This month, I attended a kickoff event for the Music City Rodeo here in Nashville, co-hosted by the rodeo, Cowboy+ and PRCA.
Like most industry events, there was plenty of discussion about partnerships, programming, and the vision behind the rodeo itself. But as I sat listening to the panel and looking around the room, I found myself thinking about something entirely different.
Community.
The conversation kept returning to the people who make rodeo culture what it is. The families, traditions, values, and relationships that have sustained it for generations. The way it grew during covid because of those people. The way they can uniquely reach their community in a way others can’t.
And it reminded me of something I’ve struggled with throughout my entire career as someone who grew up in Appalachia.
When I moved to New York after college, I often felt like I was translating myself. Not because people were dismissive or unkind, but because there were experiences, perspectives, and cultural references that simply weren’t part of their world. Likewise, there were aspects of their lives that weren’t part of mine.
Over time, I noticed something interesting. People were often very confident in their understanding of communities they had never actually experienced firsthand. Rural America was one of them.
Nobody had bad intentions.
We were all looking at the world through the lens of our own experiences and assuming it was a little more universal than it really was.
The longer I’ve worked in marketing, the more I’ve realized that many brands make the same mistake.
We assume familiarity.
We assume understanding.
We assume that because we’ve heard of an audience, we know them.
But knowing about people and understanding them are two very different things.
One of the best pieces of advice I can give social marketers is this:
Spend more time studying people than studying platforms.
Platforms change constantly. Algorithms change. Legislation changes. Ad products change. Entire social networks rise and fall. But most people are remarkably consistent.
They’re looking for the same things they’ve always been looking for: connection, understanding, a sense of belonging, and experiences that add meaning to their lives. The marketers who understand those things tend to survive every platform shift because they’re not building their strategy around technology. They’re building it around human behavior.
That’s also why I think social media remains one of the most powerful tools marketers have.
For all of its flaws, social gives us something previous generations of marketers never had: the ability to listen at scale.
Every day, millions of people are voluntarily sharing what they care about, what frustrates them, what makes them laugh, what they’re worried about, and what they believe. They’re telling stories. They’re
debating. They’re building communities around shared interests and experiences.
In many ways, that’s exactly what makes AI so powerful. It’s learning from an enormous body of human conversation, much of which was created on the internet and social platforms. The technology itself is impressive, but the value comes from the people behind the data.
The same principle applies to marketing.
The brands that will thrive in the AI era won’t be the ones that automate the most. They’ll be the ones that listen the best.
They’ll use the tools available to them to understand their audiences more deeply, identify meaningful insights, and create experiences that feel relevant because they’re grounded in real human behavior.
That’s ultimately what we help our clients do at Likeable. The platforms will continue to evolve. The tools will continue to evolve. Our job is to help brands make sense of the people using them and build strategies that create genuine connection.
Because at the end of the day, the technology has always been the vehicle. The people are the point.
