UpTrajectory Review

Jeanne Jennings takes a familiar marketing anxiety — that social media reach is rented, not owned — and gives it a sharper edge than the usual 'build your email list' sermon. Her argument starts with a number most small-business owners would brag about: 50,000 LinkedIn followers accumulated over years of consistent, useful posting. Then she asks the uncomfortable question that most social-media advice skips past. What do you actually own? The content, yes. The account, within platform rules. But not the distribution. LinkedIn decides whether those 50,000 people ever see your next post, and that decision is made by an algorithm you cannot negotiate with, appeal to, or even fully understand.

For a small-business operator, this is not an abstract media-theory debate. It is a cash-flow and customer-relationship issue. If your marketing plan depends on organic social reach to drive traffic to your website, fill your pipeline, or announce a new product, you are running your business on infrastructure someone else controls and can change without warning. Jennings is not telling you to abandon social media. She is telling you to stop counting your follower count as an asset on the same ledger as your customer list, because the two are fundamentally different kinds of property.

What makes this piece worth reading rather than dismissing as recycled advice is the PESO framing. Jennings invokes Gini Dietrich's paid-earned-shared-owned model, which most marketers treat as a tidy taxonomy, and then drives a wedge into it. The real dividing line, she argues, is not the category label but a single question: who controls your access to the audience? That reframe is genuinely useful because it collapses the comforting fiction that 'shared' media is a middle ground between owned and paid. It is not. Shared media is borrowed media, and the lender can recall the loan at any time.

The MySpace example is the one place where the piece leans on a well-worn cautionary tale, and it is the weakest moment precisely because it is so familiar. Yes, platforms rise and fall. But the more immediate risk for a small business is not platform death. It is platform drift — the quiet, unannounced algorithm adjustment that cuts your organic reach in half overnight, or the policy change that flags your content as violating community guidelines you never read. The MySpace story is dramatic. The algorithm update is mundane. The mundane version is the one that actually happens to businesses every quarter, and it deserves more attention than the ghost of a defunct social network.

The practical takeaway is not complicated, but it does require discipline. Treat every social platform as a discovery channel, not a relationship channel. Use it to introduce people to your business, then convert that attention into something you control: an email subscription, a phone number, a direct mail list, a loyalty program. This means your content strategy needs a conversion mechanism built in, not bolted on. If you are posting five times a week on LinkedIn but have no clear path from a follower to a subscriber, you are building someone else's asset, not yours.

Watch what happens to organic reach on major platforms over the next year, because the trend has been consistently downward as platforms prioritize paid promotion and algorithmic feeds over chronological distribution. If you run a small business, audit your marketing mix this quarter. What percentage of your customer touchpoints do you control directly? If the answer is 'almost none,' the fix is not to post more. It is to build the list, the newsletter, the direct channel — whatever format fits your customer base — so that the next algorithm change is an inconvenience, not an emergency.

Takeaway: Audit your marketing channels this quarter: if most customer reach depends on social platforms you don't control, start converting followers to an email list you own.