Not While I’m Peeing: The Science of Unwelcomed Marketing

How to make your marketing presence less intrusive.

The Science of Intrusive Marketing

Regular

“I love you, but you have no idea what you’re talking about.” PR Lessons from “Moonrise Kingdom”

The parallels of Moonrise Kingdom and marketing.

What Moonrise Kingdom taught us about PR.

Rebels lead the way: more solid advice from our favorite historical game changers

Lessons learned from inspirational game changers.

Advice from historical rebels.

Father knows best: PR lessons from our dads

Father knows best.

Help! My mom won’t quit liking my Facebook posts and other social media crises

Good Advice from our favorite Baaaaad Asses

Advice from game changers.

Signing On: Getting the Best Agency for Your Buck

Things to consider when hiring an agency for the first time

Hiring an agency

How $20, a pair of boots and a letter changed my worldview

how a simple interaction changed perspective

how $20 changed perspective

The First Time Ever I Saw Your Facebook: Marketing Love Songs

love songs that explaing real-life situations

Valentine's Day Love Songs

how to use prose as inspiration for copywriting

Copywriting 101

‘Twas the week before Christmas over here at Black Sheep
Where carols were playing over loud email beeps
The lights were all hung reminding us to be cheery
But with much to be done, we started to grow weary

The clients were restless, hoping to check out soon
As the Black Sheep worked hard by the light of the moon
One last release, a few more lines of copy
We had to act fast, but we couldn’t be sloppy

Then, in a twinkling, we heard something outside
A fat man in a suit hollered, “Hop in my ride!”
We looked at each other, not sure how to respond
But he seemed pretty nice, so we shrugged and jumped on.

He yelled “Ho, ho, ho!” but it wasn’t offensive –
And somehow, we all felt less apprehensive
But where were we going? And would there be elves?
We couldn’t help wondering in spite of ourselves.

This ride, how mysterious! This old man, how hairy!
As we sped through the night, we felt twinges of merry
We noticed that time was no longer an issue
And as we turned a corner, St. Nick passed a tissue

On South By, On TEDx, on Creative Mornings and tweeting
On press conferences, clippings, on last-minute meetings
Viewing the past year with this red-clad historian
We sped through the year on his festive Delorean

He spoke not a word, as we flew near Downtown
Then over to Montrose, soon we were Heights-bound
As we saw all the things that inspire Black Sheep
That old guy was right, we all started to weep

But the tears were not sad ones, no they were quite happy
(and readers, we’re sorry, this is where things get sappy)
For a very brief second we’d let our brains forget
That the things we accomplish are worth all the sweat.

That all the experiences – big ones and small
Are really the very best present of all
And ideas, like popcorn exploding in our heads
Are better than mistletoe and a warm bed

Feeling revived and ready to spring into action
Santa dropped us off, smirking with satisfaction
But as we opened our laptops, we heard o’er the roof
“Happy holidays, Sheep!” and we all raised a hoof.

You see, we thank Santa for showing us how
All it takes is remembering what came before now
But when making a list of the naughty and nice
There’s no doubt that old man will be checking it twice

We left him a gift – to remember the night
And pasted our logo in very plain sight
On the door of his shiny time-traveling sleigh
We couldn’t resist – it’s the true Black Sheep way.

Despite our rebellion, we hope you all know
How much you have helped this ol’ company grow
Each time we make toasts to celebrate this season
We hope that you realize that YOU are the reason.

New year goals

Don’t Speak: The Top Four Ways to Brand a Body (Without a Hot Iron)

Different ways marketers can show brand loyalty

Top Four Ways to Brand a Body (Without a Hot Iron)

Coffee Talk: Ellipses— Fascist Punctuation of Insipid Insult?

Ellipses etiquette

Penguins, Monkeys and How to Leverage Your Business

leveraging your business

Remembering the successes and failures of Steve Jobs

Remembering Steve Jobs

Rage Against the Hipster Music Blog Machine

Hipster music trend

The Five Languages of Not Screwing Things Up With Your Clients

Lessons on maintaining a good relationship with clients

Keeping clients happy

Craft Punk: Why You Should Do It Yourself

Making something yourself over just buying it

Why you should do it yourself

For years, the advice to every nonprofit was some version of "be more like a brand." Post more. Sound more polished. Chase the same tricks beverage and mattress companies use to win attention. But that advice is going out of date fast. 

