When Your Message is Consistent, But Your Audience Isn’t

You can be the same person across every channel. 

Your social media accounts. Your YouTube. Your newsletter. Your blog. The same principles. The same voice. Often even the same message. 

And many of the people following you on LinkedIn are the same people who see you on Instagram, hear you on a podcast, or read your newsletter. Yet those same people can understand you, trust you, and remember you very differently simply because they encounter you in a different place.

Not because you changed.

Because they did.

They arrive with different expectations.

Different attention.

Different patience.

The channel shapes what they notice, what they believe, and what stays with them, even when the words don’t change at all. 

In this episode, we explore how platforms shape perception, why fractured identities are now the norm, and what that means for communicators who already know better but are running out of time and headspace.

Listen For

4:30 How do you tailor one piece of content for different platforms?
6:04 Is it better to master one channel or be on many?
7:49 Can AI help create content that still feels human?
12:21 What’s the right way to use emojis on LinkedIn?
16:35 Are we choosing content or are algorithms choosing for us?

Guest: Molly Demellier, Sounds Profitable

Email | Website | Sounds Profitable LinkedIn

Doug

Substack | Website | LinkedIn

Farzana

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Chapters

• 4:30 How do you tailor one piece of content for different platforms?
• 6:04 Is it better to master one channel or be on many?
• 7:49 Can AI help create content that still feels human?
• 12:21 What’s the right way to use emojis on LinkedIn?
• 16:35 Are we choosing content or are algorithms choosing for us?

Transcript

Solomon Ibeh (00:00):
Audiences don't just hear messages, they experience them through the channel that delivers them. A famous debate from 1960 explains why that still matters today.

Farzana Baduel (00:18):
The year was 1960. It was the first televised presidential debate in the United States. People who watched it on television thought John F. Kennedy just won. People who listened on the radio thought Richard Nixon won. Same questions, same answers, same words, but the experience was different. On television, Kennedy looked calm, confident. Young Nixon looked tired, unwell, out of place. On the radio, none of that really mattered. Only the voice did, only the arguments. Two audiences, two formats, two completely different conclusions. That moment quietly changed politics forever, not because the message changed, but because the channel did. Years later, Marshall McLuhan put words to this idea. The medium is the message. What carries the message shapes how it's understood. And today that matters more than ever. We meet the same people in different places, on LinkedIn, on Instagram, on podcasts, on video. We know it's the same person, but we arrive in different frames of mind. We expect different things. We read meaning into tone, image, and format, even when the words stay the same. Today on Stories and Strategies, when the message stays the same, but the channel changes, what do people actually remember? My name is Farzana Baduel.

Doug Downs (01:59):
And my name is Doug Downs. Our guest this week is Molly Demellier, joining today from New York City. Hey, Molly.

Molly Demellier (02:06):
Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Doug Downs (02:08):
Are you still kind of snowed in, New Yorkers? It all kind of just melted now and gone away.

Molly Demellier (02:13):
It is way too cold to even think about melting. So we are very much snowed in, and it is not a lot of fun to have a puppy in a snowstorm in New York City. There are just piles of mud at every intersection.

Doug Downs (02:28):
No kidding.

Molly Demellier (02:28):
And cold water for his paws. So it's been quite an adventure over here.

Doug Downs (02:32):
Molly, you're the head of communications at Sounds Profitable, where you lead global PR, media relations, and external storytelling. You bring more than a decade of experience building communication strategies across various media and technology, including senior roles at Acast and Sunday’s PR.

Farzana Baduel (02:50):
Now, Molly, I'm going to dive straight in with a question for you. People are judgy. People judge you with what you put out on social media. Now, if I follow Doug, which I do on all the platforms under the sun, I kind of expect a different Doug on LinkedIn to a different Doug on Instagram. And if he's getting a bit too Instagrammy on LinkedIn, I'm going to judge him a bit. Now, I want to ask you, is that a thing? Do people need to worry about how audiences are judging them on different platforms? Are there days where we could take one piece of content and put it onto multiple different social media channels over?

