Marketing Happy Hour - Building an Engaging Brand on Social Media | Jack Appleby of Future Social

Episode Date: August 25, 2023

This week, Erica catches up with Jack Appleby, Creator of Future Social: a free newsletter read by 50K+ marketers looking to learn more about social and creator strategy. In this episode, Jack breaks down his go-to cross platform strategies for social media teams and the career advice he wishes he would've taken sooner. Here's a peek at what we cover in this episode: [00:03:31] - Jack shares his 12 year background in social media, from starting in the agency space (leading social for notable brands like Beats by Dre, Spotify, and Verizon) to joining the creative strategy team at Twitch, all while tweeting his thoughts on the industry and ultimately landing a job with Morning Brew, writing about the work he's so passionate about. He explains how he built and launched the Future Social educational publication and is now building a media business around it as a full time writer, speaker, and consultant. [00:07:22] - Jack shares his thoughts on Meta's Threads and his advice for brands after a month of playing around on the platform. He also discusses "unhinged" social media - with answers to questions like "how far is too far?" [00:16:07] - Jack shares his experience growing his personal brand on social while building his business, and gives us perspective on the new surge of creators expanding beyond social and forming media businesses. He also shares an easy starting structure for building your personal brand. [00:24:05] - Jack uncovers his ultimate tips for social media marketing professionals and reveals what he believes is the most important lesson to learn in your career. Grab a drink and listen in to this week's Marketing Happy Hour conversation! ____ Other episodes you'll enjoy if you enjoyed Jack's episode: ⁠TikTok 101: How to Build an Engaged Audience | Zaria Parvez of Duolingo⁠ ⁠Growing a Community on Social | Karissa Widder of Kindred⁠ ⁠Creating Your Own Dream Career Path | Social Media Consultant Rachel Karten⁠ ____ Say hi! DM us on Instagram and share your favorite moments from this episode - we can't wait to hear from you! ⁠NEW! Join our MHH Insiders group to connect with Millennial and Gen Z marketing professionals around the world!⁠ ⁠⁠Get the latest from MHH, straight to your inbox: ⁠Join our email list!⁠⁠⁠ Connect with Jack + Future Social: ⁠LinkedIn⁠ | ⁠Twitter⁠ | ⁠Instagram⁠ | | ⁠Newsletter⁠ Connect with Co-Host Erica: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Connect with Co-Host Cassie: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow MHH on Social: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠Threads⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠ New to Marketing Happy Hour (or just want more)? ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Download our Marketing Happy Hour Starter Kit⁠⁠ This podcast is an MHH Media production. ⁠⁠Learn more about MHH Media!⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Interested in starting your own podcast? Grab our Podcast Launch Strategy Guide here.⁠

you're listening to the marketing happy hour podcast where we discuss career and industry insights with our peers in marketing we're here to talk about it all like the ups and downs of working in social media how to build authentic relationships in the influencer and pr space managing a nine-to-five and a side hustle at the same time, how to be productive in your life and career without losing your sanity, and more. Ultimately, we're here to build a community with you because we're all trying to navigate the world of marketing together. Are you ready? Grab your favorite drink and join your hosts, Cassie and Erica, for this week's episode. This week, Erica catches up with Jack

Appleby, creator of Future Social, a free newsletter read by 50,000 marketers. Jack shares his go-to cross-platform strategies and his opinion that no matter what, human stories should be at the foundation of what you post. In addition, Jack gives us his unpopular opinion about unhinged content from brands and his three-post-per-week approach for building a personal brand on LinkedIn. Of course, it wouldn't be Marketing Happy Hour without career advice. We're about to dive into an amazing conversation on social media strategy, So make sure you have your drink ready. Let's dive in. Hey, Jack, how are you doing? I am so great. I'm a little tired, but you know, that's just like working in this industry, I think. Yeah, absolutely. We all understand that.

