Against Volume
0. Boom
Let’s agree not to dismantle capitalism today.
I’m a marketing consultant, after all.
But I think this piece can be a nice, quiet, act of subversion. My first stick of dynamite, so to speak. There will be others.
This article is not just about personal branding or even marketing.
It’s about taking back control of our thinking and, through that thinking, control of our own trajectories. Yet, I’m starting with personal branding for a reason:
I think more and more people will soon be forced to turn to it.
To try to protect their careers. To find clients. To build leverage. Perhaps to create their own job. Create their own path.
And if we don’t challenge the way it’s done, we’re going to keep sliding into a system where every voice sounds the same, where the loudest wins, and where the only metric that matters is volume (or a related term, more below).
But while I focus on helping people to find their voice and build something meaningful around it, yes, rest assured I do know the problem is much bigger than a social media platform.
1. The Linkedin Rat Race
You’ve probably seen the symptoms:
10 posts a week. Threads repurposed from threads. Selfies with every post. Automated AI-generated comments under AI-generated content.
Everyone is told to follow algo hacking best practices.
But here’s the real problem: the moment you start playing the volume game, you almost immediately stop building something meaningful. You stop sounding like yourself.
You start mistaking engagement (if any) for influence.
2. The Wrong Playbook
Let’s be honest: we borrowed the wrong playbook. Even the term “personal branding” is itself problematic. It drags in decades of marketing baggage: positioning, funnels, targets, leads, ICPs…
And we took that vocabulary and playbook, designed to scale companies (abstract things in an abstract world) and slapped it onto humans and relationship building.
We’ve been told that reach equals influence and that more is better.
More is more “at bats” they say.
The more you post, the more the algo learns, the more you win. A twisted version of agile porn. We’ve been told that if two people have the same insight, the one who posts more often will win.
Let’s leave aside, for now, the blurry meaning of “to win”.
And focus on the underlying assumption here: assuming we need scale and that we need to compete hard for that scale.
Most of us don’t. Again: wrong playbook.
Whether a boutique firm or a small B2B business, or simply someone trying to build a career and find a job, the vast majority of us are in a small, local, human to human world.
Most of us don’t need 100k followers. We only need a few people, the right people, to notice what we do, how we think, remember it, and trust us enough to move forward.
We are not Apple, we are not CNN.
And we are not building a business in the creator economy either.
We are building a career. A small business. A reputation. And while scale might happen to some of us, it is not where we should start nor what we should aim for.
3. The Wrong Incentives
Always follow the money.
Volume, Scale, Speed, Urgency… are not only lenses through which some people see the world: it’s also a business model.
Of course they tell you to post daily. There is too much money to be made on your inability to do so.
But more than misaligned incentives, I think the obsession for volume also comes from an obsession for distribution.
We could call it distribution myopia.
Consultants became addicted to tweaking the pipes instead of thinking about what’s actually flowing through them.
Meanwhile, AI has now entered the game and is flooding the pipes from which it drinks (or vacuums). This means we are slowly, but surely, starting to read photocopies of photocopies of photocopies.
Make no mistake, I think this is good news.
We are starting to witness AI feeding on itself.
Here’s the bet I am making for the next decade: if we can stay human long enough, and resist the temptation of outsourcing our own thinking, the path to building personal influence is about to become much clearer.
4. Relevance Over Reach
Volume is an infinite and empty game. The algorithm loves volume because it treats content like a commodity.
Every time we try to produce high-signal content at high volume, we run into a simple truth: real thinking, depth, care, don’t move at that pace.
So we start lowering the bar. And if we are not careful, we can easily slip into the cringe realm of the Linkedin users spinning in their content hamster wheel.
We end up “storytelling” about the day we climbed on the wrong train and became a better leader because of it. Or the last time we broke a plate in our kitchen and this sparked our latest Kintsugi for HR Workshop idea.
All in the name of staying visible. And ideally posted with a selfie.
Don’t get me wrong, I know all too well that even at a lower volume, we still need to work hard for attention. But the attention of your peers, potential clients or employer is not the end goal. It’s only a means to an end.
And to earn their attention, volume won’t help. Volume as an answer would mean adding noise to this already too noisy world.
Like using gasoline to put out a fire.
Relevance is what we need.
It is the only real and viable alternative to chasing volume. Because Relevance and Volume actively work against each other.
Relevance becomes our weapon the moment we decide to aim for it.
Now, can strategic branding reconcile relevance and scale? Absolutely it can. But we are not talking about branding here, but personal branding. The aim is to connect from human to human. And I believe that scale should not be part of the conversation. Certainly not its aim.
5. The Thought Leadership Trap
But even if you decide to give up on volume and bet on relevance? You are still at risk of falling into yet another trap: thought leadership.
The consultants will tell you to become a thought leader. But this is often just volume in disguise.
It sounds a lot like having a “bigger” voice doesn’t it? A voice that wins over other voices. A copy/paste from market share to share of voice.
And the humble ones (or impostor syndrome connoisseurs like me) might even give up before trying. But if you truly focus on escaping the volume game, you realize that what you need is connection more than assertion.
That you need thought kinship more than thought leadership.
Ideas that resonate with the right people and help you connect with them. You sure don’t have to aim for volume here.
Relevance is what can turn quiet ideas into leverage.
One conversation at a time.
6. The Price of Relevance
Relevance is expensive.
It costs time. It demands that we care, that we slow down and seek depth.
I hinted at the problem in my “Boom” intro: the world we currently live in does not really want us to hit the pause button, to think, to dig deep. It will spin harder and do whatever it can to keep us dizzy and distracted.
Most of what surrounds us rewards speed and nudges us toward shortcuts. To hit publish fast and reward us with synthetic dopamine hits.
But if we can resist that pull, if we can carve out some time and mental space to think, and aim for thought kinship first?
We will find the leverage we need to start building on our own terms.