The point isn’t going viral. Unless your business is monetizing the hamster wheel.

As Gabe the Bass Player says:

But the point isn’t to just attract a crowd.

We want to attract a crowd doing our specific thing.

We want a crowd that is attracted to what we do.

We want what we do to serve the expectations wrapped up in that attraction.

Attention is a means, not an end.

Indexing on attention leads to clickbait, which is the act of breaking the promise of expectation.

Never a good move for a business.

Social media is a discovery > demand creation channel. In a fragmented QVC / infomercial kind of way.

It’s about educating people on your product / service, sharing what other people say about it, and building your community.

To turn social discovery into sales, marketers should focus on authentic, useful content—think creator reviews, demos, and clear product info. Pair that with well-timed discounts and engaging video formats to nudge shoppers from interest to action.

Post the content that builds the reputation you want to have.

via EMARKETER

Good marketing happens when the narrative a brand tells about itself aligns with the narrative customer is telling themselves.

Typically this occurs in the realm of identity, but local / locally rooted businesses cultivate a sense of ownership and pride amongst the locals. Meaning local conditions impact narrative overlap.

This is a perfect illustration.

Rodney Brooks predicts a potential future for genAI

LLMs that can explain which data led to what outputs will be key to non annoying/dangerous/stupid deployments. They will be surrounded by lots of mechanism to keep them boxed in, and those mechanisms, not yet invented for most applications, will be where the arms races occur.

This seems the sensible requirement for truly broad adoption and use across industries and situations.

The current ecosystem is more accelerator than substitute.