I started The Social Media Hat because I was doing the work anyway. I’d take on a client project, figure out what worked, and write it up so the next person didn’t have to learn it the hard way. Twelve years and over a thousand posts later, that’s still basically my process: build it for a real client, then teach it.
For most of that time, the work was social media strategy, content marketing, SEO. Then in late 2023 I started paying real attention to what was happening with AI, and by the following spring I couldn’t ignore it anymore. I launched a podcast to force myself to learn in public. It was well received, but something wasn’t clicking – I was talking about AI on a marketing site, and it felt like building a new business inside the walls of an old one.
The turn came on a long drive from St. Louis to LA. I’d built an AI assistant – I call her CLU – and instructed her on my goals and my business. Working through why the podcast wasn’t landing, we figured it out together on that drive: this needed its own house, a new name, a new audience, a new site. Over the following two weeks, working with CLU the whole way, I built The AI Hat.
That’s where the current work lives now. I help teams whose best people are buried in Admin Drag – the busywork they were never hired to do – build a Digital Crew: governed AI agents that take the admin off their plate so people get back to the work only they actually joined to do. It’s the same instinct that built this site: figure out what works, then teach it.
This archive stays up because the twelve years here are real. Every post came from an actual project, an actual client, an actual thing that worked or didn’t. If you’re trying to get a sense of who I am before you reach out, start here, then go see what I’m building now.
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