365 Buttons
365 Buttons, and How It Actually Only Has To Make Sense To Me. The 365 Buttons meme is more than a TikTok bit. It’s a quiet rejection of platform logic, productivity culture, and overexplained marketing. Brands should pay attention to what it signals: the return of the personal, the offline, and the unapologetically inexplicable. A […]
Quick Dip: 2016 Core
2016 Core Is Back: Why A Decade On, Social Media Is Loving 2016 Again The cream rises to the top, as they say. // 2016 Fashion Blog Back to 2016 From chokers and bottle flips to viral throwbacks and unfiltered content, the “2026 is the new 2016” wave reveals a collective longing for simpler internet […]
TikTok Shop and the #DeInfluence Trend
“This Isn’t TikTok Anymore”: Creators Are Calling Time on the Commerce-ification of the Feed TikTok Shop isn’t just cluttering the feed. It’s reshaping what influence feels like, and not everyone’s buying in. A Personal Note (and a Familiar One) In a recent Trending RX piece, I wrote about what happened when I tested a TikTok […]
What’s New at ListenFirst: 2026
Expanding Your Social Intelligence Program with Our People in More Places – Webinar Recap In our recent webinar, CEO Miranda McWeeney and Head of Growth Devin Carroll introduced ListenFirst’s expanded 2026 offerings. These additions give brands deeper intelligence, cleaner data, and more support across the entire social analytics workflow. While our core owned analytics platform […]
Fall in the House of Labubu
Labubu: What happens when the fandom cools, and the brand scrambles to keep the wheel turning? This article is a follow-up to our “The Rise of Labubu” deep dive from July 2025. You can read it here. In 2025, Labubu wasn’t just a toy. It was a flex. The bug-eyed gremlin from Pop Mart’s The […]
Unhacking Olive
How to Recover a Hacked TikTok Account, Fast. The account belonged to my dog, Olive. Just a “small Chihuahua trying to make it in a big world”, as her bio so proudly says. Her slice of social media exists in a peculiar corner of TikTok—one where the majority of her “fans” are other dogs and […]