# Transcript: Unlocking the Power of Community in the Post-Social Era

**Date:** March 18, 2026 · 10:00 PM  
**Session:** [Unlocking the Power of Community in the Post-Social Era](/sessions/2026-03-18/pp1162218-unlocking-the-power-of-community-in-the-post-social-era)

## Summary

Sara Wilson presents a framework for community-powered marketing in the 'post-social era,' where audiences retreat to private digital spaces she calls 'digital campfires.' She argues brands must prioritize relevance over reach by embedding themselves in organic communities defined by shared identity, using a methodology that transforms customers into advocates through recognition, participation, and authentic value delivery.

## Topics

`digital campfires` · `post-social era` · `community marketing` · `relevance vs reach` · `personal identity pipes` · `brand strategy` · `influencer marketing` · `customer advocacy`

## Key Takeaways

1. Audiences are moving from public social platforms to private 'digital campfires' - intimate spaces like group chats, Discord servers, and close friends feeds where brands aren't invited unless they earn their way in.
2. Relevance beats reach: Brands with high cultural relevance experience 6x more growth than those focused on ubiquity. Legacy brands spend on reach hoping relevance follows; challenger brands build relevance and reach follows.
3. Communities are 'Personal Identity Pipes' (PIPs) - containers for shared identity built on values, beliefs, and passions, not demographics. People define themselves through communities, not age or income.
4. The Brand Relevance Equation: Get clarity on what you stand for and who you're for, find where those communities already gather, then show up with value that invites participation over promotion.
5. The Community Powered Flywheel works when people feel recognized → rewarded → claim it as theirs → participate → amplify to others. This creates compounding growth from word-of-mouth on steroids.

## Full Transcript

The media landscape today is chaos. Algorithms are unpredictable—a post gets 10,000 views one day, 200 the next. Platforms can't decide their identity, and paid ads reach fewer people who care less.

One major force drives this mess: people didn't stop engaging or buying. They're doing it in spaces brands can't see—private digital spaces where the conversation moved and brands weren't invited.

In January, Instagram's head Adam Mosseri confirmed what I'd observed: the primary way people share on Instagram now is in DMs, not public posts. This shift from public to private happened gradually but fundamentally.

Back in 2019, I noticed young audiences' time on social platforms stopped climbing. Growth flattened. I asked: if they're not here, where are they going? I saw people gravitating to smaller, quieter, more private spaces.

I named these spaces 'digital campfires' in Harvard Business Review in 2020. Three forms: private messaging with close friends, micro-community subreddits, and shared-experience livestreams. Different flavors, same intimacy and barrier to entry.

I thought I was naming a moment. Turns out I was naming an era—the post-social era. People weren't just switching platforms; they opted out of the whole performance game. Social media became an empty airport terminal.

Digital campfires aren't just where people hang out. They're where they decide what to buy, care about, and trust. When conversation moves somewhere brands can't follow, that's a business problem, not just marketing.

When attention moves, the way we get it must change. It's not about getting in front of people anymore—it's about mattering to them. If what you show never enters their private conversations, it didn't matter.

We've been trained to treat getting in front of as many people as possible as the goal. But a spike that doesn't translate into conversation or conversions is a sugar high—it burns off fast.

Tracksuit measured brand health for 1000s of brands heading into the 2025 Super Bowl. Many big brands spent years doing exactly what the old playbook says: get in front of as many people as possible. Here's what it got them.

Lay's, the ubiquitous American potato chip brand, is trending down in awareness, consideration, and usage. Nine out of ten Americans know Lay's—down from last year. Only six out of ten would buy it, and that number is falling.

Bud Light's story is similar: awareness, consideration, and usage all down. Three out of four Americans know Bud Light, but only one in four would consider buying it. Even Apple Music, already on millions of phones, sees declining awareness and usage.

Now look at brands with momentum. Liquid Death, the anti-wellness water brand launched in 2019, has awareness and usage both up. This is water in a can, yet people choose it over decades-old brands.