Here's the good news buried in the shift: being human, being rooted in a real community, telling the truth about the work you do - these used to just be things nonprofits talked about. Now they're becoming part of how the algorithm decides who gets seen.

Let’s be real, the social media feed you're posting into isn't the feed you learned on. There are three changes to pay attention to here:

You are no longer broadcasting to your followers. You're being matched to people by interest, whether they follow you or not. According to Meta, only 17% of time on Facebook and 7% on Instagram goes to content from friends and family. The rest is strangers' content, served by an algorithm reading for interest, not relationship. This means that follower count matters less than it used to; what your organization is actually about matters way more.

For a decade, the game was capturing eyeballs at any cost, but that game is almost out of runway. This new reality rewards the meaning people seek out, instead of the noise people scroll past. A nonprofit was never going to out-shout a beverage brand for attention, and it doesn't have to start now.

Bots now account for more than half of all web traffic, the first time automated activity has outpaced human activity online. Add the flood of low-effort AI content built to trigger a reaction, and feeds get louder, faker, and angrier by the month. Outrage travels, so platforms keep rewarding it, regardless of whether it's true.

Platforms are starting to notice the same AI slop we are, and they're building against it. As feeds fill with machine-made content, audiences and the platforms chasing those audiences are turning toward visible effort, texture and even imperfection. 

Authenticity is starting to get measured less as a brand value and more as "proof of process": can people actually see the work behind the thing? Instagram has begun actively suppressing reposted and aggregated content for exactly this reason. Original, human, made-for-the-platform work is now structurally advantaged, not just ethically preferable.

The appetite for this is showing up in surprising places too. Myspace's owners are reportedly plotting a relaunch, betting that algorithm fatigue is real enough that people will pay attention to a platform explicitly selling itself as an escape from optimized feeds.

Brands without a real story are feeling the squeeze from the other direction. Even insurance companies and mattress brands, categories built on being interchangeable, are now scrambling to act like media companies just to stay visible, hiring writers and building personalities where there used to be none. But your nonprofit isn't scrambling for any of that. The real stories, real people and real process you already have aren't a compliance requirement anymore. They're the raw material every faceless brand is spending real money trying to fake.

You're the expert. Make sure AI knows it.

The same shift is happening in search. More than half of Google queries now return an AI-generated answer before a person ever clicks a website. Being the credible, well-documented source those answers get built from is starting to matter as much as being the thing someone finds by scrolling. Same principle, different doorway: substance and legitimacy are becoming the input, not just the output.

No one knows your mission, your people, and your work better than you do. When someone asks an AI assistant how to get involved in your cause, that answer should be built from what you've actually published, not a stranger's guess or a five-year-old blog post. Making sure your own documentation is the source AI pulls from isn't just a search tactic. It's how you keep your story accurate and keep your work moving forward, instead of watching it get flattened into someone else's summary.

What this actually means for your nonprofit online

Here's the part that should feel like relief: none of this asks you to get louder, weirder or more "on brand." It asks you to do less pretending and more proving. Show the work. Show the people. Let the algorithm find you doing the thing you're actually good at, instead of trying to out-shout accounts that were never your competition to begin with or hoping to be stumbled upon via hashtag soup.

The real question is whether what you post could hold up to a stranger asking, "how do I know this is real?" That's a content question, a design question and a strategy question all at once, and it's the kind of work that's easy to know you need and hard to carve out time for.

That's the work we do at Black Sheep Agency. We help mission-driven organizations turn what's already true about them- the real stories, the real people, the real process- into content and strategy built for a moment when that's exactly what gets rewarded.

Why Nonprofits Might Finally Win the Algorithm

The algorithm now rewards real stories and community over polish and AI content. See why nonprofits are positioned to win the shift and what to do next.

The algorithm stopped rewarding polish and started rewarding (human) proof

Condensed

The algorithm now rewards real stories and community over polish and AI content. See why nonprofits are positioned to win the shift, and what to do next.

The Black Sheep blog is turning up the volume on community engagement, social media strategy, Houston happenings and what it means to lead a purpose-driven life.

The Black Sheep Agency | Social impact and nonprofit blog

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