Purposefully putting yourself out there

Or, why sharing "thought leadership" requires you to actually have some thoughts

My inspiration for this newsletter was to curate the latest social, digital, and cultural trends through a comms lens.

Such a topic requires trends to write about, which I tend to identify via the multitude of email newsletters that I subscribe to. Sometimes the trend lands in my inbox and makes itself obvious. Other times, I piece something together based on smaller nuggets of writing or snatches of conversation.

When there’s no specific trigger, I go back to some of my preferred overarching meta-trends - the frothiness of generative AI, the way society looks down on purely “algorithmic content”, why things were better in the 90s. Regular readers will know the drill.

Sometimes I do find myself wondering whether it’s appropriate to stick to this approach, given the current news agenda. I remember feeling this way particularly strongly during the racist riots that plagued the UK in the summer of 2024.

I feel it now too: everything’s a mess. But while other newsletter writers pivot over to taking a view on military conflict through their unique lens, that’s not my jam.

I just don’t feel qualified to write anything about it; it’s not my area of expertise. And I’ll be honest with you - I find the news depressing. Clearly, when working in comms, there’s a baseline of knowledge you need about current affairs. You can’t be one of the total news-avoiders I always reference in my pieces on the media landscape. I also work in an office with BBC News visible from every pod; the news is pretty much unavoidable.

But I do tend to consciously focus my attention elsewhere when I can. I try to avoid those horrible men who thrive on our attention, who’ll stand in elections and buy social networks just for the main character energy. Our attention is, to coin an overused marketing cliche, a precious resource. I try to gift mine with care - it doesn’t mean I don’t get sucked into doomscrolling wormholes, but I do my best to spot them when I do.

And because I know that attention is precious, I’m grateful to you for reading this newsletter every week. When my newsletter comes up in conversation, I sometimes slip in another classic cliche - the one about “oh, I would write this even if no one was reading it”.

Which is true - but obviously I prefer to have at least some readers. The romantic notion of people noticing and discovering my work long after it was published (a la John Keats, Nick Drake or Big Star) feels even more unlikely in the modern world of feeds and speed.

As Brett Anderson puts it in his second memoir, “Afternoons With The Blinds Drawn”, “the very act of ushering your work into the public arena is a plea for some sort of validation and response”.

And it’s true - I try not to obsess about analytics and open rates, but of course I keep an eye on them. I spend much of my working life encouraging clients to be more rigorous in measurement and evaluation; it would be remiss of me not to apply the same rigour to my own work.

The trouble is, just as it is incredibly easy to get sucked into doomscrolling wormholes, it’s also incredibly easy to get distracted by the metrics. We see it so much across our feeds - creators and commentators prioritise the awareness and engagement metrics, leaning into topics purely because they do the numbers.

As a society, we worry about the radicalisation of people who spend hours and hours consuming extreme, fringe opinions. Most of the time, the people sharing those opinions only worry about their metrics - what they say, and the effect their words might have - are of little consideration whatsoever.

In an interview with escape the algorithm, writer, illustrator, and cartoonist Hallie Bateman talks about these headline metrics as “the frothy top layer”, aka “I hope people like it” (it being whatever it is you put into the world). A desire for recognition is a natural human impulse - some feel it more acutely than others, but it’s undeniably a nice thing to feel.

Underneath that frothy top layer, Bateman identifies a:

“Deep desire for communication, community, and understanding. The idea that it’s only about belief, likes, and approval is one piece of something bigger: wanting my work to be part of a wider conversation”.

She goes on to echo Brett Anderson’s sentiments, stating:

“If I were the last person on Earth, maybe I’d still make art, but it wouldn’t be the same. There’s an essential ingredient: expressing something and having it be witnessed by others, having people say, “I see that too.””

Hallie Bateman nails the point there, I think: plenty of people would (and do) continue their creative endeavours even if no-one’s watching or reading (in fact, this website shuffles up Twitch streams with zero viewers for you).

But it’s not the same without an audience. It can feel scary to put your work out into the world; over four years of writing a newsletter, I’ve built up something of a thick skin around sharing my thoughts. It feels good to put my thoughts out there for a reaction every week - to make my small contribution to the debates and discussions going on in our world of comms and PR.

Sometimes the dominant narratives can feel stale and repetitive - I’m not sure I can stand another “algorithms are bad” piece. Offering alternative viewpoints, sharing why you think the dominant narrative is misguided provides a vital counterpoint in a sea of sameness.

In one of his posts, Adam Mastroianni talks about the art of conversation and how there is a dominant narrative which suggests that being a good conversationalist comes down to asking a lot of questions.

Adam debunks this notion, highlighting how functional and potentially one-sided such conversations can be. Instead, Adam suggests that great conversation comes from putting something of yourself into the mix. Sharing an embarrassing experience; opening up on something you feel; revealing a fact about yourself, like a corny icebreaker. In doing so, we open the conversation up to greater possibilities, moving beyond a purely transactional Q&A into something more interesting.

I often say something similar to clients who want to do more “thought leadership”. If you want to lead the conversation, you actually have to have some thoughts to put out into the world. You need to adopt some of that self-publishing bravery and be confident in what you’re saying.

It’s boring to repost company news and say something like “really exciting to see [x initiative] launch”. You need to tell your audience WHY it’s exciting. What happened during the initiative’s development that was challenging? What’s missing from the market that you’ve taken steps to rectify? What did you think was wrong about the dominant narrative that you want to challenge?

Without that strong POV, your posts, stories and articles will feel like dull party small talk, and won’t break through on either of the layers Hallie Bateman identifies. No initial headline metrics, no entry into a wider conversation. If you’ve got something to say, opinions to share - perhaps even a spicy take here or there, it’s going to stand out and generate the reaction you’re looking for.

With that formula in mind, it’s easy to see why some people become hooked on the frothy top layer of attention. I can imagine it’s easy to share hot takes that you don’t even believe in. When you’re cosplaying as a racist, or a chauvinist, or an evangelist, the dissociation means you focus is purely on generating the metrics and watching the engagement (and, in many cases, the money, roll in).

We have the brand comms equivalents - a tag and comment competition can juice the numbers; a reactive meme or some “brand-ter” (god help us all) can generate cut through. But in our world, the vanity metrics must be connected to a deeper level of impact or effectiveness to be truly valuable.

Ideally you will have a couple of three (to quote Phil Leotardo) themes you keep coming back to that form the ballast of your publishing approach. Having that centrifugal force gives you a core base you can build from and allow you to mix the posts that do the numbers, and the posts that genuinely move the needle. As to when each approach is appropriate, that comes down to editorial judgement - and that’s something you only build up through repetition and experience.