The job has the word “social” right there in the title. So why does it so often feel like the loneliest role in the office?
That was the question we kept circling in our recent webinar with Grace Tully and Jo Pham, co-hosts of The Social Party and social pros who have run some of the biggest accounts around, Grace coming off four years at PayPal, Jo leading editorial and creator work at WhatsApp.
The Social Party started because the two of them, working on lean teams and constantly online, had the same itch at the same time: they wanted to meet more people who actually did this job. Two separate LinkedIn posts, one mutual friend, and a lunch later, they had a shared thesis that has only gotten louder since: the best community-building does not stay on the screen, and the teams figuring that out are pulling ahead of the rest.
Followers are one-way. Community is a relationship.
“With social, you build followers. With community, you build relationships,” says Jo.
A follower is one-way. A community is a two-way street. People talk to you, you talk back, they talk to each other, and over time that traffic becomes loyalty. You need both, and neither one replaces the other. But if you have spent years optimizing for follower counts and reach, it is worth asking how much of your effort goes into the one-way number and how much is going into the long term relationship building that pays dividends over time.
This is not a soft, unmeasurable idea, either. It is where the durable stuff lives: repeat engagement, customer advocacy, and the kind of trust that survives a bad week.
The new currency of influence is showing up in person
For years, influence lived almost entirely with creators posting online. Partner with a creator, borrow their audience, done. Grace and Jo see a second kind of currency emerging now, and it is happening face-to-face.
As the world came back to IRL, brands noticed something: organic, in-person moments generate a stream of mentions, introductions, and advocacy that a paid placement simply cannot manufacture. Grace’s phrase for the goal is perfect.
You are trying to create “moments worth posting about.”
She lived it at PayPal with a Surprise and Delight series, tracking down real customers who had bought event tickets through PayPal and upgrading them to courtside seats and suites, in partnership with the NBA, WNBA, NFL, Live Nation, and Ticketmaster. It was scrappy, shot on an iPhone, and it worked because it made people feel seen. As Grace put it, social is really about joy at the end of the day, feeling something, whether that is being seen, heard, inspired, or nostalgic.
Watch the Replay
So how do you measure “the vibe”?
Every social and community leader knows the follow-up question from leadership: what is the ROI? Jo’s honest answer got a laugh, because it is the real answer. “How do you quantify the vibe?”
Here is how The Social Party actually thinks about it. The value of getting people in a room shows up in three places. First, the organic mentions in the days after, sometimes so many that they pause their own rollout because attendees are already telling the story for them.
Second, the warm introductions, which are worth more than any cold lead, because you get to start a real relationship over a drink instead of pitching into a void.
Third, positioning: you put your people in front of exactly the audience you were hoping to reach, and you cannot fake that with a paid placement and a prayer.
Some of that you can put a number on. The rest, as Jo said, makes deposits into long-term, relationship-driven ROI. Grace’s example is the one that sticks: at an early event, a real customer grabbed the mic, unprompted, and told the room the brand had changed her life.
That kind of advocacy has no price tag, and it is exactly what every brand is trying to buy online.
You do not need a budget to get started.
If the events conversation feels out of reach because you have no event dollars the good news is that very constraint is where a lot of the magic happens.
The Social Party started with Grace finding 15 people on LinkedIn and inviting them to her favorite bar in San Francisco. That is it. “No budget, no expectations, can’t fail,” as Jo put it.
Think about your best hangouts with friends. They almost never involve a production budget. They involve people, a place, and a good conversation.
For brands, that might mean coffee in the office, a lunch and learn, or a run club. Get scrappy. Use the people and spaces you already have. The most resonant content on the internet tends to be the stuff that feels real and unpolished, not the stuff that took a five-figure crew.
Your comment section is the last third space
Grace shared a line she had seen that stuck: the comment section is the last third space in America. It is where people go to feel affirmed, to laugh, to find their people. And for brands, it is the most honest, unprompted customer research money cannot buy.
She is not speaking in the abstract. At PayPal, the team spotted a comment from someone asking for a single hub to manage all their subscriptions. They passed it to product. About a year later, PayPal launched a subscription hub. A shipped product sourced from a comment.
That is why we keep saying comments are content, and you have to treat them that way. The problem is time. Most social managers, as Jo described, are one of one, or one of three if they are lucky, expected to create, post, engage, and now build community in person too.
The instinct is to move on the moment a post goes live and chase the next one. But the highest-value work often happens after you post, in the replies: being first, being fast, and offering real value. That is the exact gap Respondology was built to close: helping social teams manage the repetitive comment work at scale to take back hours to focus on the parts of the job only a human can do: building genuine connection and community.
Know when to jump in, and when to stay silent
Not every cultural moment is yours. Grace’s test is a good one: only step into a conversation where your brand genuinely belongs and adds something, rather than forcing your way in.
The flip side is knowing a real opportunity when you see it. When Alix Earle’s Italy villa turned out to be a scam, Airbnb went straight to the comments and set her up with a new one, and earned millions of dollars of organic video for the cost of a stay. That worked because the brand tie-in was obvious, and the timing was human.
The brands winning right now lead with people
Ask Grace and Jo who is crushing it, and you get an enthusiastic list: Ramp, Air, Slack, a whole “B2B SaaS renaissance” of supposedly boring companies that are wildly fun online.
Ramp does stunt marketing. Air built an event space into its office and hosts several gatherings a week, including free coffee on Sundays for anyone who wants to work there.
What do they share? They lead with people, not product.
The old blueprint was to build the perfect product, then let marketing sell it, with the humans behind the company kept largely invisible.
The new model flips the old script. You show the team, you build the relationships, and the product buy-in follows. As Jo put it, when you see a team online and think “I want to be friends with them,” you’re more willing to try whatever they are selling.
One thing to do tomorrow
We asked Grace and Jo to leave the audience with a single action, and their answer is refreshingly human.
Reach out to someone you admire in the industry. Not a cold email. A warm one. Congratulate them, ask a question, be loud and proud about your own work. That is how The Social Party found its people, and it is how you start turning a lonely job back into a social one. As Jo said, you are one connection away from a breakthrough.
So put your phone away, and go start the conversation.