I'm so excited to have you on the show today. I feel like it's been a long time coming just for me personally, following you on social media for so long on LinkedIn. You're one of the top voices I love to follow for social media. So we're excited to have you. But before we get started, I do have an important question for you that we ask all of our guests and that is what is in your glass tonight this is marketing happy hour after all first of all thank you that was very nice uh i'm drinking so i'm trying to drink more water and i'm throwing money at the problem because for whatever reason like i like the sparkling waters and like yeah branding guy like drinks liquid death so i just have like boxes of it in the

corner and for whatever reason i i will forget to drink water all day long, but I'll open six of these throughout the day. I'm just doing this now. That's amazing. Yeah. I am somewhat of a water snob over here too. Like my favorite is Aquapana. I don't know if you've had that one. You should try it. I don't even know what that is. It's so good. I don't know. It might be French. Who knows? I don't know. But it's really good. I also love Liquid Death, but actually an alcohol-free discovery platform called The New Bar just sent over some of their summer drinks from their online marketplace. So I'm finally trying this like Dessoir brand, I think it's called. It's a non-alcoholic aperitif and it is so good. So that's a space that I'm like super excited to

watch too is the non-alcoholic space because I feel like a lot of people are moving over there so interesting to see but anyway um thank you so much again for joining us we love your social newsletter your future social newsletter and I can't wait to dive into how you built and scaled that I feel like you are in a season of just building building building so it'll be interesting to hear from you. But first, can you just give our listeners a peek into your background in social? Sure. Man, it's funny. Every time I tell this story, it feels like another year goes by and I feel old.

So I've been working in social for 12 years now and was even doing some of it in college before that. Got my start at agencies, got lucky, got into the industry right when social media budgets kind of became a thing, I felt like, it was like 2011. And across a bunch of different agency jobs, I ended up leading social for brands like Beats by Dre, Spotify, Verizon, TV show Community, a whole bunch of video games, a bunch of tech products, just all through various agencies. Got to jump around a little bit, see what's out there.

Went over to Twitch for a spell and was on their creative strategy team with their influencers on the platform. And then after many, many years of doing that, I've been kind of tweeting the whole time about just like advertising thoughts with no strategy in mind. Like the only reason I did it was because I had been at the same agency for five years. And I had this like crisis of, oh, my God, I don't know anybody else that works in marketing except for my coworkers. Yeah. So I started like tweeting just to meet people and slowly built an audience doing that.

And it was enough where Morning Brew called me and said like, stop doing the job and start writing about the job. Like, you have the followership for it. It took them a year to convince me to do it. I was like, I don't know. It didn't work. Went over there and launched Future Social with them. We built a publication around my content. Did about 50,000 followers or subscribers

in about a year and a half and with a 55% open rate, which is very high for the industry. And then six months ago, I took an independence. They ended up not doing as much creator work anymore

and I got the chance to own it fully myself. So now I'm running my own media business, which was not the plan. It's never something I aspired to do, is run my own business. I was actually afraid of it for a very long time and still am. But now I'm a full-time writer, speaker, and consultant for social.

So cool. Tell us a little bit more about the mission of Future Social itself. Who do you kind of serve with that publication? And how have you continued to build and engage audience around that? Totally. I mean, one of my core values is just kind of curiosity, which is who I am as a person. Like I think it's why I was able to work in social so long as I'm just fascinated by people and how they communicate and how we send messages as whether you're a brand or a person or whatever else. So with future social,, I really love teaching and coaching. And I love theorizing about this stuff.

I think there's not nearly enough theorizing in our industry about what could be, why things work, what might work next. So it's really meant to be an educational resource for marketers who want to learn more about social. And a personal goal of mine is always making the writing in a way that it's breaking down complex topics in the most accessible way possible. I want first-year social media employees, as well as CEOs,

to get the same type of results and the same type of actionables out of the newsletter. That's really, really cool. And one of the recent topics that you wrote about was threads, which is what Meta recently launched. I guess it's kind of an answer to Twitter or X, as it's now called, who knows. But I'm very curious to hear before we dive further into the conversation, just what your thoughts are now around threads. You were like the leading voice in that area for that launch day. I'm, I, you released a guide for brands like the next day. So just curious to hear

what you think now, like, do you think if they continue to build upon the platform that it'll actually catch on? Or do you think it's, you know, kind of a flop a little bit? It's, I think it's too early to tell um like it's funny historically i've always written about how when a new platform emerges be late to that platform don't be early like don't dedicate resource or manpower or budget because you want to see how it performs uh the reason i was so excited about threads on day one was it hit 100 million users in the first week and that's because of that auto follow feature coming over from instagram it's tough i mean this is where i struggle with like industry media yeah

engagement's way down it's like down like 80 percent uh but this is why i think the concepts these numbers are so important is threads engagement right now is still where be real was at its absolute peak and we talked about be real like it was the next big thing for two years. Yeah. So do I think it's going to reach like a Twitter size? If it does, it's not going to be for a long time. And I really wish Meta had done more to onboard users and to make it stickier.

