My digital strategy is a work in progress, and I’m OK with that.

I suck at my personal digital strategy. I feel comfortable bearing my soul for MTD blog posts, but when it comes to extending to my personal social platforms, I’m painfully inconsistent. Some days I feel confident and churn out TikToks, and other days I’m Googling ‘How to protect my online identity.’ It’s crazy, I know, but the added layer of posting my children makes me extra cautious. I literally go back and forth weekly on making my social media accounts public or private.

And then, because I’m inconsistent in my approach, the random posts I do get out prevent any kind of traction or engagement [directly counter to the “consistency is key” mantra we preach to clients]. As a result, I rarely get the impact I’m going for. Which then sends me into a spiral where I hide behind a private IG account [aka, I would be a terrible influencer]. Time and again, I can’t seem to get comfortable and into this creator “groove” I envision for myself and MTD. Hello insecurity and imposter syndrome!

What’s wild is that I actually help major brands and public individuals work through this all the time - it’s a huge part of our digital strategy work. I literally know what I need to do → At M.T. Deco, we advise clients to focus on the platforms that feel good to them, or where they’re getting the most response from their community, and to not worry about being ‘everywhere at once,’ aka the Gary V. firehose method. We set measurable goals with realistic publishing schedules. We create to-do lists, we check in, we serve as accountability coaches. We look at the analytics, we extract insights, and we help optimize and pivot.

ICYMI, I even hired a kickass head of content, Jamie Farnsworth Finn, who does an incredible job with our content strategy and bringing my vision to life [and keeping the trains running]; the challenge is that I don’t always keep up with my end of the bargain. After a year of barreling through content creation, I think I’ve actually landed on what’s getting in my way, and it’s specifically around creative energy preservation.

I’ve written about this before in terms of energy broadly, but I’m realizing that I have a specific reserve of energy that allows me to do creative work. In my case, it’s a variety of content creation including writing, producing TikToks, shooting photos, going live and conducting interviews, and writing post captions [oh and erm, playing with magnatiles, building blocks, coloring books, and play doh]. What inevitably happens is that this energy ends up going fully into our clients, and I struggle to create MTD content with the fumes I have leftover [even in writing this piece, it’s 3 days late on a Friday morning, and I’m trying to get it out the door].

There isn’t an epiphany here or a moment to look back on as a time of growth. Nope, definitely not there yet. This is a dispatch from the journey. It’s a note to acknowledge creating an impactful digital strategy is hard work and it requires evolution, sometimes which can be painful, but necessary growth.

At any rate, I’m in this for the long run and am inspired by other creators like Jenna Kutcher and her 10 years to become an overnight success. Yes, here for that. But in the meantime, how am I evolving today? [cause you know I’m all about the action / goal setting / manifestation of it all]. 

First of all, I’m making space. SPACE IS EVERYTHING for me in this chapter of my life. I’m doing this by shifting our approach to clients - fewer overall and prioritizing those that are truly partners with us. Not only does it make the work more fulfilling, I'm not as creatively drained at the end of the day. In fact, great clients make me feel creatively energized [shoutout to my close friend and brilliant business woman Kendall Ostrow who is helping me with this evolution - future blog post on how I’m doing this because, like most things, it’s also HARD]. 

Second, we are loosely incorporating the 4-day workweek inspired by our partners at CULTIQUE so that Fridays can be fully dedicated to creative work. And third, I’m going to focus more on creativity itself / experimentation within the platforms. Our contributor Jareen Imam from Amazon wrote about how leaning into her creativity has actually given her more energy [there’s SO much great advice in her piece, you must check it out], which is also exciting and inspiring. More drawing, reading, baking and less to-do listing? Sign me up.

And lastly, I’m breathing through it all. I’m getting back to my intentions I set for myself in January, to reset with purpose, dedicating time to rest, and pushing myself to find where I most feel comfortable when it comes to being online. In my mind I feel I’ve gotten slightly off track, but really, there are no rules here, so we keep moving optimistically forward… and honestly, maybe this will [finally?] be the start to my groove. Or not. And that’s totally OK.

Xo, Melissa