claims to care about and yet they structurally make it harder to achieve.

So that problem already existed. And when AI got introduced, everything just accelerated.

Across our conversations with prospects and customers at Slate, one problem comes up constantly:

We need to 10x our content without 10xing our team.

Ahhhhh, the classic “do more with less.”

It sounds like an efficiency problem, so, naturally, companies go looking for an efficiency tool. AI can generate a lot things. It can make the captions, draft the posts, create the visuals, turn someone into an avatar, and send that avatar out to say whatever needs saying that day. And it gets the job done for the most part. The content calendar is full and everyone has technically completed the assignment. Whether the work got better thought is a different question, and HubSpot has some points on this.

In their 2026 Social Media Trends Report, they found that 94% of social marketers now use AI somewhere in their workflow, yet 45% still call producing enough high-quality content their biggest challenge and 73% say it has never been harder to stand out. AI is doing exactly what was promised. It is helping teams produce more. But can we all agree that volume is the easy half of the problem??

The criticism around AI-generated content is not wrong. There is plenty of awful work being produced with it, and I have scrolled by and unfollowed many. But blaming the tool allows the people setting the expectations to get off fairly easily. We criticize the marketer who took the shortcut without considering why their team was expected to publish so much that they felt using a shortcut felt necessary.

I am not pointing at other people from a safe distance, either. I have shipped a calendar filler. There were times when I posted something that I knew was gonna be a complete bust while I was scheduling it, and it performed exactly like I had imagined it would—POORLY. My reason was that there wasn’t enough time to execute on something better. I was under-resourced, had little to no budget and simply did not have the time because leadership needed this launch announcement to go out today.

You see this firehose energy stems from the same sort of logic when a manager tells a social person to “make a post that goes viral.”

Based on what? For whom? Why would anyone care?

There is no strategy inside using generative AI other than needing to outsource a lot of the work to meet volume expectations and the under-resourced creators are left to manufacture the outcome by all means possible. When I see companies using AI to replace the creators, especially with things like AI avatar, I don’t know…it feels like the technological version of the same unrealistic demands of going viral. And if you ask me, I think it’s pretty gross.

You can’t replace a human with a machine. A person’s delivery and experience are usually the reason the content has any credibility. Remove the person and what? You’re now left with a synthetic cartoon shell of a person reciting a corporate brochure copy. I do not know why anyone would assume that would work. Also, I thought we were in the business of building that creative muscle. In order for you to get stronger, you need to have patience to build up some organic stamina.

Here is what technology companies keep getting wrong about creative people, and I say this as someone who works inside the industry—they assume creative people need help being creative.

They don’t.

The social people I know are not short on ideas. They are short on time. Their days are wasted rummaging through all the mundane things like organizing assets, sifting through feedback, chasing approvals, formatting content, and handling all the small production tasks that chips away an entire afternoon. Then they get given a tool that offers to generate 50 ideas for them.

Great. Now they have 50 more things to review.

Ask any good social marketer what they need help with and I’m fairly certain that it involves having some level of autonomy in the way they create. They know which moment deserves the cut and when a joke doesn’t land. They can tell when an overly polished piece needs to be killed. They are tapped into the culture and can tell you when you need something be paused. They can also look at a piece of content and decide “Nah, this is weird.”

And here’s the distinction that these ragebait slop conversation keeps missing. When people say AI slop, they are picturing only the output: the templatized generated captions, the avatar delivering robotic copy, the image that gave Steve an extra arm and a fourth finger. They are not picturing the mechanics underneath the work that have been incredibly useful for a while now. And nobody ever complains about them. You wanna know why they don’t complain?

Because it doesn’t change the end results that show up on the feeds.

Take webinars. We produce a lot of them, and I will be the first to admit that no one wants to watch an hour-long webinar twice. Especially not the social marketer who only needs the one banger line buried somewhere around the 20-minute mark.

