Welcome to Kinda Brief | July 22

Time to ⚠️ Be Real ⚠️ & News from July 13 - 21

July 22, 2022

Welcome to Kinda Brief

Hi Folks! Welcome to my first ever newsletter. My name is Cameron, and I’ve got almost a decade of social media and brand marketing experience. I read a lot of industry news to keep up to date on all of the platform changes, content trends, and cultural influences that could impact my work or inspire my next great idea. In the past, I’ve aggregated the highlights for my coworkers into a neat little newsletter. I was recently let go as part of a layoff – no hard feelings, it's part of doing business – but it dawned on me: other marketers might want this roundup in their inbox. 

And lo, Kinda Brief was born. I’ll give you a weekly-ish breakdown of the latest updates to social media platforms and highlight some interesting trends all with a healthy dose of snark. If you’re a brand or social marketer, don’t have time to sort through other newsletters padded down with ads from martech companies for unhelpful white papers, or just want to keep up with my musings on digital culture, then this is the newsletter for you. It’s the kinda stuff I like to think about when building a creative brief. 

Hope you find it inspirational and informational!  

Platform Updates

Instagram 

The Rest of Meta 

TikTok

Twitter

YouTube

LinkedIn 

Twitch 

Snap 

Reddit 

Culture Movers 

Creator Economy 

Gaming 

Streaming 

Can I Be Real with you? 

If you haven’t heard about the latest social media app, Be Real, here’s how it works: once per day, every user gets a notification that it’s “⚠️ time to be real ⚠️” prompting them to open the app and capture what they are doing at that moment. You’ll see your friends sleeping in late, working from the same corner of their apartment every day, staring down a mountain of dirty dishes, and enjoying nondescript strolls down the street. It’s a charming and disarming glimpse into your actual friends’ day-to-day routines that actually makes me feel more connected to people the way early Facebook did right as all of my high school friends ventured off to our respective college campuses. 

Smash cut over to Instagram. The one-time photo-sharing app turned influencer-focused shopping mall is trying so hard to make Reels happen (see Platform Updates above). “What’s the next Instagram?” has been a question since the app gained popularity. Back then, social apps rose and fell quickly, and the staying power of today’s ecosystem was not assumed. But conversations about replacing Instagram have felt more urgent recently, even in the patterns of behavior on the app itself. The photo dump trend harkens back to the days when Instagram was a straightforward photo-sharing tool. TikTok has all of Meta on the defensive. As their algorithms shift to favoring influencer content and discovery, we see less and less of the mundane but very real lives of our actual friends on their apps. 

Now the big question: is Be Real the Instagram Killer™? Probably not. The app’s a little buggy, and there’s no indication of a monetization plan (like it or not something an app needs to survive). It’s possible things at Be Real change quickly, and they grow into the champion we need to dethrone Zuckthulhu from our digital social lives, but I think they’re more the Snapchat Stories in the coal mine. Be Real’s format hints at the next communication modality we’ll see coming to the existing appigarchy. The push to update your 25 RightNow friends on TikTok could be a hook for getting you to open the app. Or, god forbid, Instagram could gobble this feature up too. 

For right now, though, brands are having fun with the front and back photo format of the app, so jump on that meme while you can.  

The Business 

Lil bit of business here at the end. My plan is to keep the weekly-ish updates letter free. But I’d be silly to start a project like this and not think about how I could monetize it eventually. In the future, I may start doing deeper dive breakdowns of trends (max one extra email per week, not trying to blow up your inbox). If those become a consistent thing, I’d move them behind a paywall. 

Right now, there are two tiers for this substack: 

  • Free - You’ll get the weekly-ish newsletter 

  • $5/month - Right now, just gratitude support for the newsletter

Thanks for reading my first issue. Looking forward to sharing more soon and getting your feedback.