Can I be so for real right now? I’m running on fumes.
I’ve gone to over 20 events, dinners, and conferences in the last four months. I’m out-conferenced, yes, but I’ve also grown and made connections at a level and pace that outruns the effort I’ve had to make.
The irony is, events used to be my least favorite area to run as a marketer. Booth design and on-site coordination gave me hives. A lot has changed in my decade in B2B marketing: events have become more experiential, more about the people in the room, less about counting leads and handing out merch (although, I still make some bomb merch, including a recent Marine Layer hoodie I had custom-printed for a dinner I threw at Croud).
I also hosted an event for my creator community.
I had this idea to bring a few corporate creators I know into one room. People I’ve met through LinkedIn, through work, through being in this weird in-between space of being both a marketer and a creator.
It was supposed to be small. Maybe 15, 20 people.
And then it kept growing.
I got my creator friend Lana Ivory to co-host. Someone invited a friend. Someone shared it. More people wanted in.
And suddenly… we’re at almost 100 people on the guest list with sponsors.
What started as content turned into a room of opportunity: collaborations, introductions, and honestly, its own kind of ecosystem.
Which feels very reflective of what’s happening online right now more broadly.
Content, events, and networking used to feel like separate categories. You posted online, you went to industry events, you networked privately. Those things existed alongside each other, but they weren’t necessarily feeding each other in real time.
Now they are.
The new growth loop is content leading to rooms, rooms leading to relationships, relationships leading to visibility, visibility leading back to more content.
And once you notice it, you can’t unsee it.
Content used to feel like the final product. Now it feels more like the starting point.
Creators have followed suit, and they’re building spaces people want access to.
You can see it with Maggie Sellers and Hot Smart Rich. What started as internet content evolved into curated events and now a community layer through HSR Angels. CreativeMornings did something similar years ago by turning a consistent format and point of view into a global community people actually wanted to participate in.
The content creates the gravity. But the community becomes the thing with long-term value.
I think this is also why events suddenly feel so culturally important again. IRL is back, but now it’s designed for distribution.
The best events today are documented, clipped, reposted, photographed, recapped, and extended online for weeks afterward.
BravoCon is basically a content machine at this point. Cannes Lions increasingly feels optimized around who’s documenting the experience as much as who’s attending it. Even at Possible this year, you could feel how creator culture has fully merged with the conference world.
You can especially see this in creator culture. Creator summits are simultaneously networking events, filming environments, collaboration factories, and social proof engines all at once.
LinkedIn accelerated this massively for corporate people.
You can literally watch ecosystems forming publicly now through comments, reposts, podcast appearances, event photos, collaborations, and mutual proximity.
More on the show this week.