LMNT, hydration packets for the optimization-obsessed, shows every metric moving up: awareness, consideration, usage. The story isn't big brand bad, small brand good. It's that brands in decline invested in ubiquity; brands with momentum invested in relevance.

Legacy brands spend on reach hoping relevance will follow. Challenger brands build relevance first, and reach follows. Data backs this: brands with high cultural and personal relevance experience up to six times more growth than brands with lower relevance.

Liquid Death's marketing manager said: you wouldn't scale anything if you don't trust the relevance of what you got. They put out an open Reddit call for unfiltered reviews, published every one—positive and negative—on billboards and TV. It became one of the year's most talked-about campaigns.

The reach was massive, but it only worked because the relevance came first. Relevance is the alternative to reach. It's what makes reach mean anything at all. So what makes something relevant? Recognition—someone seeing themselves in what you made.

I don't remember who was loudest. I remember who made me feel seen. For Halloween, I dressed as a jar of Bubbies pickles. I emailed the brand for a high-res label. They sent it, plus free pickles, and the CEO invited me to their superfan group for early access to new varieties.

That's recognition. I cared enough about their brand to dress as it, and they cared enough about me to treat me like I mattered. I didn't just get free pickles—I got invited in. Bubbies went from something I grabbed off the shelf to an extension of my identity.

Recognition turns products into extensions of personal identity, which turns customers into advocates. That principle scales. Nobody has proven this better than Taylor Swift, who built an entire ecosystem around making fans feel seen through Easter eggs and inside jokes.

Taylor rewards fans for paying close attention. When they connect the dots, it validates that their attention mattered. During the Eras Tour, fans made friendship bracelets—not Taylor's idea, but she gave them the raw material: references and inside jokes. They built a whole culture around it.

Most brands run a one-way broadcast. Taylor built a participatory universe people want to be part of. The result: billions in revenue, not because she's everywhere, but because her fans feel like she made it for them.

If relevance is what matters, where do you find it? August 2013, hot afternoon in New York City, at Condé Nast. I'd just joined Facebook to run lifestyle partnerships across Facebook and Instagram. Instagram had been acquired a year earlier.

I spent time scrolling Instagram—this was my job—trying to figure out where the opportunity was. I kept noticing the same pattern: fashion content, more and more. Designers, editors, models, stylists—not in huge numbers yet, but early adopters were there. Something was brewing.

Fashion community was letting people in for the first time, not through glossy magazine spreads but through filtered square photos on their phones. Models in half hair and makeup, garment bags in hallways—the beautiful mess fashion had always kept hidden.

This wasn't just a content opportunity. This was a community forming in real time, finding its home on Instagram. I realized: if we showed up for this community and helped them amplify what made them them, they wouldn't just use Instagram—they'd claim it as their own.

That's why I was at Vogue. I had no business being in fashion—my first interview, I showed up with my dress inside out and backwards. But Vogue was the gatekeeper. If we got their blessing, the fashion community would follow.

We went with one question: how can Instagram show up for Vogue in a way that actually matters to them? The September issue was dropping—fashion's Super Bowl. The Vogue social team wanted to blow it up, make it more participatory and culturally fluent.

What emerged: Anna Wintour had never once appeared on Vogue's own Instagram. That was about to change. For the first time, Anna appeared on Instagram reading the September issue with a single caption: show us your Vogue.

Within 24 hours, that image went viral. People started copying it—celebrities, influencers, regular fans—all posting with their September issues using the hashtag. It became a meme, made the nightly news, and the press picked it up everywhere.

But this wasn't a one-off. We doubled down. We showed up at Fashion Weeks with giant screens showing Instagram themes so the fashion community could literally see itself reflected back. We gave fashion fans backstage access through partnerships with Diane Von Furstenberg and Carly Kloss.

We teamed up with the CFDA and created an award for Fashion Instagramer of the Year, given out at their annual awards. The message we hit over and over: we see you, we get you, we're here for you.