Like something TikTok's done really well over the years. They threw events, like the weekend concert that everyone watched, or even a Fortnite having the Travis Scott show that everyone watched. I wish they had thought about some new modern retention tactics instead of just giving it to us and seeing what happens. But we'll see.

My advice for brands now, what has been a month, my advice to brands now on threads is it's worth throwing your content there and seeing what your engagement is. I know you don't get the advanced analytics that you're used to on platforms, but if the content is getting engagement, why not? Especially if you already have an engaged Instagram audience, because you theoretically have a huge percentage of that on threads anyway. Yeah, absolutely. And I, I always say, I think with co-worker um my co-host sorry that they might have launched it a little too early but I think something that's really beautiful about that too

is they have that platform with Adam and he speaks directly to creators and so he can kind of tell you I know there's a broadcast channel where he's like sharing updates all the time about what they're doing to improve the platforms both both Instagram and threads. So it'll be interesting to see what happens there. Yeah, I do. I will say, I think they're one of their big misses is I know we think of Twitter and threads as like mobile platforms, but I think a bigger percentage of the core creators use desktop than people realize. Yeah. So not having a browser version of threads on day one, like, I mean, you know, I'm a huge Twitter creator. It's my primary platform.

I was getting frustrated because I wanted to be able to type on my computer and that was a limiter on me using threads. Yeah, no, that's true. I never thought about it like that. That's interesting. Well, you do have a lot of opinions that can sometimes ruffle feathers,

threads being an example of one of those topics that kind of caused a lot of conversation on LinkedIn and social media in general. More recently, we saw your post on unhinged social media. Let's talk about that. We, Cassie and I both are in agreement with you that the content can absolutely go too far at times, but what's I both are in agreement with you that the content can absolutely go too far at times, but what's the perfect balance there, would you say? I mean, so for anybody that hasn't read the article, I wrote a piece on how I wish we would scale back unhinged content. And there's a lot of brands do a lot of different things that have gotten pretty crazy. I mean, you were seeing like very explicit sex jokes coming from brands. We're seeing, for lack of a better phrase, bowel movement jokes coming from brands.

Like it's, I mean, brands participating in public controversies, trials, celebrity feuds, everything. To me, it's all gone a little too far. And I really wish people would scale it back for a couple of reasons. One, for being honest, you're just not going to be as good at it as the other brands. Like the other, one of the reasons the brands that do it see huge numbers is because they go so over the top. They're so aligned with their legal teams. Like they have fully committed to this.

And it's very hard to get a company to commit to that kind of approach. And I don't think most should. I also really, I really worry that as the social media industry gets younger, we're seeing the field blossom and grow. So we have more under 30-year-old employees working in social than ever before.

I think there's a lot of people who work in social now who love social media and don't love the brands they work for. They don't love marketing. They don't love telling stories about those brands. And it's creating this like false engagement where people get all these likes on things that like don't lead to anything that would create you to become a consumer or fan i remember during the pandemic uh i watched a pro sports team tweet a connect four game from their twitter account i'm like how does this make me a fan of your what does this have to do with anything um so that's a very long-winded way of saying like as far as the line goes if you wouldn't want your kid to see it,

probably not something that should be on the brand accounts. Yeah, that's fair to say, I think. How do you think brands can test those different trends and things like that? Push the envelope just a little bit without straying too far from their purpose, like you're saying on social. And we know that shock value works a little bit to an extent. How can we kind of achieve similar results with a strong strategy instead of just throwing whatever they see to the social media platforms? You know, I don't even want to encourage ways to try to test being in that realm because I

really don't think it's the way to go. I think there's so many different personalities you can use on the internet. And we taught like, you see things thrown around like social agencies, like we speak the way the internet speaks. The whole world's on the internet. There's not one type of internet user, like in on every social network, like TikTok's not a bunch of internet user like and on every social network like tiktok's not a bunch of kids like the average tiktok users might be even in their 30s at this point yeah um to claim that there's only one way to speak to people drives me nuts and it's not a binary the choices i see a lot in the social media community is we want to act crazy on our account or we feel like everything we have to do is really bland and boring like no guys like there's all kinds of content you can do you can be wholesome you can

