I believe even the hardest things, misunderstood tools, complex stories, or painful experiences, can be turned into a force for good. That’s what drew me to social media: a space that’s often written off as shallow or overwhelming, but when used well, can move people to act, connect deeply, and create real change.

After a decade working on hundreds of social media campaigns, I’ve seen both sides of it. The impact side and the frustrating side. I’ve watched leaders pour time and resources into social without results, feeling like they’re shouting into the void.

I often hear:
"Social isn't working for us."
 "This is so frustrating."
 "You're my last stop before I throw in the towel."

That’s exactly why I founded Cause Fokus—a social-first thought leadership agency that helps executives and founders step confidently into their story, build trust, and turn their influence into impact.

We use empathy-driven strategy, grounded in human psychology, to get you in the room with the people who matter most to your mission. I’ve had the privilege of leading social for U.S. policymakers, international NGOs, small businesses, professional athletes, artists, and global change-makers.

And yes, I’m very proud of my Swedish roots, so you might hear me talk a lot about quality over quantity, fika breaks ☕️, and clarity in everything I do. (That’s also why "fokus" is spelled with a k. 😉)

3 ways to work with me:

- Subscribe to my free newsletter
- Hire me as a fractional consultant
- Hire our team for LinkedIn content strategy & support

CASE STUDY: Turning Influence into Opportunity

A CEO of a patient advocacy foundation came to me with a big problem: no traction from their company’s LinkedIn ad campaigns. Cold outreach was falling flat. They were losing momentum with healthcare partners—and couldn’t afford to keep spinning their wheels.

Our solution:

We activated the Chief Development Officer’s personal LinkedIn presence.
In his own voice, we posted 3–4 times a week, spoke directly to the pain points of ideal partners, engaged in strategic conversations, and sent warm, personalized messages to his top-tier contact list.

In just 6 months:
- His content reached 100,000+ impressions
- Profile views from key decision-makers jumped 508%
- Connection acceptance rate hit 60%
- A major lapsed partner re-engaged and said: “I love what you’re doing on LinkedIn. I can tell the organization is taking a turn for the better. Let’s chat.”

Because when the right people trust you, the right doors start opening.
Trust is currency. Let’s spend it well!

Brynne Krispin

One year ago today, I received this email from LinkedIn inviting me into the Top Voices program.

It's been a journey!!

But here's what I want you to know:

The badge didn't change anything.

Not my credibility, influence, or ability to connect with the right people.

All of that was built in the years before the badge ever showed up.

Every single post I published was a tiny experiment.

An experiment to figure out who I am. What I actually believe. The message I want to clearly communicate.

And an experiment to see what resonates. What sticks. What makes people stop scrolling and say, "Yes, that."

Some posts flopped. Some I cringe at even now! Some got 3 likes and a comment from my dad. 🙃

But every single one gave me data.

Data about my voice.
Data about my audience.
Data about what it looks like to keep showing up, even when it feels like no one's watching.

If you're just starting out, remember this:

→ You don't need a badge to have influence.
→ You don't need permission to share your ideas.
→ You don't need to wait until you've "figured it out."

The figuring out happens in the posting.

Every time you hit publish, you learn something. About yourself. About your audience. About what you're actually here to say.

So if you've been sitting on the sidelines, waiting for some sign that you're ready...

This is it.

Start experimenting. Start failing. Start learning.

The badge is just a byproduct. The real win is becoming the kind of person who shows up anyway.

What's one thing you've learned from posting that surprised you? 👀

Your book: polished, well-researched, years in the making.
Your keynote: compelling, rehearsed, standing ovations.
Your decades of experience: undeniable.
Your LinkedIn presence... 

😬😬😬

If this hits a little too close to home, you're not alone!

So many brilliant leaders have built incredible bodies of work, but when it comes to showing up online, it feels awkward. Unnatural. Like you're suddenly forgetting how to do the thing you've done your whole career.

