Your ATTN Please || Friday, 26 September

What does it really mean to grow?

No, I’m not on some airy-fairy self-help bs. I’m talking about growing your content, follower count, and maybe even your confidence? While you may have read this spiel from other publications, you’ve never heard it from Jony Lee, bona fide social media superstar and Head of Growth at The Attention Seeker. You may want to take notes.

- Sophie Randell, Guest Editor ♡

PRESENTED BY THE ATTENTION SEEKER

0 —> 77K followers in 100 days? This could be you.

You’ve seen other businesses blow up online and thought:
“How the hell did they do that?”

You're not missing some secret magic formula. You’re just missing the right strategy. So let us help you build one (in just 1 day!).

At the Cohort Intensive, you’ll get:

✅ A full content strategy
✅ A repeatable system you can stick to
✅ A plan to grow your business through social

…all alongside the team with 3.2M+ followers & 100M monthly views.

We recently helped Tough Yarns with their social strategy. Three months later? They’ve got 77K+ followers across IG & TikTok.

Why shouldn’t your brand be next? 👇

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WHAT’S HAPPENING IN MARKETING TODAY?

US Govt makes f*cked up Pokémon vid, ChatGPT makes correct diagnosis & Sephora kids make life hell

DHS using Pokémon branding in a propaganda video?????

This is a dystopia indicator. Yesterday afternoon, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted one of the worst pieces of propaganda I’ve possibly seen in my lifetime. The video, captioned "Gotta Catch ‘Em All” features a montage of DHS officers, forcefully entering people’s homes and businesses, and leading them away in handcuffs, with scattered clips of imagery from the show - all to the actual Pokémon theme song.

What’s worse, the Pokémon Company is likely to roll over when it comes to legal action, according to former chief legal officer Don McGowan, who told IGN: "Even if I was still at the company I wouldn’t touch this, and I’m the most trigger-happy CLO I’ve ever met. This will blow over in a couple of days and they’ll be happy to let it".

Should you be using ChatGPT for medical advice?

Sounds like an insane question to ask, and you’d be right to instantly assume the right answer is "no". However an artist in Germany who liked to draw outdoors showed up at the hospital with a bug bite + symptoms that doctors couldn’t quite connect. After an entire month of unsuccessful treatments, the patient asked GPT, which diagnosed it as tularaemia. The chatbot was correct, and the case was later written up in a peer-reviewed medical study. At the same time, a man was admitted to hospital after the chatbot suggested he eat sodium bromide for three whole months, causing psychosis.

Vox says you should look at ChatGPT the way like you do Google. Searching for medical information on either platform is just as likely to lead you to the wrong conclusion as it is to point toward the correct diagnosis. The difference is you can actually have a conversation with a chatbot about your health, which can actually be super helpful and lead to better conversations with your doctor/ better care. Just don’t let it convince you to eat toxic pool cleaner.

The Sephora kids saga continues: “she looked 10 years old and her skin was burning.”

Jesus Christ. Imagine being a Sephora worker in this day and age. Well, you don’t have to, because The Guardian recently interviewed workers to hear their stories.

One named Jessica was working a shift at Sephora when a little girl who looked about 10 ran up to one of her colleagues, crying. “Her skin was burning,” she shared, “it was tomato red. She had been running around, putting every acid you can think of on the palm of her hand, then all over her face. One of our estheticians had to tend to her skin. Her parents were nowhere to be seen.” Read more of the horrors here.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

Hey, do you like YAP?

If so, why not share it with a friend? The more we grow this thing, the more resources we can put into making it awesome for you. Even if every subscriber invites just 1 person to YAP, we’ll meet our growth goal for 2025. So, you in?

DEEP DIVE

How to grow your content, your follower count - and your confidence

What does growth look like in content creation?

Does it mean blowing up your follower base? Maybe figuring out an effective content strategy that keeps engagement consistent? Or perhaps, is growth all about finding the confidence to just give sh*t ago and block out those embarrassment chemicals in your brain?

To get answers, I sat down with Jony Lee, a social superstar with over one million followers and the Head of Growth at The Attention Seeker (TAS). We chatted all about what “growth” looks like in both her role and personal brand, the effectiveness of creative risk-taking, and how perfectionism is a weed invading your personal brand garden.

Sup Jony! So, Head of Growth… what does that mean?

Honestly, it’s a wanky title for someone who likes talking to people, convincing them their stories are worth telling and igniting a flame for their social media presence. But I also have a very vast knowledge and understanding of social media and the intricacies of it. This means I love testing things so we can do bigger things and create better results.

So I talk to clients about how we can help them achieve attention, teach the team how to harness the power of social media, and then look ahead to the future for our team.

Does that involve your own personal brand too? And what draws people to that?

My role now requires me to build my brand so people can see another version of the company. TAS's brand is quite cheeky and more of an entertainment platform. Stan's is more from a business owner's perspective. And then my brand comes in from a marketing manager/social media lead kinda perspective, and talks more to younger marketers and students.