Twelve months later, Vogue featured nine Instagram-savvy models on the September issue cover with the headline 'The Insta Girls.' You can't pay for that cover. Instagram didn't pay or pitch it. Vogue decided Instagram was part of the fashion world's story.

During that time, Instagram grew from 110 million to 370 million users. Was this strategy entirely responsible? Obviously not. But by showing up for the fashion community and making Instagram undeniably relevant to their lives, we reverse-engineered social sharing, UGC, organic press, and virality.

At the time, I didn't have language for what was happening, but the pattern was clear: relevance is not something you create out of thin air. It already exists inside communities. Your job is to find it and plug into it.

A community is a container for shared identity. People in a community are united by a shared piece of their personal identity—their values, beliefs, interests, desires, even fears. I call these Personal Identity Pipes, or PIPs, because they're the things that make people who they are.

Nancy Chen posted on TikTok asking: where are my Fortnite girlies at? She was tired of playing only with her husband and wanted to find other women. That video went viral. Thousands of women commented saying they had the exact same problem.

Nancy created a Discord server. Within a year, it grew to 25,000 members calling themselves Girly Squad. Nancy started it, but she's not the center—the members are. In a single week, they send over 30,000 messages and log 4,000 voice minutes.

They don't just talk about gaming. They share art, music, career advice, and help each other with college admissions. Members meet in Discord and fly across the country to meet in person. They also co-created a Fortnite game that became the number one most-played globally.

When I asked Nancy why that post took off, she said: a lot of girls say we feel seen as a community. That makes sense. When a community sees you, you start to see yourself through it. Belonging to it becomes part of how you see yourself.

Communities are everywhere. Van lifers: people who've chosen freedom over fixed addresses, trading stability for life on the road. Van life isn't a housing choice—it's a statement about who they are and how they want to live.

FIRE movement—Financial Independence, Retire Early. That's a community too, united not by age or income but by values around money and freedom. It's not just a financial strategy; it's an identity built around autonomy and control.

Hobby horses: often young women and girls who do competitive show jumping and dressage with handcrafted stick horses. It started in Finland and now spans 22 countries. To outsiders, it looks like playing with toys. To them, it's an athletic discipline, a craft, and a community.

What makes communities communities isn't size. It's that belonging to them becomes a part of how people see themselves. That's why I call communities Personal Identity Pipes—they're containers for personal identity. Not random groups; containers for shared identity.

Horowitz Research and Vox Media surveyed 800 young people ages 14-24. They found a disconnect: 66% said society defines them based on demographic labels like age, gender, income. But 81% want to define themselves through passions, hobbies, and beliefs—not demographics, through identity.

Where do people live out those passions, beliefs, interests? In communities. If you want to prioritize attention, loyalty, and growth today, prioritize relevance over reach. And communities are where relevance lives. People you're trying to reach are defining themselves through their communities.

You cannot just walk into a community and start selling. Communities have rules, often unspoken. They smell inauthenticity from a mile away. The same passion that binds them makes them fierce protectors of what they've built. Get it wrong and they'll let you and everyone else know—loudly, publicly, and fast.

Remember the Kendall Jenner Pepsi protest ad from 2017? Pepsi tried to tap into activist culture, the energy of people marching for real causes. But instead of showing up for one specific community, they collapsed civil rights, protest culture, and activism into a single soft drink commercial.

They treated distinct, deeply held identities as interchangeable groups. Every single one of those communities felt it. The backlash was instant and brutal. Pepsi pulled the ad in 24 hours. Pepsi didn't fail because they showed up. They failed because they showed up to take, not to give.

They tried to extract cultural energy without contributing anything meaningful back. That's the mistake. Communities can tell the difference. So what does showing up the right way look like? You earn your way in by contributing something valuable to them.

Most brands don't know what valuable looks like. They think it's discounts, coupons, points, free shipping. Those are fine, but they're not what earns you a place in a community. Communities aren't built around transactions—they're built around identity.