tell human emotional stories you can look up hero's journey and what that and how that's consumed psychologically by a viewer why it works in movies that can work in social media content uh casey nice that has a vlog where he explains he blogs, how he always has a three-act structure. You can apply that to social media content. It can be about human achievement. It can be funny without ever like even inching towards inappropriateness. So I think the goal shouldn't be how can we get edgier? The goal should be how can we tell more human stories and human relatable tales that have to do with our product

absolutely and it sounds cliche but i guess putting the social in social media or back into social media is what you're talking about they're like just connecting with your audience and people is the way to go versus just trying to get the most views or get the most likes on something that might be a little unhinged yeah it's it's almost like we've had an overcorrect in the industry uh i mean like i remember being like the guy who's fighting with executives where it's like just to get the social media team in the room for things and now we see a lot of brands that are like social first in that social teams like are getting to do what they want a lot more often. They're getting to act a little wilder. It's gone too far the other way.

And that would be like a real back in and find a way to tie everything together. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see what happens there, especially with brands that are so forward with that content, like Duolingo, I think is one that you had mentioned in your piece on unhinged social. And we actually had Zaria on our podcast, I think one of our first seasons.

And just even from then to now, things have gotten a little bit different on their platforms. They've definitely moved into that territory of maybe going a little bit too far now. So very interesting there to hear your thoughts and thank you for that. Sure.

Okay, so what has your experience building your personal brand and working on consulting projects while simultaneously growing your business? Are they all intertwined? I know you have some basketball stuff going on. You've got some speaking engagements and you're building this business and you're sharing it all online. Tell us about that journey and what that kind of looks like for you. Yeah. I mean, there's kind of two phases of it. There's when I was working full-time within social. And then when I became like a full-time content creators, which is what I am now. When I knew I was taking the newsletter independence, my approach this year was let's see what happens. Let's see what type of work I enjoy the most.

Let's see what type of opportunities present themselves the most. And my vision was, I'm going to do brand deals for my social. I'm going to do sponsorships for the newsletter. And I'm going to do consulting. And we'll see what happens. I'd obviously have the social platforms for myself, had audiences of people who would directly hire me for things. The second that I announced that I was going independent, a bunch of sponsors immediately

stepped up. I had sponsorships that equaled last year's salary my first month of going independent because people wanted to work with a marketing newsletter that was written by a marketer who could convince other marketers to like check out new platforms. So it's gone so well in that regard that my focus is like building like what I'm calling a media business now. And I think we're seeing this discourse a lot more as far as like creators expanding. Like we see something like Mr. Beast going into chocolate bars and different languages and all of it, like his various businesses. More and more creators, especially B2B creators are they're really forming media businesses. So for me, like, I've always really enjoyed speaking the same thesis of the newsletter.

I like talking about this stuff and educating. I had no idea if there'd be an appetite for that. And I kind of put it out there on my LinkedIn, like, hey, if anybody's got speaking opportunities, like would love to do something. Agora Pulse's head of partnerships tweeted out, hey, we're looking for speakers. Who would be good at this? One of my followers replied to him, what about Jack? He replies, oh, yeah, we should talk to Jack.

And then a month later, I was the final keynote speech at their digital conference. Wow. So this is where, like, if you build audience and you continue to show value to that audience, like they will provide and give back. Like I have not spent a dollar on marketing this newsletter. I've done zero and I've done zero outbound. So every dollar that's come in this year is from someone organically reaching out to me over LinkedIn or Twitter to either sponsor the newsletter or do branded content with me. And I think it's just, if you provide value for 10 years,

like eventually, like those people you've worked with, like become budget holders themselves and work in marketing jobs and want to contribute to the community. No, that's so cool. That's so cool to hear that people that you've connected with have kind of come back and advocated for you, you know, in spaces where you might not even have known there was opportunity. So that speaks to the power of networking for sure. One other thing that I've seen you post about is growing your personal brand, like on LinkedIn and things like that. What are some tips that you have for people who are trying to do that right now, but don't

really know where to start? So that, yeah, there's a structure that I like, something I thought a lot about, something I'm gonna probably put out some like, maybe like cheap digital products around to help people do this kind of stuff. Like one of my things, like I really, really believe that everyone has stories worth sharing