Molly Demellier (03:31):
I think to a degree they are. I always joke that I swear the people who follow me on Instagram would probably be fascinated to know that I have a job and I'm actually a contributing member of society. If my name wasn't so unique, they would probably have no idea that it was the same person on Instagram that it is on LinkedIn. I do think there are instances where you can put the same content, say a photo or a video. We know the algorithms across the board are really prioritizing video right now, but we need to tailor what it is that we're saying in the caption to what that audience is. And if you're getting very, very bespoke, I would recommend putting really different parts of a video. Say it's a long-form video that you're chopping up into clips, putting different parts out to different platforms because the audiences are just used to digesting the information in different ways.

Molly Demellier (04:30):
I think gone are the days that we think of social media as a megaphone, and we need to be thinking about it as a really, really bespoke way to reach an audience in the way that they're used to receiving information. If we look at LinkedIn, I don't really think that we should be considering that like a discovery tool, right? No one's going to LinkedIn and saying, who can I find today that's very interesting to connect with? You're saying, here's really my network of people. What has Doug been up to in his career? What's new in Farzana's world? But I think platforms like Instagram and TikTok are very much driven by the discovery mode, where you're just constantly looking for new information. Half the time, I miss things that my friends and family are doing because the algorithm is really more tailored to the influencer model, honestly, where a lot of the money is.

Doug Downs (05:19):
So speaking of influencers, social media guru influencers, in other words, how to use social media. I'll hear some say, don't worry about being on all the channels. Do one thing and do it well. And I get that idea, right? Don't juggle so many tennis balls that they all fall. But on the other hand, we live in a multi-channel universe. I kind of side to, if you're not playing the multi-channel game, you're putting all your eggs in that one basket and you don't own the channel. The channel could change, the channel could disappear. So how do I know what's best for me, a solo channel and do it real good?

Molly Demellier (06:04):
It's a really tough question. There are a few schools of thought on it, right? When you think about just the evolution of social media as a whole, and in the States, what we've been experiencing with TikTok, is it going to go away? Is it not? There were some creators who thought that they lost their whole world overnight. It's held on. We're still kind of figuring out what that looks like in the States, but if you even look back longer term, it was kind of like one day we all woke up and said, we're not going to use MySpace anymore. We don't want to put our top friends up. I think the way society works with these platforms and engages with them, it takes a lot of shifts, and it feels like the shift can happen so quickly now that to not be multi-platform, I think it sets you up to a real risk of just not being able to then reach other people across other platforms when something might go away.

Farzana Baduel (06:58):
That makes such a great point. And I think a lot of us, especially as comms people, we know that we are meant to take a piece of content and adapt it to all the different platforms. But what if you're like me, where I know that, but I just don't have the time and headspace. I've got a needy cockapoo, I've got demanding clients. It's really tough to find the time and the headspace, and especially when you do it for a living, the last thing you want to do is spend time on your own, but you kind of know you have to, right? So do you think AI tools can actually help us in order to be able to bring those nuances in and have that headspace and that time to do it in an efficient way using AI tools? And if so, what AI tools, what hacks can you offer us? We kind of know we got to change it up, but we need help.

Molly Demellier (07:49):
Yeah, absolutely. And I feel you. Like I said, I have a needy dog too that takes up a lot of my time. But I live with AI tools now. It's just becoming almost an extension of my team. I have the paid version of ChatGPT, so it is a little bit smarter. It really remembers a lot that I do. I do make sure to really check in and say, have you lied to me recently? Just make sure it's giving me correct sources and that everything I have is always very up to date. And the other thing that I've been playing around with, actually even for my clients, is creating a writer's room per each client so that I can really learn to understand my client's voice, especially early on in a relationship, and then train ChatGPT to be able to replicate the voice as well.

Molly Demellier (08:40):
And one of my clients who I've worked with now for a few years, we've both been working on this as he wants to grow his LinkedIn presence. So we have a very open door communication style where we share the prompts that we're putting into our own chat rooms for him and our individual ChatGPTs to then just help refine it through the two of us. Because what I said to him was, I can give you some bullets to throw through your ChatGPT, and it'll probably kick out something quite different than mine, but I understand that's also not what you're paying me for. So let's refine this together because mine is so used to my voice, but I can coach it to be you. And then what I will also do, going back to multi-platform distribution, right now Sounds Profitable, we merged with the events company Podcast Movement in, I believe it was August of last year.

