Nobody Wants More Content: A Conversation with Carmen Vicente

The internet is obsessed with algorithms, hacks, growth tricks, and engagement formulas. Carmen Vicente is obsessed with people.

That's the thing that stuck with me after this conversation. While most of B2B social is busy reverse-engineering the feed, Carmen has built a career on something much simpler and much harder to fake: understanding why anyone pays attention to anything at all. Because nobody wakes up wanting more content. They want connection.

She also started her career brewing beer, taught weaving and rug making, and somehow ended up a LinkedIn Top Voice with tens of thousands of followers. So I had questions.

The non-linear career, and the thread running through it

Brewer. Communications. Marketing. B2B tech social strategy. Weaving instructor. On paper it looks like a collage, not a career.

Carmen's answer for the throughline was simple: writing. She studied creative writing and wanted work where she still got to build narratives. Communications, marketing, and social all turned out to be writing jobs in disguise. She figured the only way to get her writing in front of people was to put it into a script and hit record.

The part I didn't expect was how deliberately she counterbalances the job. She knits year-round, reads constantly, and fills her off-hours with activities that demand total, undivided attention. Her theory: if you work in social, you have even more reason to protect your focus, not less. The person feeding the algorithm all day needs the analog hobby more than anyone.

Study the system, or be the sucker

There's a moment where a lot of people go from using social media to genuinely studying it. For Carmen it came when she moved into tech and realized the apps are just products full of features that someone decided to build.

Her framing was blunt. If you're only a passive user of social media, or you work in social and spend all day feeding the algorithms, you're the one getting taken advantage of. Turning analytical was how she stopped feeling like a sucker. Studying the system gave her back some agency instead of just eating whatever it served her.

The habit that comes with it: take nothing at face value. When a platform ships a feature or a head of product posts something, her instinct is always "what does this really mean?" Sometimes the answer is nothing. But the reflex to dig is the whole game.

Soon, you'll be talking to your algorithm

Carmen made a prediction a while back that she called dialogical algorithms. The idea: recommendation feeds were about to stop being one-way broadcasts and start becoming conversations.

Then it happened. Instagram shipped preference toggles. Threads launched Dear Algo, where you talk to your feed. YouTube added Ask YouTube. Every major app now has some LLM layer sitting on top of its recommendation system that you can chat with.

Here's why it matters for anyone making content. When people start telling their feed exactly what they want ("show me someone reviewing these earbuds"), reach stops depending on your follower history and starts depending on how specific and useful your content is. You have to think a little like an SEO wizard. The upside: brand-new accounts can break out because reach is no longer gated by prior engagement. The downside: if you spent years building a big audience, that back catalog counts for less than it used to. Her strategic takeaway for brands is to make content, at least some of the time, that goes hyper-specific on exactly what you do.

Three audiences, three kinds of content

One of the sharpest practical frameworks came secondhand, from Sam Clannon who leads the Create product at LinkedIn. You're really trying to reach three groups: your network, your network's network, and everyone else. And each one wants something completely different.

Your network likes personal stuff. Your network's network does not care about the epiphany you had at a barbecue. Everyone else has no idea who you are yet. So the message from the platforms is that you need an actual content plan with top, mid, and bottom-of-funnel material, not one flavor of post on repeat.

This is also how Carmen defuses the eternal short-form-versus-long-form debate. We love a quick hit of dopamine, and we also love watching movies. Both are true. Long form works when you already have an engaged audience that wants more of you. It usually falls flat on the stranger who just stumbled across you. It's not either-or. It's which audience, which moment.

Let the creator cook

Carmen had a single video generate around 710,000 views across platforms for a brand campaign. Her explanation for why it worked was almost anticlimactic: they gave her the keys and let her cook.

She works both sides of this. Her company hires influencers, and she also creates content in partnerships. The tension is built in. The brand wants a bottom-funnel message and the product front and center. The creator knows the less you force the product in, the better the video performs. In her experience, the brand deals with the least micromanaging are consistently the ones that do best.

But that only works if you're selective up front. Letting go requires choosing creators you actually trust to run with it, not ones who need constant hand-holding. The freedom is the strategy, and it starts at the casting stage.

What B2B keeps getting wrong

Carmen's take surprised me: B2B social is genuinely good right now, and starting to lead the pack. B2B companies have real budgets, which means they can produce cinematic, ambitious work that a lot of consumer brands simply can't afford.

What they get wrong is the same old instinct to turn everything into a sales pitch. People don't want the product shoved in their face. They want you to build a world and invite them into it.

And the structural problem underneath it: most companies treat content as an entry-level generalist job. To make the good stuff, someone senior has to advocate for a campaign that probably won't even show the product in action, and defend the budget for it. A junior hire rarely has the authority to say "give me your faith and your budget, this will take us somewhere." Her fix is provocative and correct. Companies need high-level content people. A VP of content, not a rotating cast of juniors.

Founder content and the power dynamic nobody names

Every startup is now told the CEO needs to post. Carmen has seen behind that curtain, and her read is clear: founder content fails when the founder has no real interest in it and has fully outsourced it. People can tell. Nothing is worse than a founder trying to impart wisdom that obviously came out of ChatGPT.