You don't need to become a content creator. You just need a strategy that actually fits how you think and work.

That's exactly what we're building together in the Thoughtful Leaders Cohort starting Feb. 4!

Small group. No fluff. Just a clear path from invisible to in-demand — on your terms.

We have a few spots left, and I'd love for you to join us!! 
📓 Sign up: https://lnkd.in/eza5za4r

I've seen one LinkedIn post lead to a multi-million dollar corporate grant for a nonprofit. Here's exactly how it happened:

A subject matter expert at a nonprofit posted a niche, data-driven piece about a new initiative they were rolling out. I remember her asking, "Do you think people will actually care about all these nerdy details?" 

I said: "Yes! The nerdier the better."

She walked through why they were investing in it, shared some of the candid conversations that led to the decision, and made a case for why it was the right move.

It wasn't viral content, but it was strategic content. The post got around 10 likes.

But then a World Economic Forum employee saw that post. Sent her a DM: "This aligns so well with our conference theme. Would you be open to submitting a proposal to speak at WEF?"

She said yes.

A few months later, she gave a powerful talk on exactly what her post laid out to a room full of global leaders and policy experts.

A major corporate foundation was in the room, and they asked to meet. 
After a series of conversations and proposals, they funded a comprehensive study. 

Then another grant to develop initiatives with a local government. 
Then a third grant to support practical interventions.

One post → One DM → Millions in funding.

Now, you might say: "That's just luck. You can't plan for that."

And you're right — you can't fully predict these moments.

But you can increase the odds.

You can stop posting randomly and start positioning strategically. You can ask yourself: Who are the game-changers who need to see my content? What do they care about? What would make them stop scrolling and say, "We need this person in the room"?

Connect with them. Engage with them. Post for them.

The more you post with intention, the more you turn random into predictable.

You can wait for the right moment to find you.

Or you can create the conditions for it to happen.

What's one opportunity that came from a post you didn't expect?

I'm extremely picky about who I connect with on LinkedIn. It's one of the top questions clients ask me: 

"Should I accept every connection request? What's your process?"

My take: There's no one-size-fits-all answer. Your strategy depends on your goals, your capacity, and who you're trying to reach.

But if it's helpful, here's exactly how I filter connection requests:

First, I look at their profile. I consider:

→ What their headline says about what they do.
→ If they've posted recently, and what they're sharing.
→ Whether their content makes me think.

Then I ask myself a few questions:

→ Could I realistically see myself having a strategic conversation with this person?
→ Are they sharing ideas that challenge me or teach me something?
→ Would I want to work with them someday — as a collaborator, client, or peer?
→ Or does their profile scream "I'm going to pitch you something in 30 seconds"?

If the answer to that last one is yes, I pass.

My feed is my learning environment. My network is my community. And I want both to feel like spaces where real conversations happen.

Your approach might be totally different, and that's okay.

Maybe you're in growth mode and want to cast a wide net.
Maybe you're more open to serendipity.
Maybe you have more bandwidth than I do.

The goal isn't to copy my process, but to develop one that truly serves you.

For me, a curated network is about intention.

What's your filtering process? I'm curious how others approach this. 👀

Excited to welcome these newest members of our team!! 🎉

We're growing! Meet the newest members of our team! 🎉

👋 Daren Colbert – Ghostwriter
Daren helps CEOs and senior leaders translate hard-earned leadership lessons, strategic insights, and culture-building beliefs into LinkedIn posts, newsletters, blogs, and email campaigns that build trust and drive real business outcomes. He blends narrative craft with direct-response discipline to make leaders sound unmistakably like themselves—only sharper. Off the clock, he’s a husband and proud dad who still believes stories can change outcomes when they’re told with honesty and heart.

