Social Media Awareness Campaign
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The Project

We needed to build awareness ahead of a dual acquisition/product release announcement. With the insight that LinkedIn is infamous for posters landing on the “LinkedIn Lunatics” subreddit, we hatched a plan to capitalize on the trend: we would create our own satirical “LinkedIn Lunatic” posts to capture attention by entertaining the audience and generate demand by educating about the problems the product solves.

In other words: if you can’t beat ’em, out-cringe ’em.

The Goals

1. Build awareness for Chief in the form of organic impressions
2. Generate demand for Chief, measured by engagement

The Process

A month before the launch, we planned out a series of posts from both the Chief brand page and Bret’s personal page. We ideated as a team, I wrote the content, and I used Nano Banana to generate the most absurd images I could get away with. Then we started posting and watched LinkedIn do its thing.

The Results

• 11,000+ organic impressions
• 99+ engagements

The campaign hit its primary goals. Awareness up. Demand generated. Announcement made waves. Not bad for a guy crying on a toilet.

The Post

The most popular post was the “crying in the bathroom” one — a direct satirical jab at founders who manufacture engagement by posting pictures of themselves weeping in public. We paired the absurdity with actual substance about what’s broken in the traditional outbound playbook.

The only problem: some people took it completely seriously and reached out to Bret to check on him. Which is both the nicest and most on-brand thing that could have happened.

Learnings

1. Satire works on LinkedIn. Safety labels help.

People were entertained, goals were hit, and the announcement landed. But a handful of folks reached out to Bret with genuine concern — sweet, but also a sign we buried the wink a little too deep. Next time: signal “this is a bit” before anyone schedules a wellness check.

2. Humor earns attention. Substance earns trust. You need both.

The posts that performed best weren’t just funny — they paired absurdity with a real, recognizable problem (the broken outbound playbook). Pure comedy without substance is just noise. Business substance without comedy is just… every other LinkedIn post. The combo is the formula. Patent pending.

3. Founder-led content lives and dies on authentic voice.

The campaign worked because Bret’s voice is genuinely distinctive and his opinions are genuinely his. Pro tip: use the founder’s own words as much as possible. When ghost-writing satirical content, if it doesn’t land, it doesn’t land — and there’s no recovering from a joke that falls flat. I tested every joke on Bret directly. The bathroom post was the one that made him laugh hardest. Approved.

4. A pre-planned series beats a one-off weird post.

Mapping the campaign a month out gave us a narrative arc and a drumbeat of content leading into the announcement. One strange post is easy to scroll past. A series of strange posts builds something closer to anticipation — or, at minimum, a reputation as a company that thinks different and experiments. Both are fine outcomes.