I am beginning to think of myself as the human wake-up call.

I’m fortunate to meet with amazing marketers around the world, and I find that too many of them are living in the past. They set a social media strategy and then execute the same plan for years without looking up to see how the world works today.

So, I start clanging around trying to wake them up.

One of the biggest wake-up calls has to be for social media marketing. The fundamental premise is broken. And the brands still operating in the past aren’t just leaving opportunity on the table, they’re building irrelevance at scale.

Social media is not just a distribution channel for your podcast or YouTube videos. It is the operating system for a modern brand. Let’s do a deep dive on this today.

The brands pulling ahead right now have made five fundamental shifts in how they approach social. Not tactical tweaks.

Today I’ll cover:

• The central role of social media in culture
• Connecting brand messages to values
• An experimental approach
• Onboarding to the community
• Measurement

1. Connect to the culture

Most brands still approach social as if it were a publishing calendar. We have things to say. We will say them on a schedule. We will boost the ones that perform.

But culture doesn’t care about your schedule.

The shift is from broadcasting to tuning in to culture, to community, to what your audience is already talking about. Your community is telling you exactly what they want to engage with. The question is whether you’re listening or just waiting for your turn to talk.

This is a harder shift than it sounds. It requires giving up the illusion of control that a content calendar provides. It requires trusting that participation in real conversations is more valuable than polished proclamations. And it requires speed of execution.

Social-first brands aren’t just responding to culture, they’re creating it. They’re the emcee at the party.

2. Visible values

You can’t fill a social feed with product content without sounding like an advertiser. Nobody follows an advertiser.

The brands that win on social have what you might call vocal values — a clear point of view on the world that extends beyond what they sell. Consumers, especially younger ones, increasingly want to buy from brands that share their values. But values only count if they’re visible.

This creates a different kind of content challenge. Not “what should we post about our product?” but “what does our brand actually believe, and are we willing to say it out loud?”

Warning: I’m not saying you need to be political or divisive. That can be a hazardous strategy. Brand values can be positive and uplifting. For example, LEGO stands for wholesome, positive, creativity.

3. Decentralized and experimental

This is where organizational culture either enables or kills your social strategy.

The old model: every post has multiple approval layers, legal signs off before anything goes live, and brand guidelines are applied like brand armor — everything perfectly coordinated, perfectly safe, and perfectly forgettable.

The new model is decentralized and experimental:

• An agile social team that is empowered and trusted, with a direct line to the CMO
• Social managers are natives in the brand community
• The legal relationship is built on trust rather than friction.
• A bias toward trying things rather than perfecting them.

Today’s winning brands are elastic, moving when the moment arrives rather than when the approval chain completes.

A great example of this is the Duolingo owl, a brand mascot that has created social media mayhem for 15 years. The owl is not just responding to culture. The social media team is making its own. The owl is starring in his own anime series.

The phrase “just try it” sounds scary to many traditional brands. They’ve spent millions over decades to build trust and protect their images. They’re not going to risk over an experiment. How will they overcome that legacy? They probably can’t.

4. Onboarding for the community

I wrote a few years ago that social media is no longer a strategy — it’s the beginning of a process.

My thinking goes like this. A brand strategy means creating an emotional expectation between your products and your customers. The best way to do that is to use social media to drive customers to your content and hope they subscribe.

When people opt-in to your content, in a virtual way, they’re saying, “I like you. Tell me more.” It’s a higher level of emotional connection. Now you have an audience. Fantastic!

But most organizations stop there. They don’t take it to the next level: community. In a community, you can realize the highest level of emotional connection and create an experience where customers literally feel they belong to the brand.

This is a great opportunity — most businesses overlook the role of social media leading to brand community.

5. Measurement: The hardest shift 

This is where the conversation gets uncomfortable. Especially for me.

I’m a measurement junkie but the science lags the current physics of business growth. The tools we have don’t adequately capture how trust accumulates, how cultural relevance translates into purchase intent months later, and how organic social builds the conditions that enable paid social to perform.

The dominant measurement philosophy — everything must trace to revenue, every dollar must be accountable — made sense 20 years ago. Marketing needed discipline. But this mindset has calcified into something that prevents a relevant strategy. When every social investment must prove direct revenue, you will systematically underinvest in the things that build brands over time.

You can be part of the culture, or you can measure. You probably can’t do both.

I’m not suggesting blind faith. We need to consider evidence-based trust. Organic social builds trust, engagement amplifies trust, paid social scales reach, campaigns scale relevance, and all of it fuels traffic to retail. Sales prove the trust. Reviews reinforce it. It’s a flywheel, and you can’t optimize one part of it while ignoring the rest.

The Underlying Problem

Strip away the frameworks, and what we’re really looking at is an identity crisis that most brands haven’t resolved: Are we a company that uses social media to advertise? Or are we a brand that participates in culture?

This new reality requires completely different organizational structures, talent, success metrics, and relationships among marketing, legal, and the C-suite.