👋 Alex Piscatelli – Content Strategist
Alex is a social media strategist and creator based in San Francisco. Her media and storytelling experience ranges from newsrooms such as E! News and San Diego’s public media station, to nonprofit clients Saga Education, It Gets Better, and more. She is currently a graduate student researching grief and representation in media and popular culture, and writes and podcasts at griefandmedia.com.

👋 Max Moclock – Outbound Specialist
Max is a brand strategist who helps organizations cut through the noise. He’s guided everyone from federal agencies launching mission-critical initiatives to consumer retailers building breakthrough digital experiences–all focused on one thing: crystallizing go-to-market strategies that deliver results. When he’s not sharpening brands, he's throwing punches in kickboxing, playing ice hockey, or practicing piano.

We are beyond thrilled to have Daren, Alex, and Max on board as we continue to help leaders turn their expertise into impact. Help us welcome them to the team!

I ended the year with 72 drafts sitting in my "to post" folder. 🙃 
Here's exactly what I'm doing to turn that pile of drafts into actual published posts this year:

1. Turn on my Olivia Dean playlist.
   
2. Open my custom AI agent (the same model we use for our Builder clients).
   
3. Drop all 72 drafts in.
   
4. Upload my 2026 priorities doc so my agent knows what I want to focus on this year.
   
5. Ask it to rate each draft based on two things (using a scoring sheet):
   → How aligned is it with my goals?
   → How close is it to being done?

6. Move the ranked drafts into my content calendar.
    
7. Block 1 hour each week to finalize and schedule.

That's it.

I don't have time to waste staring at a blank page. No more "what should I post today?" panic. No more letting good ideas collect dust.

The goal isn't to post more.

It's to post smarter with intention, aligned to where I'm headed.

If you've got a graveyard of drafts haunting your notes app, give this a try and start building on what you already have.

What's one draft you've been sitting on that deserves to finally see the light? 

p.s. We're accepting 2 more Builder clients Feb. 1. Message me if you need help with this!

In the late 1700s, a scientist discovered hydrogen, calculated the Earth's density, and laid the groundwork for Ohm's Law.

Almost no one knew.

His name was Henry Cavendish, and he hated being seen. He rarely published. When he did, it was quiet and incomplete. His genius stayed hidden in notebooks until after he died.

Compare that to Einstein — another introvert, but one who understood that for ideas to matter, they have to reach people.

Two brilliant minds. Two very different legacies.

When I first read about Cavendish, I got a pit in my stomach. Because for years, I was the same way. Content to stay behind the scenes, ghostwriting for others, believing the work should speak for itself.

It took me a long time to realize the quiet cost of remaining behind the scenes.

Full article below. ↴

In the late 1700s, there lived a man who changed science forever, and almost no one knew it. His name was Henry Cavendish, and he hated being seen. He

Open article: The Cost of Remaining Behind the Scenes by Brynne Krispin • 4 min read

One of our writers just turned a Slack message into a viral post.

A client sent over a rough idea: "I want a post about supply chain delays in my industry. I've been hearing the wait times are getting out of control."

He mentioned a few data points he wanted included. A case study he remembered hearing about. He knew the angle — these delays are holding up growth and threatening long-term stability.

Some writers would've taken that brief and started typing.

Ours didn't.

She built a deep research framework:

→ Current lead times across multiple product categories
→ Industry reports on what's causing the delays
→ How these bottlenecks impact downstream projects and infrastructure
→ The specific case study and what actually happened
→ The broader implications for the industry's future

14 pages of research later, she had a comprehensive deep dive.

Then she summarized it. Drafted the post. Revised it several times.

And here's the step most people skip:

She ran the final post back against the original research to check for content decay — making sure nothing got diluted, no context was lost, and every statement still aligned with the source material.

The client posted it with minimal edits, and it took off.

Why? Because it was SO specific.

Not "5 tips for better leadership."
Not "Here's how to scale your business."

It was the exact frustration his audience was already feeling, articulated in a way they hadn't seen before.

This is what we train our writers to do.

They're constantly looking for signals. 

