Hello Reader,

It's so hot here in Portland that I dropped a note to our team in our Notion project management system about a client's website that inexplicably said something like,

"We'll need to discuss the section section, which is the section difference..."

It may have been worse, I have intentionally blocked it out. It was B-A-D. But needless to say, the "Portland office" of SM&Co hasn't been in the best frame of mind this week (listen, in the PNW we are in no way set up for 100F+ heat).

I've been sharing a lot with you about planning recently—it's been at the top of my mind because our "east coast office" (aka Andrea) is coming out west next week to work on planning for the rest of the year and into 2023 (wow, that sounds futuristic). I am very much in the "take your own medicine" school of thought, so we'll be looking at our framework (which you're never going to stop hearing about) and deciding on our areas of emphasis, which is exactly what we do with clients. You can't do all the things all at once—no matter what anyone tells you!

One thing that won't be a focus of our attention is the update to the Instagram algorithm. Perhaps you saw the it doesn't look at all like a hostage video that Instagram's CEO put out (though I prefer this parody version) explaining that while "photos will still be supported," video is their present and future.

This announcement has been all the talk in various business groups I'm in, and folks are scrambling to figure out how short videos fit into their marketing. (I truly can't imagine how hard this is for, say, small local restaurants who rely on beautiful food photography for social marketing.)

Here's the thing: I don't hate social media. I use it and enjoy it in my personal life and for making connections with colleagues.

However, I do hate social media making people feel forced to move away from their marketing strengths into something that is a poor fit for their businesses and message. And that's exactly what the scramble to adopt reels into marketing strategies is doing. If you aren't going to be best served by that format, it makes no sense to adopt it as a high effort tactic.

Again, I have clients who are amazing TikTok-ers (Is that a word? Can someone check in with the youth for me 😉?) because they are natural performers and the information they share lends itself to that platform's format AND their audience is on that platform. (Lots of qualifiers there, right?)

But even for those folks who are succeeding on those platforms (we love them—they have so much content to re-envision, re-think, and re-work), we always advise that they take the content from platform where they're naturally strong and translate that effort into a diversified plan of action to amplify their reach. For us, we believe the easiest and most effective way to amplify your content is with an SEO strategy to ensure you're reaching the 90% of people who start their research with a Google search.

That's why the message—your marketing movement—is what's most important, not the medium.

Have a wonderful week,

Sarah

P.S. I will not be monitoring my inbox as much in the coming week as usual, so if you reply to this message (thank you, as always for engaging) know I'll be delayed in connecting back.