Molly Demellier (09:32):
So we're preparing for a massive event during South by Southwest. It'll be the first time that we are fully embedded in the South by Southwest programming, which is super fun, but is also a massive undertaking to be able to highlight all of our sponsors everywhere and all of our amazing speakers that will be coming out. So what I've been doing is asking ChatGPT, based on a few notes, getting things started for the engine, saying, can you give me a recommendation to post this across X, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook. Even Facebook is a huge place for community as well still. And then refining it based on the audiences that we have there and asking it, am I using the right tags? Am I using the right hashtags? What should I put in the comments? And really challenging the AI tool to then give me answers and refine things.

Doug Downs (10:23):
I see communications is almost like a dance partner. On the one hand, there's what I'm doing, but on the other hand, there's what my partner is doing, using AI to refine my voice or be consistent with my voice. Awesome. And I could even tell the tool TikTok is different from Instagram is different from LinkedIn, but do you find, I'll put it this way, do you find that your mood or expectations are different depending upon where you are? When I'm on X, I'm not saying I'm angrier, but my kind of might be up a little bit. And when I'm on Instagram, my impatience, stupid scroll, so I find I'm a different person on the different channels as an audience.

Molly Demellier (11:13):
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. On LinkedIn, we're there for work, we're there to be very professional. As Farzana was saying at the beginning of this, if you get too Instagrammy on LinkedIn, it's going to have some judgment for it. So I think that's also where you really need, if you're using these AI tools, you need to be very clear of the tone that you want to hit on LinkedIn versus Instagram versus TikTok. For me, working in a space like podcasting that can be really animated and really fun, I see that as where does the emoji go? Which is such a simple thing, but it matters in LinkedIn when you first see the earliest part of the caption, and then if you put a space, basically you just get that one line, right? So are you losing a bunch of information, creating a next paragraph? And right now I'm thinking about we're doing speaker announcements for the South by Southwest event, so to capture the attention in the immediate, I'm trying to start with a little microphone emoji and then speaker announcement and then tagging the person and their company.

Molly Demellier (12:21):
So then it'll follow with a photo or a video asset that we'll later be creating, but it just captures that attention right away rather than burying their name and the fun details too far below where it does that cutoff. And then Instagram, I don't think a lot of people really actually read the captions too much anymore. I think it's getting, again, that quick hit of attention, but making sure that the content that's posted is very strong. And then if someone does go in, making sure that you have the hashtags and the tags that are going to get you into the proper discovery places.

Farzana Baduel (12:58):
That's so interesting, Molly. I wanted to sort of pick on that thread of emojis, to emoji or not to emoji. That is the question. Now on LinkedIn, you want to be this serious professional, and then emojis kind of slightly make you come across as a bit sort of like a kid. But at the same time, if you just put a column of text, it just feels oppressive and I just don't read it. Whenever I see an emoji, I will lean in more. Exactly, and it is almost like it gives you this visual shortcut. You write speaker announcement, but then you do the loudspeaker emoji next to it. And in a way it's kind of like just helping your brain look at the picture and instantly connect it to the words, and it kind of makes your brain feel a bit more friction-free. So it is making it easier to consume. So what other rules do you have on emojis? Because sometimes I see the emojis at the beginning of a sentence. Sometimes I see them at the end of the sentence. Sometimes I see it mixed up. Sometimes I see emojis instead of where you'd expect bullet points if they're doing a column. Are there such things as too many emojis, too few emojis? And what's your take on emojis on LinkedIn specifically?