from day one of your career. Like if you're on the job for the first day, there's a million things that are happening to you, that you're feeling, if you're on the job for the first day, there's a million things that are happening to you that you're feeling that you're understanding that are worth letting other people know about because someone will relate to it. Someone will learn from it. So as far as LinkedIn goes and make no mistake, if you want to build a personal brand about your profession, don't even start with Twitter. Don't even worry about Twitter. LinkedIn's incredible. The algorithm is great. It's a healthier platform. A structure that I recommend to get started is every week, try to do three posts. One is something that you learned that week at work. And there's nothing

that's too small. It can be, oh, we tried this new to-do list app that I'm really enjoying at work. Has anybody else tried this? I like it for this reason. It could be, oh, I learned a note taking style. It could be anything. Like I learned a brush tool in Photoshop that I never knew. So one thing you learned that week, one thing you're proud of that week, if you work in social, it might be like your top performing social post for that week, or it might be like that you put in PTO that you've been nervous about putting in or your boss or whatever that might be um and then a final one someone else's work that you admire maybe that's a brand social post that you just thought was very clever or funny and you just type it up put it on your take a screenshot put up and why you like

that kind of thing if you do something i learned, something I'm proud of, and something I admired every week, that's three of the five business days per week. And you will naturally learn what writing performs better, what thoughts to share. And even if you build core audience, for most people, building a personal brand is not what I'm trying to do, where it's like I'm trying to become an educator of marketing for a mass sum of people. For most of us, building a personal brand is about finding those five people that are going to give us jobs where we're going to work for two to three years. And those add up quickly. Suddenly, there's your 20-year career right there. There's hundreds of thousands of dollars because you just posted on social media.

Yeah, absolutely. I can't even explain how many of the positions that I've had or connections that I've made have been because of things that I've posted or things that people have shared that I posted or things, you know, it's, I don't really do it as much anymore because I've been taking a little break, but I've definitely had a lot of opportunities just come to the door because of things that I have shared about my personal experiences or things that I love and things that I like. And I think that's definitely been super advantageous to my career. And I always encourage people to do that. So. Yeah. And something I would add to that is I think we

get really, it's funny. Like I know we all work in social. So we like, we're trained to think in engagement and replies and comments and all that. Something I think that goes really undervalued, not just in marketing, but in personal branding is the people who see the content, but don't engage with it. A lot of the most incredible things that have happened to me,

whether they're sponsors who built large campaigns around my content, people that offer me jobs, I didn't know they existed until I put out a piece of content asking for their help. During COVID, I had a layout, my first ever layout, and I'd never been available on the market before with no job. When I tweeted that, it did a quarter million impressions, and a woman reached out to me.

She's like, hi, I work with Twitch. I've been reading your stuff for a while. Like, I'm curious if you're interested. I had no idea who she was. And she was an incredible boss. Three months later, I'm working for her. One of my biggest presenting sponsors for the newsletter. I put on my LinkedIn, hey, we're looking for sponsors right now.

Like, never done this before. She'd been reading my writing for years, had never commented once. So something I want to encourage people is when they look at like personal branding, whether it's on Twitter or LinkedIn, it's easy to get caught up in the people who are immediately replying to you, especially on like a Twitter where it gets very negative. Twitter tends to run on the more junior side of the industry, which is not a bad thing. Like I think everyone needs a chance to connect with their peers. But a lot of the best opportunities that came to me from Twitter are people who I don't

even know were following me and then suddenly appeared. So if you get discouraged by either you're not attracting people you think you're attracting or like certain types of negativity, the things do come back in spade at some point. Oh, absolutely. That's so good. Okay, moving on, just because we want to make sure that we get this in here because you are the social guy, right? We have to hear your top tips for brands on social. What can social media managers be doing to succeed on each platform? I don't know

if you want to be like, Hey, LinkedIn, do this. Hey, Instagram, do this. But however you want to answer that question, give us your top tips. Yeah, it's funny. What's been really, really great about getting away from the work itself is getting to have a more third-party view of all this stuff. Getting to do like functionally, like doing more research on it.

Like I get to read Pew Research Center every day now. I can like do all the homework on the industry. And I've looked at things that I've tried for the brands I used to work for, for the brands I consult with now, and just my personal social. There's so much that I did throughout my career that I've totally thrown out like it. Because I think at the end of the day, all of it really matters for social. If you want to get high performing content that drives engagement, drives followers, and then drives like actual consumers for your brand is understanding what makes for a compelling social media idea, which is a big concept. There's a lot that goes into that. But this is where

I think brands should be spending every dollar and every hour making sure that they understand the human emotions of the consumers they want um like so i started this like silly tiktok basketball uh basketball account just to kind of document me as an adult playing ball um and i've obviously lots of homework and working this industry for a long time so i built a couple of content series um and i knew like that they would do some numbers and they worked. Like I knew that the mid thirties athlete is an underserved audience.