There's a power dynamic no one talks about. If it's your job to make the CEO post, they aren't afraid of you. No amount of nagging gets a disengaged founder active. They have to see the value themselves. And even then, the work isn't just publishing. It's engagement: commenting on other people's posts, priming your own algorithm, spending real time in the circle you want to be part of. When founder content dies, it's usually because there's output and zero genuine investment behind it.

Attention is currency, and the bill comes later

People nod along at "attention is currency" without pricing it out. Carmen thinks of attention as finite. You get so many hours in a day, and they're already being spent somewhere.

The commercial risk of losing the attention game is that you drop out of people's media diet. And once you're not in the diet, you're not in the room when they finally make a decision. In B2B SaaS that matters even more, because the consideration cycle is long. A purchase might happen once every year or two, after many rounds of approval. If you weren't top of mind across that whole stretch, you simply weren't an option when the moment came. Staying present is a marathon. You don't win attention by grabbing it once in a while. You have to do it all the time.

Is social media good for anyone?

Carmen won't pretend the answer is a clean yes. Ten-hour screen time is bad for you. Walking away entirely means giving up a real layer of shared cultural knowledge, and increasingly the practical infrastructure of daily life. The honest answer is moderation: humor, learning, inspiration, and comedy all live on social, but they show up after twenty minutes, not ten hours.

The uncomfortable part is that the responsibility for using it well has been quietly dumped on the user, when the platforms have every lever and no incentive to pull them. She pointed at the teen social-media-ban debate as the tell. A ban isn't evil at its heart, but it offloads responsibility onto local governments who don't understand the technology, which lets the companies off the hook without changing the product at all. The people who understand these systems inside out should be regulating them. That is not going to happen.

Key takeaways

A few things from this one I keep coming back to.

The new game rewards specificity, not follower count. As feeds turn into conversations you can talk to, reach flows to the most specific, useful content rather than the biggest back catalog. New accounts can break out. Old audiences count for less.

You need a content plan, not a content type. Your network, their network, and everyone else want different things. One flavor of post can't serve all three. Build for the stage of awareness, not just the format.

The best brand work happens when you let go. The campaigns with the least micromanaging perform the best. That means choosing creators you trust and then actually trusting them.

Content is a senior job pretending to be a junior one. The companies winning at B2B social have someone senior defending ambitious, un-salesy work and the budget behind it. Treating content as an entry-level task caps how good it can get.

Attention compounds, and so does its absence. In long B2B buying cycles, staying top of mind is a marathon. Fall out of the media diet and you're not even a candidate when the decision finally happens.

Frameworks worth stealing

The three-audience content plan

Map everything you post to one of three audiences: your network (they'll read the personal stuff), your network's network (they won't, so give them the idea, not your barbecue story), and everyone else (they don't know you yet). Then make sure you're producing for all three stages of awareness instead of repeating one type of post and wondering why it only ever reaches the same people.

Let the creator cook

Before a campaign, pick creators you genuinely trust. During it, get out of the way. The less you police the content and the less you force the product into frame, the better it tends to perform. If you find yourself needing to micromanage, the real mistake happened at casting.

Study the system so you're not the sucker

Stop being a passive user. Treat every app as a product full of deliberate choices, take nothing at face value, and keep asking "what does this actually mean?" when a platform ships something. The analysis is not academic. It's how you get agency over a system designed to spend your attention for you.

Quotes worth keeping

These are the lines I wrote down.

If you're only a passive user of social, or you work in social feeding the algorithms all day, you're the one getting taken advantage of.

We don't go to social media to be nourished. We go because it's habitual and it gives us a little hit of something we like.

Of all the brand deals I've done, the ones with the least micromanaging are the ones that perform the best.

Nothing's worse than a founder trying to impart wisdom that came from ChatGPT.

And the one that's the simplest and probably the truest.

Social media is good in moderation. The tricky part is that moderation is next to impossible.

Rapid fire round

Same questions every guest. No prep, no warning. Here's how Carmen handled it.

Best advice you've ever received? Her sister's trick for walking into a big event nervous: just say it out loud. "Hey, I'm feeling really nervous." Name the feeling instead of hiding it, and the pressure drops. Same energy as announcing the hole in your pants before anyone notices it.

Advice you wish you'd listened to? That it's okay to be decisive without tacit knowledge. You don't always have to try something to know it isn't for you. Sometimes you can just make the executive call and skip two years in the wrong job.

What would you tell your younger self? Become visible in your working sphere earlier. She was late to sharing her work online, and only good things came from it once she did.

Ongoing challenge that keeps you up at night? Sleep. She wakes at 3 a.m. and runs work through her head, over and over, long before anything actually happens. She's clear that this is a her problem, not a work problem.

Favorite spot? Haifa Room in Toronto. Mediterranean, and everything she's had there has been great.

Tool you can't live without? Knitting needles in real life. Notion for everything digital. She organizes her whole world in it.

A message for your kids, if your work were a reel playing back? Keep a low ego. She's taken title cuts and started over more than once, and she'd tell them not to chase status. Do the work you find meaningful instead.

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Carmen Vicente is a social strategist in tech, a LinkedIn Top Voice, and one of B2B social's Rising 30. She writes the Scroll Sick newsletter about where to spend your attention. Find her on LinkedIn.