The value that actually earns legitimacy isn't what you give people. It's how you make them feel about who they are when you show up in a way that reflects their values, passions, worldview. Something clicks. I call it the OMG, that's so me effect.

That feeling of 'you get me, you see me, you know me'—that's what earns you a place in community. Your job as a brand is to trigger that effect. You don't get there by talking about yourself. You get there by bringing value on their terms, not yours.

How do you figure out what value on their terms means? I realized there's a formula: the Brand Relevance Equation. It has three parts. First, get clarity: what you stand for and who you're for. Second, find community: where those people already spend time. Third, invite participation: show up in ways that invite participation over promotion.

When you do all three, something powerful happens. People feel seen. They participate. They bring others with them. That momentum creates a flywheel—one that generates attention, loyalty, and growth. I call it the Community Powered Flywheel because it's literally powered by the community.

It's the same flywheel we built at Instagram by showing up for the fashion community. It's the same pattern among the most magnetic brands today. When a brand applies the Brand Relevance Equation and shows up for a community with value truly relevant to them, here's what happens.

First, the community feels recognized—they feel seen and known. That OMG, that's so me effect kicks in. Then, when you deliver value in a way that matters to them (not you but them), they feel rewarded for giving you their attention.

When they feel rewarded, they claim it as theirs. They take ownership. Once they've claimed it, they participate—they create with it, engage with it, make it an expression of who they are. And when something becomes part of how they express their identity, they amplify. They tell others, they share, they bring people in.

This brings in new people who feel recognized, and the cycle repeats. That's the flywheel. Once it starts spinning, it doesn't just sustain itself—it compounds. Let me show you what this looks like in practice with two examples from two brands at different growth stages.

Brightland, an olive oil company, launched January 2022 with maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars. Most of it tied up in inventory. Their marketing budget was a few hundred bottles of olive oil. That's it. They were breaking into one of the most commoditized categories imaginable.

But they had clarity. They stood for high-quality Spanish olive oil that's fun to use, not precious. More importantly, who they were for: food creators—large and small—people who don't just cook but build identity around that. Then they found community: where those people were hanging out.

Instead of going everywhere at once, they started with one tight-knit subculture and then expanded. They decided: barbecue first, then bakers, then recipe developers. Creating density in those different sub-communities before moving on. Then they invited participation.

Two months before launch, they started seeding product in those communities—not broadly. They concentrated those bottles inside one community at a time. The goal: feel inescapable in that space. They chose a mix of big and small, not based on follower counts but on who mattered within that community.

They slid into creators' DMs like a friend would, asking: How much easier would your life be if olive oil already came with a squeeze bottle? Then they sent them the product and asked them to use it however they wanted.

When everyone is connected, communities really start seeing the same brand over and over. It stops feeling like marketing and starts feeling like culture. So what happened? The flywheel started to spin. The community felt recognized. Brands don't usually pay attention to smaller creators—at least they weren't at that time.

They felt valued. The product was genuinely great, and the squeeze bottle made better content. So the community claimed it. Creators used the product in their next video, showed it in their kitchen. They participated—they started creating with it organically. They amplified: told their audiences about it, brought others in.

More people got more packages, more inbound requests came flooding in. The impact: $100,000 revenue in the first week with zero paid ads. Now available in all those retail locations. Now the fifth largest olive oil brand in the US, on track for $140 million.

That's the flywheel in motion—not because they outspent the category, but because they embedded themselves inside a community that already cared about cooking and gave that community something worth participating in. Now let's look at a brand at a different stage facing a similar strategic choice.

Poppi, a prebiotic soda brand. In 2021, they'd just closed their Series A—$13.5 million—in summer. They were scaling but still resource-constrained. At that moment, they faced a choice: go broad and try to reach young women ages 18-24 everywhere, or go deep inside one identity-rich community.