People follow me for the same reason they follow anyone else: the story they're telling. You could say people enjoy watching my personal content, which is like relationship-heavy, or they enjoy watching me talk sh*t to my boss, which is that underdog story. But at the end of the day, people follow along is because they relate, they see themselves in the scenario and they’re inherently entertained by that.

Is there fear or apprehension when you take creative risks, either for yourself or clients?

All the time. Not all of my content does well. And I think with the amount of reps I’ve done for both TAS and myself, I’m no longer scared to put out content. I still get upset from bad performance – albeit 10,000 views is “bad” to us – but it doesn't stop me from allowing myself to fail.

With clients, you’re building a relationship with another person, ideally to the point they’ll take on your insights and opinions. There's a lot of give and take, a little dance you have to play where you have to allow them to play out their concerns. And if they want to add boundaries, I have to create content within them so they can see we're happy to help them. And if it doesn't succeed, we’ve at least given them the space to fail, rather than just saying “no, I refuse to do that because this is how I think”. These are people with livelihoods, businesses and money, so you can’t force them into risks.

You’ve mentioned storytelling; what else is key to making content that sticks?

It boils down to a human truth and story structure. The human truth is something everyone can relate to, no matter your background. And story structure is just how humans best digest information. So for example, TAS’s content went off when it was about me being a brat towards my boss, asking for things that I thought I deserved, right?

There’s a human truth of hierarchy and being an underdog, which doesn't just manifest in a workplace. That manifests with your siblings, between a student and a teacher, with a parent and child. Our manifestation was me battling my boss in a story structure that is digestible for everyone. It’s essentially beginning-middle-end, with some nuance to it. Some people get confused because we say human truth, and they see being in an office as a Gen Z with a Millennial Boss, which isn’t always relatable. But the reason it went viral is because of the underdog position.

Is there anything you’d tell people on the fence about really leaning into social media spaces, either for their own personal brand or their business?

We all need to understand that social media’s still in its infancy. There’s so much more to come and it means we have time to fail and learn. If you’re a perfectionist, the whole landscape will have changed by the time you’ve mastered it. A lot of people make excuses, say they don't have time or that it’s not the “right” time to start. It's like, well, you just need to try first, if anything. And I get it. It's a scary world and you’re in front of a bunch of eyes, but you’ll quickly realise you have to fail and learn to become a bigger thing.

-Devin Pike, Copywriter

TREND PLUG

“It's a double entendre…”

Take it from a writer - you sound way smarter using small words you know over big words you don't.

You've definitely met people who default to the latter, using words like "obfuscate" and "pulchritudinous" with the overconfidence of a LinkedIn influencer meeting a normal person. On the other hand, there's a good chance you've been way outside your depth and used spiffy jargon - not to woo people, but as a survival instinct.

Either way, we've all been around pseudo-intelligence at some point - something mirrored by Payton King and Max Norman, who upped the pretentiousness and riffed off each other in an ironic, squeaky-voiced and nonsensical exchange:

"It's a double entendre in the most beautiful sense of the word, if you wanna take it from there," Max says to Payton, who replies "And I'd love to take it from there, it's a double entendre but yeah, it's still paradoxical."

The audio of their back-and-forth inspired a new TikTok trend, because for better or worse, internally or externally, we've all experienced fakery in English skills, haven't we? Whether we were surviving history class as a non-history buff or listening to someone add nothing to a convo with linguistical grace, everyone everywhere has tried looking smarter than they are for one reason or another.

How you can jump on this trend:

Grab this sound, put the camera on yourself (and a friend if you like), and lip-sync with the audio. Then, add on-screen text describing a situation where you or someone else use smarty-pants language that's either completely unnecessary - or, for survival purposes, absolutely necessary.

A few ideas to get you started:

• "Joining a client session where everyone knows the ins and outs of their whole life, but you're only just meeting them"

• "When you're covering for the sick copywriter who uses lots of big words"

• "Listening to the intern talk like they've got 20 years of experience"

- Devin Pike, Journalist & Copywriter 💜

FOR THE GROUP CHAT

😂Yap’s funniest home videos: Cookie Monster (real)
❤How wholesome: We all need a hug sometimes
🎧Soooo tingly: Mini Mic and Funky Slime
🍝What you should make for dinner tonight: Chicken Mozzarella Bake 🤤 

ASK THE EDITOR

I want to post more on LinkedIn but I always struggle with new topics to talk about. Any advice? - Samir

Hey Samir!

Instead of reinventing the wheel every time you sit down to post, you should have a few topics you continuously talk about. My suggestion is to come up with 3-5 relevant topics you want to focus on in your content. Then, brainstorm 3-5 subtopics under each of these.

Once you've done this, you'll have a pretty good list of things you can write about so you're never starting from a blank page. Another option is to just post about what you’re learning every day. This could be insights from conversations you’re having, podcasts you’ve listened to, or books you’ve read. If you do this, you will have endless places you can draw content inspiration from.

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

Not going viral yet?

We get it. Creating content that does numbers is harder than it looks. But doing those big numbers is the fastest way to grow your brand. So if you’re tired of throwing sh*t at the wall and seeing what sticks, you’re in luck. Because making our clients go viral is kinda what we do every single day.

WHAT DO YA THINK?

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