There's a trap every brand falls into eventually, and most never climb back out of.
It starts with a reasonable instinct: you want people to respond positively to your content. You want engagement. You want reach. So you start studying what gets likes, what gets shares, what triggers the algorithm — and you build your content strategy around chasing those signals.
And then something quietly breaks.
You stop making decisions based on what's true, or interesting, or actually worth saying. You start making decisions based on what tested well last Tuesday. Your brand becomes a mirror of your audience's preferences rather than an expression of a genuine point of view. You're liked, technically. But nobody's paying attention to you specifically. You've become wallpaper.
Likeable Is a Commodity. Interesting Is a Scarcity.
I was in a conversation recently with Geoff Desreumaux, founder of TANGO — an agency built on a single conviction: brands try too hard to be liked, and it's costing them everything. Geoff spent over two decades in advertising watching brands perform for approval, and eventually decided to build something that cuts against that entirely. His thesis is clean and correct: make brands genuinely interesting, and the audience will follow.
It sounds obvious. It almost never gets executed.
Because being interesting requires a different kind of courage than being likeable. Likeable is easy to optimize for. You give people what they already told you they want. Interesting requires you to take a position, to make something your audience didn't know they needed, to say the thing that might divide the room — and then stand on it.
Likes are a measure of comfort. Interest is a measure of value.
Organic Social Isn't What Most People Think It Is
Here's the thing most brands and creators get backward about organic social media: they treat it as a distribution channel for messaging they already decided on. Push content out, count the engagement, adjust for next week.
That's not a relationship. That's a broadcast.
The opportunity in organic social — the thing that actually converts attention into loyalty and loyalty into revenue — is genuine conversation. It's the brand that responds like a human, argues its position, shares something it actually believes, and treats the feed as a dialogue rather than a billboard.
This is harder to do at scale. It requires more judgment than a content calendar. But it's the only play that compounds. Because when your audience trusts that you actually believe what you're saying, they bring their friends. Not because you were entertaining. Because you were real.
The Creator Version of This Problem
Everything I just said about brands applies twice as hard to individual creators. Because you are the brand. There's no product or service to hide behind. If you've been optimizing your content for approval — softening your takes, going with the popular opinion, posting the format that always performs — you're slowly erasing yourself from your own platform.
I've seen it happen. Guys who started with fire, with a real specific point of view, gradually sand down every rough edge because they're afraid of backlash or unsubscribes. And they end up with an audience, technically, but no real authority. People follow them but don't actually care what they think.
That's a hollow outcome. It doesn't convert. It doesn't last. And frankly, it's exhausting to maintain because you're performing a version of yourself instead of developing one.
What Interesting Actually Requires
Being interesting isn't about being controversial. It's not about being provocative for the sake of friction. It's about having a genuine point of view that's been formed by real experience, real thinking, and real skin in the game — and then being willing to defend it.
The comeback of text-based content that Geoff talks about points to something real: people are hungry for actual ideas, not just polished production. They want to know what you think. Not what you think they want to hear. What you actually think.
That starts with the question every creator and every brand needs to sit with for more than five minutes: What do I actually believe that most people in my space won't say out loud?
Find that. Build there. The likes will follow eventually — but more importantly, so will the people who matter.