Jack Appleby is Free for Hire

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Four years ago, digital marketer Jack Appleby found himself out of work. 

It wasn’t great timing, coming right at the onset of the pandemic.

He had one advantage, however. He had accrued 30,000 Twitter followers by posting regularly on social media for years.

On June 30th, at 11:48 a.m., he tweeted: “Big news: I’m free for hire thanks to COVID.” 

He ended saying: “Give me a shout, let’s make something cool.”

Within 24 minutes, he received a direct message from Twitch that led to a job paying $200,000. 

Overall, he got 100 offers for job interviews from that single post, which was seen by 250,000.

Jack understood something about social media that most people don’t. By writing something valuable online you can build a community. That community is akin to your own field of dreams.

Then, when you call, they will come. 

Jack told that story to explain the value of having an online presence to five dozen reporters at a Journalists Club event hosted by Phil Rosen, who writes the financial newsletter, Opening Bell.

“There is no better job security than having a personal brand,” Jack told the group.

Jack spoke on a panel with Evan Frolov from Morning Brew and Joseph Milord from LinkedIn.

One irony is that many journalists in the mainstream media are surprisingly passive on social media. They may follow people, but don’t actively engage beyond posting links to their own stories.

I noticed that recently when the Wall Street Journal fired two dozen journalists from its Washington, D.C. bureau. I looked up the people affected and found that few had large followings on LinkedIn, most of them rarely posted and some had no profile at all. 

It’s true some news organizations restrict employees from posting.

But there are often ways to be active without violating the terms.

A former colleague of mine at Bloomberg is a case in point. By day Steven Dennis covers Congress, but at the end of each week, he curates examples of over-the-top house listings. He calls it #Fridaynightzillow. It’s helped him gain 169,000 followers.

Jack, who now writes a newsletter called Future Social full time, had a series of suggestions for how journalists can get in the game even when time constrained. One was that at the end of each week, write a post that starts: This was the best story I wrote this week or month or year and say why.

There can be negatives to writing on social media. Jack said he’s had to fend off the mob on occasion. He takes pride in having blocked more than 1,000 people. 

But the pros outweigh the cons, he said, especially when so many reporters are getting fired.

“Be shameless,” was Jack’s advice. “It will help your career.”

BRIEF OBSERVATIONS

CHATGPT TED: I’m loading a decade of blog posts into a Generative AI large language model to see if I can create a program to write like me. Here is how I describe my writing to ChatGPT as part of that effort.

PRODUCT MARKET FIT: This seems to happen a lot.

REGRETS OF THE DYING: I found this random comment on a random post on a random page of the Internet. So much emotion packed into one screen.

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE: This person is not wrong.

A TREE GROWS IN MANHATTAN: Trees growing through the iron rails set up to protect them have always seemed like metaphors for life. We erect the fences to protect young saplings, knowing full well they will later constrict growth.