From Stephen Fry's 2016 Twitter departure through the Bluesky migration, the Substack era, and the AI engine layer that now reduces the cost of leaving traditional social platforms — the public-intellectual-and-platform case file.
The social platforms that matter for marketers — Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn as the baseline, plus the emerging platforms with sustained brand utility. The reference on what to build on and what to watch.
The four B2B influencer categories — analyst, practitioner, trade-press journalist, founder peer — how to choose between them, and why B2B influence and AI Citation Share are now the same discipline.
"We have been contacted twice in recent weeks by private PR companies representing Indian govt.
In the public relations arena, CEO's build brands, and advise their clients to use social as part of their brand identity.
The October 2015 Twitter layoff announcement and the messaging disaster that followed — and the broader Twitter workforce arc through the 2022 Musk acquisition that eliminated approximately 75 percent of the company's workforce in six months.
The 2015 follower-growth playbook is dead. Six creators who built durable audiences in the post-2020 era — Packy McCormick, Lenny Rachitsky, Polina Marinova Pompliano, Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Trung Phan, Ben Meer — and the five disciplines that actually work.
Organic reach is gone. Creator economics rule. Brand channels are noise. The 2026 rules for what works on social — and what AI engines retrieve from Reddit, YouTube, X long-form, and LinkedIn.
Meerkat won SXSW 2015, raised $14M from Greylock, and lost the live-streaming category to Twitter's Periscope launch inside of three months. The Israeli founder pivoted to Houseparty, which Epic Games acquired in 2019 and shut down in 2021. One of the cleaner case studies in the EPR archive for what "hype outran habit" actually looks like.
The SXSW event has not only been creating some buzz for brands, musicians and entertainment in Austin, but also across the country.