Make Social Better
Linn Frost, Co-CEO of Social Element, has been classically trained at Ogilvy, worked on the Dove Real Beauty campaign, helped launch Virgin Red from zero to three million customers, and now leads a 22-year-old agency on a mission to make social better. Her position is simple: being on social media is not the same as being social.
“The brands that will prevail are the ones that have an actual relationship with their audience. Being on social media is not the same as being a social brand.”
Linn Frost is Co-CEO of Social Element, a full-service social media agency founded before Meta existed and now one of the most tenured specialists in the space. She joined the agency after three years at Virgin, where she led the launch of Virgin Red, Virgin Group’s first global loyalty platform, growing it from zero to three million customers and 210M in revenue. At Social Element, she leads the agency’s brand, marketing, and growth alongside co-CEO Ashley Cooksley.
Linn began her career at Ogilvy, where she was part of the global team behind the world-famous Dove Real Beauty campaign and was promoted for her work winning the Avis pitch alongside strategist Rory Sutherland. She went on to hold senior roles at RKCRY&R, Tonic Agency, and Truant London, before joining Virgin’s senior leadership team to build the marketing and brand function for Virgin Red. She is dyslexic and routes her career entry through work experience rather than graduate schemes, which informs her strong advocacy for blind hiring and access over credentials.
At Social Element, she has brought her advertising and brand-building background to bear on a brief she actively set herself: treat the agency as a client, make the creative campaign with no client approvals, and build a community around the agency’s values. The result is the Make Social Better initiative, a campaign and community she co-authored and which reflects her central conviction that the industry has both a responsibility and an opportunity to shape social media for good.
“We asked every person we meet: who do you follow, and why?”
It’s not about a brand saying it wants to be on social media. It’s about a brand being social.
Linn’s distinction is structural, not semantic. A brand that runs social media like a broadcast channel is using the technology without understanding the medium. Social is relational. Community is built on shared values and daily conversation. The brands that will outlast this era of content overload are the ones treating every post as a contribution to an ongoing relationship, not a message to be delivered.
Social media is the world’s largest focus group. You just need to be set up to use it.
The richest audience intelligence available to any brand is already being generated in public, in real time. Social listening, when done with rigour, reveals what audiences actually care about outside of a brand’s product category. Linn’s approach is to build a playbook for a brand as if it were a human, define the communities it would belong to, then go and listen to the conversations those communities are already having before the brand says a word.
Create an emotion and a compelling experience. People will come to you when they are ready. Push too hard and you lose them.
The instinct to close at every touchpoint is the biggest self-defeating habit in B2B marketing. Linn’s operating principle, drawn from her advertising training and sharpened at Virgin, is that the best lead generation is creating experiences people remember and value, without attaching a commercial ask. The relationship funds the sale that happens later, often at a moment and through a channel you cannot predict.
Stay close to the conversation.
New leaders and insights. No noise.
Thanks, you're subscribed.
Look out for the next edition in your inbox.