Molly Demellier (14:12):
LinkedIn specifically for emojis, 1000% depends on your brand voice and your industry voice. One of my best friends works in the pharmaceutical industry for communications. I bet she's doing very, very different comms for her clients than I am in the podcast space. I don't think we're going to be throwing out pill emojis for companies like Pfizer or little injection emojis. I think that's probably going to be poorly received and it's going to be probably a lot more dry and just very heavily information-based. What I think companies like that could get away with is actually one of my favorite tricks that I use on my personal LinkedIn. It's just as you were saying, Farzana, instead of the bullets, using an emoji to do that. But instead of using the little characters, I like to do the symbols. So for my personal style, I've started to put in, I love the color blue, so just the blue little diamond instead of a circle. Because also the blue against the light background, I think it draws the eye to it. And again, people are skimming, they're not really reading in depth. So if I want them to really capture one thing, I want them to see those three or four little spots in blue. Now for, like I said, more animated brands that are typically in places like the entertainment space broadly, but specifically podcasting, I do think that things like emojis are just a little bit more natural to the brand voice and brand style. But with my clients, I do always remind them, what is your brand voice? What is the brand voice that you want to be? And then whether or not emojis are appropriate, I think is really based on that.

Doug Downs (15:51):
And I'm sure there's something to do with left brain, right brain, and emojis force one side of my brain to process and words force the other side of my brain to process. When we look at, last question, when we look at audience behavior today, how much of what we're seeing is genuine preference versus algorithmic influence? If I post on YouTube, I'm playing to the algorithm. On TikTok, I'm playing to the algorithm. We just did an episode with Alicia Tilts last week all about the LinkedIn algorithm and how it separates things into three buckets. And because it's Sounds Profitable, what research do you think still hasn't been done that we really need?

Molly Demellier (16:35):
Yeah, I think algorithm versus preference, I think it's a bit of both. Still, in places, I think our preferences are driving our algorithms, certainly, but we can't exist without algorithms. I think a great example actually is on LinkedIn when they tried to play around with posting or showing you older content at the top to make sure that you didn't miss something. Were you guys a part of this update? So things were always like, three weeks ago, Doug Downs posted about this episode, and people went nuts. They were like, why do I want something from three weeks ago? I can't find what's happening now. So then LinkedIn had to do a reversal. I think that it's still a little bit stuck every now and again. I still see comments of raise your hand if you're still seeing things that are a month old, and it really, really bothered people.

Molly Demellier (17:30):
We want the latest and the newest to know that we're up on what's happening. So I think as much as we want to think that we're independent thinkers and we're really doing everything based on our preference, I do think that the algorithms are driving so much more of what we do. And I think that's something for people just more broadly, communications professionals or not, really need to be aware of, is how is this information getting to you? But then as far as the research that we're missing, I would love to see a study that says where you discovered some piece of content and where that led you to next. I think on an individual basis, we see a lot of podcasters, when they go to do a checkout or something from a sales side, we say, where did you hear about us? And that's a little bit more on the brand side, like buying something where a sponsor has a product to sell. But I would love to know if there was a way to calculate, you found this clip on TikTok, so now you're a listener of this podcast, or, so how do really all of these platforms work together? Or I guess really just the crux of this conversation, right? Are we talking to different people on each outlet that we go to, or what is the red thread that brings us all together?

Doug Downs (18:54):
Together? We need people to remember accurately too. That's a big problem too.

Farzana Baduel (19:01):
Thank you, Molly. It's been super insightful. Thank you for having me.

Doug Downs (19:08):
Here are the top three things we got today from Molly Demellier. Number one, tailor content by platform. One message can travel, but the wording, tone, and format have to match how each audience consumes the content. Number two, protect your presence. Relying on one channel is risky, so build visibility across platforms to avoid losing your audience overnight. And number three, use AI as a voice partner. Train AI to understand your style and audience so it can scale content without losing authenticity.

Farzana Baduel (19:41):
And if you would like to send a message to our lovely guest, Molly Demellier, we've got her contact information in the show notes. Stories and Strategies is a co-production of Curzon Public Relations and Stories and Strategies Podcasts. If you like this episode, please do leave a rating and possibly even a review. And a big, big thank you to our producers, Emily Page and Solomon Ibeh. Lastly, before mass media, ideas spread one conversation at a time, someone saying you should hear this. Do us a favor, forward this episode to one friend. Thanks for listening.