They chose deep. First, they got clarity. Poppi wasn't trying to be a better soda for everyone. They were building for a very specific identity: young women who care about wellness, social rituals, and how they show up in the world—not just what they drink, but what it says about them.

Find community. The question became: where does that identity already live? Not broadly across Gen Z, but inside sororities—one of the most visible, ritual-driven, and socially amplified communities in the country. And importantly, sororities already had momentum. Rush week was exploding on TikTok with millions watching.

Poppi didn't create attention—they stepped into a place where it already existed. They didn't just target young women. They found where young women were already expressing identity together. Then invite participation: instead of running ads at college students, they built a soda ambassador program.

Thousands of students applied—not because they were targeted, but because they wanted to be part of it. They didn't treat sororities like a one-off activation. They invested in them over time, turning them into both distribution and insight. Over time, joining a sorority meant discovering Poppi.

You could believe it because suddenly it was everywhere. Poppi integrated into big days: game days, tailgates, philanthropy events—the moments that actually matter in this community. They didn't interrupt sorority life. They wove into it. So here's what happened: the community felt recognized. This wasn't college marketing—this felt like it was for them.

They felt rewarded: free product, yes, but more importantly, ownership. So they claimed it—made Poppi part of their rituals. They participated: created content, hosted events, integrated it into campus life. Then they amplified: organic chatter, organic press. This is the flywheel in motion at growth stage.

The impact: 7,000+ students apply to the ambassadors every year. Revenue grew 5x from $100 million to $500 million. Just in one event: 28% sales lift from one single campus activation. And they were acquired for $5 billion. I only put that up there because this stuff actually makes for better business.

That's what happens when relevance really kicks into overdrive. Brightland and Poppi didn't just blast out messages and hope for the best. They got clear on what they stand for and who they're for. They found the communities where those people already gather, and they went all in.

They showed up in ways that made their people feel seen, not sold to. That's the equation that gets the flywheel spinning. Once it starts, it doesn't just sustain itself—it builds. When people feel seen, they don't just remember you. They talk about you, they share you.

They bring you into rooms you could never enter on your own—not because you asked, but because they want to. That feeling of being truly seen is electric. I think of it as word of mouth on steroids, because it turns word of mouth into a growth engine.

One last example that always makes me laugh. Strava is for runners, cyclists, hikers—people who don't just exercise but who identify as runners, cyclists, as people who move. Strava didn't build utility; they nurtured a community around movement as identity.

I came across this TikTok from a young runner in the UK named Lauren. She created a slideshow of screenshots of her Strava run routes, each one with a hilarious, relatable title: 'searching for endorphins, got cramps instead,' 'attempted to break my self-loathing,' 'depressive spiral stomach hookup this morning and she chose violence.'

Nobody paid her. There was no campaign. She just felt so seen by this app that she made it an extension of her personality. Thousands of people liked it, commented on it, shared it—completely organically. That's what relevance has the power to do.

You don't have to buy every impression. You don't have to manufacture every moment. When you make people feel seen, they become your marketing. That's not just a nicer way to do marketing—it's a better growth model.

Let me bring you back to where I started: the group chat, the DM thread, the 'you have to see this' text at 1 AM—the rooms that brands cannot enter. You don't get into those rooms by talking louder. You don't buy your way in.

You get in by being worth bringing along. And the only way to become worth bringing along is to stop trying to reach everyone and start truly mattering to someone—a specific someone, a community of someones who share a piece of their identity, who have a fire already burning.

That's how you get brought into the room—not by being louder, but by being theirs. So what do I want to tell you? Get clear on what you stand for and who you're for. Then ask yourself: what community are we worth showing up for?

Answer that, and show up with value again and again. You won't have to chase attention anymore—you'll earn it, and it'll grow. Because reach is something you have to keep paying for, but relevance is something that pays you back.

This is a matchbook. It says: find your fire. I made it as a reminder that somewhere out there, there's a fire already burning. Now it's time to go and find yours.

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*Source: stt · Language: en · Model: anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-5*

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