Off the top of my head, here are two ways that I would go about with recycling this long form content into something more social-native:

• Transcript-based editing. This lets me read the conversation instead of scrubbing through it, find the promising section, and cut straight from the text. I can ctrl F and find the exact phrasing that I need.

• Then there are other tools, like Shortcuts, that’ll break the recording into a bunch of smaller clips and sort them by type. The Slate specific offer is that the clips are geared towards your brand and style of content that would resonate on your channels. But having this in my editor at least gives me somewhere to start. I can pull a single clip, combine multiple clips and edit it further.

These things all require AI. Nobody calls it slop, because we’re not just sharing work as is. There is further editing and tweaks but AI helped trimmed hours of work. That’s the intentionality behind creating content using AI. In this case, it never wrote a word the audience read. It cleared the drudgery that stood between me and the deliberate decisions to make great content. I don’t need to rely on AI to tell me whether the line is actually a banger, or whether the clip makes sense outside the full conversation, or whether it thinks my audience would actually care. I needed AI to sift through 60 mins of footage and surface those lines to me and then I decide what to do with them. And that’s the type of decisions that stay with me, and that is the correct place for it.

Slop is what happens when the tool crosses that line and starts making the calls. Technology is most useful when it is managed by the human.

Alright, I’m huffing and puffing a bit here but if you’re looking for some rule for how much of the work you should hand to AI. I can’t definitively tell you that. I can’t say that AI should handle 80% of your content execution, because execution contains dozens of small decisions that shape the final work. The better question is which decisions your team prefers not to outsource.

Creative discretion tops my list.

As I mentioned in my webinar example, a tool can surface a possible clip, and it remove repetitive work, or hand me a rough starting point. It should not be deciding what the I, or the brand, believes or what deserves to be shared.

Back to that one HubSpot report because it’s giving reassuring receipts. The three places where social marketers say AI is letting them down most are:

• image generation

• image editing

• and video generation

Notice the commonalities? These are the part of the work that’s closest to the final creative call. The best use of AI in a creative workflow is the mechanics of supporting you to work faster, not replace the creative thinking.

And by the way, a note for you leaders that are running social teams.

Creative judgement is not something you can easily get. Taste has to come from somewhere. You cannot ask someone to make culturally relevant work while giving them no time to participate in or at least pay attention to the culture, and a social team racing from one task request to the next gets fewer and fewer chances to use the instincts they were hired for.

AI can protect that time or it can eat it.

If a tool saves someone an hour and the hour goes toward improving the premise or reconsidering an edit, it helped. If the hour is instantly converted into a bigger publishing quota, the team is right back where it started. Which makes the entire resource kinda useless.

So why do we think this keeps happening?

In my opinion, part of why this keeps happening is that volume is easy to count and judgment is a lot harder to grade. A team graded on how often it posts will use AI to post more. The tool follows the incentive wherever it points. I would love to pin this entirely on managers, but the incentive does not only live above the team. Plenty of marketers chase volume on their own, because the feed requires it and gurus will tell you to be consistent which obviously means…post more. None of us are immune to this pressure.

Social teams do need help producing more. The demand is real, even when it is unreasonable, and pretending the technology has no value does nothing for the people responsible for getting the work done.

So here is what I would ask you to do, from one chronically online person to another. The next time somebody pitches you an AI tool, somebody will, and maybe it’s even me, ask what work it removes and what your people get back in exchange. If the answer something along the lines of produce more content and faster, fine. Just be honest that that was the goal. But if you want something quality then you need to plug in the resource that would buy back the time for your team.

Anyway. That is my read, and you get the gist of my thoughts on this ai slop convo. But if you want to hear other social pros debate about this in real time, we are bringing HubSpot to Slate’s next Social Social Club on August 12 at noon ET. Bryna Corcoran and Lauren Mendoza-Routt are joining Carmen Vicente to dig into how teams are actually using AI and which metrics better reflect the way social works. And if I may toot our own horn, we’ve built the SSC to be a pretty solid webinar series that leaves registrants looking forward to the next one.

Register here