Social isn’t just a platform anymore. It’s infrastructure.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.
When I started working in social, literally no one had it in their job title. Today? Almost a million people do globally. (It’s part of why we’re hosting Social Fresh 2026 in March, but more on that in a minute.)
And nearly every marketer (title or not) touches social every single day.
It’s wild how fast that happened.
The scale is almost absurd
Over 5.6 billion people use social.
That’s 62% of the world’s population. It’s how we connect, get information, and shape culture. Social drives news cycles, elections, fandoms, and entire industries from sports to fashion to finance.
Try to think of an industry social hasn’t rewritten. I’ll wait. (Maybe basket weaving?)
Social started taking over the moment feeds landed in our pockets. It became — and still is — our default shortcut to connection and culture (for better or worse). We scroll to learn, escape, aspire… and sometimes stress ourselves out.
Here’s where it gets interesting for marketers
Social now touches every piece of the marketing stack. Your PR, content, brand, performance, sales… all of it runs on social to some degree. Many teams almost exclusively.
Even AI is getting most of its fresh training data from Reddit, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
But here’s the thing that matters most:
Social works best when it feels small.
Your friend’s voice. Your favorite creator. A niche community. A CEO showing up authentically.
That contradiction (massive scale that only works when it feels intimate) is what keeps me thinking about this industry. And why gathering offline still matters.
The most important conversations? They still happen in rooms, not comment sections.
Social Fresh 2026
If social is the operating system for marketing, we need spaces where the people running it can compare notes, share experiments, and stay human.
That’s why on March 19–20, 2026, we’re gathering in New York City with a few hundred of our closest friends.
I started working on the first Social Fresh Conference in 2008 and today, it’s evolved into a social-native marketing conference for practitioners who want to know what’s working now and what’s coming next.
Our first speaker lineup just went live: Marriott, Vanguard, Ramp, Meta, IBM, Microsoft, Red Cross, and more.
Get more info here or hit reply with questions. This is our 31st conference, and I’m still excited about it. I hope we get to see you in New York.