Social Media & Community Manager @ OpenPhone

I didn’t enter marketing through a formal program. I built my career inside the social feeds. I was the first social hire at five different companies, each time starting from zero. No brand guidelines. No playbooks. Just business goals, a blank calendar, and me figuring it out as I went.

Working that way taught me how to move fast without being careless. I could spot patterns before there was data, and I was able to make things resonate, especially when no one’s handed you the language yet. Everything I know, I had to teach myself. And that scrappiness shape my approach. It’s what made me enthusiastic about startups.

Now, I’m a Head of Marketing. But I still operate like a practitioner. I still believe that good marketing is earned, not manufactured. And I still wrestle with what it means to do this work well—in a profession that rewards speed, but rarely stops to ask what we’re building long-term. I care a lot about trust. I care about storytelling with a spine. And I really, deeply, truly care about helping social and brand teams feel like they’re doing work that matters...not just content that performs.

You won’t find playbook jargon or polished frameworks here. I write openly (and often) about the realities of leading marketing in my newsletter, TheseChapters. It’s a space for people who are figuring out the tension between growth and integrity, especially those who, like me, didn’t get here by playing it safe.

If you’ve ever felt like the job was both wildly creative and quietly existential then you're my kinda people. Let's connect!

Here’s a small but very real example of how posting online can actually matter.

About a month ago, I shared a fairly lengthy post on LinkedIn about mental health and burnout.  It wasn’t about the work itself so much as the strain of trying to balance work with everything else, especially as we exist in a world where it’s easy to always be on. And that's unfortunately not a unique experience.

In that post, I tossed in one small suggestion, as an aside. I wrote, "if companies are refreshing benefits this year, here’s a free idea:add a cleaning service stipend. Wellness stipends and gym perks are fine, but not everyone wants to spend their limited time on a treadmill. For a lot of us, a clean home does more for our well-being than another obligation. It’s practical. It’s human. It takes one thing off the list."

I truly didn’t think much of it. It was what I would call a fart thought passing through.

The next day, HR messaged me to say that Slate was adding cleaning services as an approved option under our health and wellness stipend. I’ve attached the screenshot below.

But that's not all. I then shared that moment on TikTok, and it ended up getting around 300k views and close to a thousand comments. People saying they brought it up to their own teams. People coming back to say their company added it too. People sharing other ideas they wished employers would consider.
I also wrote about it on Substack, and it resonated there as well.

I’m sharing this on here to emphasize that you never really know what sticks. Sometimes a passing thought, something you almost don’t post, lands with the exact right people.

And credit where it’s due—huge kudos to my team at Slate. They're not the type that just say they're there for their employees. They listened, moved quickly, and actually did something. Dream team fr fr.

Christina Le

Slack DM thread where Pam Lopez tells Christina that Slate is adding cleaning services as an approved health and wellness stipend after seeing her LinkedIn post, noting leadership agreement and culture impact; Christina replies enthusiastically, saying “WAIT WHATTT” and “That’s incredible!!!!!”.

me: why does my back hurt

also me working:

A surreal composite image of a large shrimp curled up and sitting like a person in a black ergonomic office chair against a white background 

Irina, this AI-generated letter is doing a staggering amount of wordwork to basically say sorry not sorry.

You claim you don’t “track individuals,” but you sell/license the capability that collects and analyzes public posts from real people, at scale. That is monitoring public expression and anyone with a social listening tool knows exactly what it does. 

The reality is that Hootsuite is perfectly okay with helping ICE surface and analyze conversation patterns tied to REAL people because you're offering raw public data and you’re enabling a form of MASS monitoring. All because they cut you a massive check.

Saying you don’t like the word “surveillance” doesn’t change what’s happening. What you’re defending here is the commercial use of technology that magnifies government visibility into public voices. And you can keep fluffing it up in whatever layered corporate bullshit language, but that’s the core of it.

I’ve partnered with Hootsuite on campaigns, and I’ve been a customer through two companies. I’m not coming at this from just a random linkedin user. I know your product and I know the implications.

This choice, and now this letter, are as disappointing as the tool tbh.

Screenshot of a letter titled “Letter from Irina, CEO of Hootsuite,” where the CEO defends Hootsuite’s work with ICE, claims their tools don’t track or surveil individuals, and emphasizes listening to public social conversations at scale.

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