Picking up on the things you mention in passing. Researching what your audience is saying when you're not in the room and what keeps them up at night.

They think like detectives, not order-takers.

And in a world drowning in generic AI content, that's the difference between getting scrolled past and stopping someone mid-scroll.

Depth is your differentiator. Lean into it!

Arthur Brooks is a happiness expert. He started with anxiety and depression.

I picked up his book at a used bookstore a few weeks ago ("Build the Life You Want"), and it completely reframed how I think about expertise. 

Brooks didn't write because he had all the answers. 
He wrote because he was desperate to find them. 
His expertise was born out of his own struggle.

This resonated deeply with me, because so many of the founders and executives I work with are waiting to share their ideas until they feel "ready." They're waiting until the framework is polished, the book is finished, or they finally feel like a real expert.

But here's what I've learned after working with 50+ experts: the ones who resonate most aren't the ones who've "arrived." They're the ones still in motion — still learning, still figuring it out, still willing to say "I don't have all the answers yet."

That honesty makes you more trustworthy, not less. Your audience doesn't need you to be perfect. They need you to be a few steps ahead, willing to share what you're learning along the way.

So if you've been sitting on the sidelines, waiting until you feel like an expert... you already are one. You just haven't started talking about it yet.

What's something you're still learning that you could also be teaching?

Becoming an Expert - Brynne Krispin

Marketer with 14 years experience in digital marketing.

I left behind my 9-to-5 job as a product marketer to embark on a new journey – building my own product. 

The first product was a failure. I had to understand what to do as a marketer in a startup (meaning zero budget), where to invest my time, and how important it is to understand the customers and their JTBD.

However, it was a massive success because this is how Socialinsider came out. While I struggled with the first product and didn't want to let go, we already had a product market fit for Socialinsider.

Today, I wear multiple hats: an entrepreneur, a builder, a data-driven marketer, a wife, and a mother. I'm addicted to psychology and obsess with understanding the 'why' of every customer's move. 

Socialinsider combines social intelligence, analytics, and listening into one single tool. It provides a wide range of metrics and insights from brand to campaign levels.

Socialinsider is being used by top companies such as: Booking.com, Mitsubishi Electric, Volvo, Rolls-Royce, Honda, and Samsung. 

Wanna talk? 
Ping me at adina@socialinsider.io.

Adina Jipa

Social media trends 2026 👀

We talked with 13 social media pros to share their social media trends and prediction for 2026. 

In a world full with AI and AI content how brands can still generate value and reach out their audience? 

Here’s how:
1. Private communities
2. Human authenticiy 
3. Social-first episodic content
4. More BTS content
5. Creators is measured by outcomes, not awareness. 
6. Nostalgia wins hearts
7. Social SEO influences how brands get found by the right people
8. UGC, but real voices. 

So social media leaders, are ready to adopt these trends into your strategy?

 Thanks everyone, for being part of this Tom Miner, Renée Shaw, Georgia Gonzalez, Carmen Collins, Michael Mims, Diya Banerjee, Rhianne Lee, Jessica Mann, Brianne Cail, Jenn Crim, Arina Lazăr, Dorien Morin-van Dam 🙌

Link in comments to get the full article 👇

Adina  Jipa

Social media analytics data & industry reports | Co-founder & CMO at Socialinsider

Social media trends 2026

After a 2-week break, doing LEGO, wrapping Christmas presents, and enjoying some winter sun in Doha, let’s start 2026 with a live session.

This Thursday, I'm going live with SocialDay ® to talk about something many teams still struggle with: how to use data to actually prove social media ROI.

🕑 Thursday, 2 PM GMT

We’ll show how to turn messy, complex social data into clear stories that make sense to leadership, and influence real decisions.

No vanity metrics, no surface-level reporting. Just practical ways to connect social performance to business impact.

