I made a deliberate call to lower post volume and prioritize quality over quantity. In one measured quarter, post volume dropped 41% while engagement rate increased, meaning the channel was generating more audience interaction with far less content and far less noise.

That's the core evidence the strategy worked. Fewer, better quality posts outperformed the old spray-and-post approach.

I moved MSR's social content mix toward video as the default rather than the exception, and helped guide the org's flagship podcast series’ from an audio-only show into a fully produced video format that drives increased viewership directly from social channels, a direction the show still follows today.

Blog post amplification had historically underperformed badly, propped up by static, forgettable graphics.

I worked directly with our designer to animate what had been flat, static assets, and motion consistently outperformed static across the channel from that point forward, a pattern that later shaped decisions like the Research Focus newsletter's shift to motion cover art.

I brought a new storytelling format to the channel, using LinkedIn's slideshow-style carousel post to tell longer-form stories in a swipeable format.

Every swipe counts as its own engagement, so the format naturally lifts organic performance while giving dense research stories room to breathe across multiple slides instead of forcing them into a single caption.

Across the strategy shift, the channel moved toward featuring real people, researcher wins, fellowships, and named recognitions, and toward real photography over static graphics, both of which measurably outperformed the templated approach that came before.

Beyond optimizing existing channels, I shepherded the creation of an entirely new one.

I got MSR's TikTok approved through legal, built out the proper branding, and set the channel strategy from scratch, launch cadence, content mix, and how it would differ from the LinkedIn-first approach that worked everywhere else.

The channel launched at NeurIPS in December 2025 and sits at over 7200 followers as of today, organic growth on a channel that didn't exist previously.

I audited MSR's YouTube presence, rebuilt the channel homepage from scratch, and developed a playlist structure that increased viewership. Even with that rebuild and active collaboration with Microsoft's main Brand Social YouTube channel, cross-posting full episodes to a combined audience of 2.5 million subscribers, social consistently outperformed YouTube on long-form video.

On Second Thought is the clearest proof point: YouTube totaled 23,662 views across all four full episodes combined, while the same series drove over 9 million video views across social channels through organic and paid distribution.

That gap isn't a knock on the YouTube work, the homepage and playlist rebuild were real improvements, it's evidence of where the audience actually was and where the strategy correctly put its weight.