The reframe is simple enough to put it this way: social is the operating system, not the megaphone. But simple doesn’t mean easy. Making it real requires organizational courage — the willingness to trust your team, loosen the approval chains, invest in brand-building that doesn’t trace back to a conversion pixel.

That’s the reckoning. Most brands will read something like this, nod along, and go back to their content calendar.

The ones who act on it will author the next great social media case studies.

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

The post Five shifts in social media strategy that separate winners from wallpaper appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

Too short for a blog post, too fun to ignore, here are a few thoughts about the world of marketing, content, and beyond …

The end of comments

This might seem counterintuitive for a person who preaches about “the most human company wins,” but I have disabled comments on this blog. It has nothing to do with trolls or haters—it’s the math.

In 2017, I wrote a post noting that the average number of comments on a blog post had dropped from about 25 to 12. This decline was happening as the number of my subscribers was going UP. I theorized:

1. Comments have migrated from the blog to other places where I post, like LinkedIn and Medium. Many people also find it is just easier to reply to the email they receive.
2. When I started this blog in 2009, most people consumed content on a desktop or laptop computer. It was easier to leave comments on a keyboard. But today, about 85% of the traffic comes through mobile devices, and it’s just a pain to log in and comment.

So, while my subscriptions have gone up and I judge the quality of my content to be better than ever, the actual number of comments per post is near zero. It’s not a failure. It’s evolution.

I’ve been thinking about deleting the comment section for a few years but hesitated because of the history that would be lost — nearly 100,000 comments on this blog, including epic commentary by Seth Godin, Gary Vaynerchuk, and other luminaries.

But in the end, I figured I was probably the only person who cared about this history and decided to let it go when it was time for the annual subscription renewal. Turning the page.

Self-Suffering

I have been truly suffering over the past two weeks … at my own hand.

More than 90% of my work involves hunching over a computer. And when I write a book, the hunching hours are endless. The muscles throughout the entire top of my body bunch together. And every time I finish writing a book, my body strikes back and says, “ENOUGH.”

For the past two weeks, I have been in level 8-9 pain in my neck and shoulders. Almost every muscle is in a knot. I am sleep-deprived since there is no sleeping position that does not cause pain. My weight has crept up, and my blood pressure, too. I am so exhausted that I cannot think or work or eat.

In other words, I am a barely functioning human being. And I did this to myself. Luckily, massage and prescription drugs have started to help.

I’m not writing this to whine or seek sympathy. This is a cautionary tale. Just because you have a “white collar” job doesn’t mean you’re not vulnerable to injury. I can’t abuse my body like this any more and have to take immediate steps to be better. Don’t be me. Watch for the warning signs.

Mascot mania

I did a guest lecture at the University of Indiana last week and they all wanted to talk about was how Duolingo “killed off” its mascot.

“Authorities are currently investigating his cause of death and we are cooperating fully,” the company said on social media. “Tbh, he probably died waiting for you to do your lesson, but what do we know.”

Duo — full name Duo Keyshauna Renee Lingo — was born in 1000 BC, according to Duolingo. He has been the wise and witty face of the company since its creation in 2011, motivating-slash-pestering users to do their daily language lessons.

His tendency to guilt-trip, at times in a vaguely threatening way, made him a meme in 2017, and his popularity has soared ever since.

Obviously, killing off the bird created an audacious stir. A bunch of other brands piled on to express “condolences,” including Netflix and Subway.

The Indiana students were getting bored with the number of brands trying to catch the meme wave with their owl mascot tributes. The lesson is, you can only be audacious once. Once the brands copied each other, it became dull. And nobody can ever kill off a mascot again!

Age over wisdom

A friend lamented the other day about how he wished he were 22 years old again. I became wistful myself, especially since everything was hurting that day.

Would I trade the wisdom (and achiness!) of who I am now to be 22 again? No. I love who I am now. I am using every experience, lesson, and trouble I’ve had in the past to teach others and lift them up. I couldn’t do that at 22. What could be better than using your gifts to make an impact in the world?

By the way, I hold open the possibility of changing my mind on this as we advance into the future together!

AI self-soothing

My wise friend Kami Huyse made an interesting observation in the RISE community:

“This morning, I had a conversation with ChatGPT because I wanted to put it into context with some research and perspective. I found that the AI was extremely comforting and helped me reframe my thinking without invalidating my feelings.

“This might seem good at first and even make me prefer the conversation with the AI over one with my husband, but that wasn’t where I landed. Iron sharpens iron. We need people with different thoughts to sharpen our thinking.

“I fear that turning to AI all the time would lead to bubble thinking. I don’t doubt for a minute that the AI would also validate someone on the complete opposite side of the spectrum. And with just as great arguments!”

This is a keen perspective. Social media already keeps us in an algorithmic bubble of groupthink. AI will learn even more about us and reinforce what we want to hear. Keep in mind that AI self-soothing might reinforce bad habits as well as good ones!

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

Illustration courtesy MidJourney

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