This one’s especially for senior social media marketers who want to:
- go deeper with their data
- present results with confidence
- make their work impossible to ignore

See you on Thursday 👋
👉 Registration link in the comments

What OKRs we set for our social media 👇
Objective: social media is becoming a traction channel
KR: Increase % of customers influenced by social media from 12% (2025’s average) to 20% EOY.

That’s it.
That’s the only number I’d like to see in our marketing reports.

Why?
1. A single revenue-tied OKR forces prioritization: Effort shifts from “posting more” → posting what moves the needle.
2. It aligns social with the business impact.
3. Social media is no longer a support channel.

One OKR ≠ one metric.

In order to make this happen, our SMM has to track these metrics monthly:
- impressions
- engagement
- followers growth
- mentions

Both on our company pages and my profile.

But these are more supporting metrics for the business objective.

Which social media OKRs has your CMO prioritized for 2026?

TikTok views are wild these days. 

Over the past few days, many users experienced outages:
- zero views
- broken feeds
- reports not working
- content not loading

If your analytics looks scary this week, it wasn’t just you. 

I did a quick research on some of my fav brands on TikTok, such as: Empire State Building, drinkpoppi, BMW USA, and many of them have registered a decrease in views in the last week. 

However, when comparing the overall monthly performance, the total number of views is increasing. 

What does this mean for your monthly reporting:
➤ Don’t judge performance based on one or two weird days
➤ Avoid making big strategic decisions during outages
➤ Keep posting if your schedule allows, consistency still matters
➤ Screenshot “anomalies” (for your sanity and reports)
➤ Compare your monthly performance with your competitors. Are these changes in views or engagement happening to them as well? 
➤ Historical performance helps you understand how your brand performs.


Even if platform-native data feels glitchy, being able to compare what’s happening now with your historical performance makes all the difference. When you can zoom out, patterns become clearer, and panic becomes 👉 optional. 

What are your best practices for reporting when platforms or algorithms go crazy?

Why our OKRs system failed in 2025 👇
(intentionally choosing the word ‘failed’ here to emphasize the fact that the process of setting up OKRs is not as easy as it looks)

We decided to use OKRs in our company for team alignment and as part of the company's OS.

How we started: we read the book and debated whether we should use the ‘Scaling up’ methodology, thanks Teodora Rădulescu for the recommendation.

We chose to stay with the OKRs framework for its simplicity (we thought so)

We watched videos featuring company examples and, in January 2025, deployed this framework with our team: marketing, product, sales, engineering, and support.


What we did wrong:
- we chose too many objectives and some objectives had more than 5 KR - very hard to track
- the objectives we set didn’t cover all the fires we had at the beginning of 2025 (some of them were too scary for us, and others didn’t know how to approach them). We thought we could cover them into other KR.  Actually, we didn’t fix them throughout the year. But how many fires can you fix during one year?
- all hands meetings on OKRs took too much time (I don’t want to do the math for the cost of those meetings)
- in the middle of the year, we noticed that some of them could be replaced by some monthly check-ins, no need for a specific one in our OKRs system.


In Nov 2025, we already started working on 2026 OKRs with a better approach (Peter Caputa's e-book was quite practical here)

Here’s what we changed:
1. Focus only on 3 business objectives with no more than 5 KR each.
2. Removed the Yes/No KR and transformed them as part of the monthly check-in.
3. Initiatives are not KR. KR should be measurable or at least have a monthly evolution.
4. Every OKR should have a responsible person who has the power & ability to change that OKR.


I’m pretty sure that by Nov 2026, we’ll have a better understanding of how to improve our OKRs system. 🤷‍♀️

Have you set your 2026 OKRs? What’s your experience with this system?

Let's see which social media metrics deserve the spotlight in your reports.

PS: CMOs don’t expect perfect attribution, but they do expect a story based on numbers 👀

What metrics your CMO wants to see into their reports?

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The Battle

Brynne Krispin

Adina Jipa

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Brynne Krispin's LinkedIn Performance

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