There's a lot of parents in that field. People have gotten out of shape and I have my own injury. So I made a series called like I'm a 34 year old ex-college player trying to get in shape. I have 30 TikTok followers in six weeks from that. And my average views on that particular series are usually over 100,000. So I'm 3X-ing my own followers just from that content hub.

Or like I play rec league basketball. I set a goal for myself up front. Like I want to try to be MVP of this league. I'm not even close. But people have followed my journey on that. Because I started early in like somebody who's very true to who I am as a basketball player as adults I found like TikTok found me that audience and I knew how to keep engaging them sure I think all brands can do that too so is your hook actually

compelling is it a human story and like are we being honest with ourselves about how creative these ideas are? That's great. And I think that can be applied to every platform. Like you just said, it's not really like a specific thing per platform that's gonna work. It's really understanding your audience and understanding what's gonna connect

and understanding what's gonna draw people in. So I love that. And Jack, we'd love to ask this question on the show. What do you know now? It's kind of broad, but what do you know now that you wish you knew early on in your career? The most important lesson to learn in your career is your career is your job. It is on you to manage your career. You may have the most wonderful boss in the whole world. They are busy. They are tired. They are stressed

out and they cannot babysit you to help elevate you or promote you or get you that raise that you want. Once you decide that it's on you, it's off to the races. Like you can do everything like on your own and you understand how to problem solve your own career. Like a big one for me, I was just like a social strategist. I was doing very well. I was one of our top performers performers I was probably like five years into my career uh my client Yago bought the TV show community and I couldn't tell you why I decided to do this but I I was close to my clients so I emailed one of the clients and it's like hey just for the record like I'm the show's biggest fan in the whole world if there's ever a chance for us to work on it let us know know. That was not part of my role.

I was a strategist. But for whatever reason, I had the confidence to do that in that one moment. I was just excited the show was going to get canceled. Three weeks later, I was pitching it and I won that account. And I got to work on my favorite show for a year. And that was this big, big light bulb moment for me where it's like, you don't have to wait for other people. You don't have to wait for other people like you don't have to wait for permission to go do things the most proactive people the ones who get

paid most anyway who get to work on things they want to work on from there I ended up working on my favorite video game of all time rock band I've worked with the NBA at Twitch like I've touched almost every dream brand I've wanted to, because I've kind of just put myself out there to go find it. Yeah, no, that is so, so important for people to learn. And I think you often learn it too late that you are your biggest advocate. You are your biggest fan and you are the one that can power your career forward. And I think that that's really cool to hear your experience with that too. So yeah. Okay. We're reaching the end here. Where can everybody find you follow along with what you're up to? You know, the basketball, Tik TOK, social fill us in. We'll put everything in the

show notes so people can connect with you there. Definitely. So the newsletter is called future social. If you give it a Google, you'll find it. I'm still moving it to an official website because I was more interested in making sure it got out there than doing the baseline business. My name is Jack Athleby, which is a silly, fictitious name, but it is what it is. So you can Google me. I'm on LinkedIn and Twitter. On Twitter and LinkedIn, I post daily content about marketing careers, and the newsletter comes out once a week. Amazing. Thank you so much again for joining us. This has been great. Awesome. It was so much fun. Thank you.

Thanks for listening to this week's episode. We hoped you loved it as much as we did. If you enjoyed the conversation, we'd love to get your feedback on the episode. Head to the review section of your favorite podcast app and let us know what you thought. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week. We are so excited to share that our first ever free marketing happy hour digital resource is now available. Download the dream career game plan today at marketinghappyhr.com forward slash freebie. That's marketinghappyhr.com forward slash freebie. This five-step workbook will guide you through defining your goals, building your network, diversifying your skills, influencing where you're at, and investing in your growth. Cassie and I created this resource with marketing careers in mind, but the framework can be applied to any industry. Our hope is that this workbook will help you truly elevate your

career, whether you're in the market for a new position or just looking to make your mark in your current organization. No matter where this resource finds you, we are cheering you on every step of the way. So go check it out at marketinghappyhr.com forward slash freebie to download and make your career dreams come true.