Erin Lentz, Executive Director of Design at ArtVersion, was featured by Senior Executive’s CMO Think Tank in “Social Media Shifts CMOs Can’t Ignore—and How to Respond,” published November 2, 2026.
The article examines how social media is changing beyond the traditional measures marketers have relied on for years. Reach, engagement, follower growth, and clicks still provide useful signals, but they increasingly tell only part of the story. Audiences now discover, evaluate, and recommend brands across a much broader set of interactions, many of which happen outside public view.
Senior Executive frames the discussion around a growing gap between what marketers can easily measure and what actually influences perception and trust. The article points to private sharing, peer recommendations, AI-generated brand discovery, niche communities, and changing expectations around credibility as factors reshaping how brands reach audiences and how those audiences make decisions.
Lentz focuses on one of the least visible parts of that shift: social behavior that happens privately.
A post may receive relatively little public engagement while still traveling through direct messages, group chats, email threads, or other one-to-one conversations. Those interactions rarely appear in the same way as likes or comments, yet they can carry greater influence because the content is being shared intentionally from one person to another.
As Lentz explains, marketers still tend to evaluate social performance through visible signals such as impressions, followers, likes, and comments. At the same time, some of the most meaningful distribution happens when someone directly sends a product, idea, or recommendation to another person.
That behavioral shift changes what makes content valuable.
Content still needs to earn attention in a crowded feed, but attention alone is becoming a limited measure of effectiveness. The stronger question is whether the content is useful, specific, credible, or interesting enough that someone would choose to carry it into another conversation.
That creates a different standard for creative and content strategy.
For brands, the opportunity is to develop material that has value beyond the initial impression. Useful insights, distinctive points of view, strong visual communication, clear expertise, and relevant ideas are more likely to be saved, shared, referenced, or discussed elsewhere. Those behaviors may be harder to observe directly, but they can be more meaningful indicators of trust and relevance.
Lentz encourages marketing leaders to look beyond visible engagement and pay closer attention to signals such as shares, saves, direct traffic, and what audiences do after exposure. Her broader point is that paid media can create reach, while trust increasingly moves person to person.
The idea also connects to a larger change in digital discovery.
Social media, search, earned media, direct recommendations, and AI-generated answers are becoming increasingly interconnected. A brand may first appear in a social post, be validated through an article, discussed privately, and later surfaced through an AI assistant or search experience. Those touchpoints no longer operate as isolated channels.
The Senior Executive discussion addresses that evolution directly, noting that consumers are increasingly discovering and evaluating brands through creators, peer conversations, short-form content, and AI-generated recommendations. Other contributors in the article also emphasize the growing importance of credible information across multiple sources and the need for brands to understand how AI systems interpret what exists about them online.
For ArtVersion, this reinforces the importance of thinking about digital experience as a connected ecosystem.
Brand websites, editorial content, social media, earned media, visual identity, and search visibility all contribute to the signals people use to form an impression. Increasingly, those same signals also shape how AI systems understand and describe a brand.
The result is a broader definition of visibility.
Being seen remains important. Being credible enough to be shared, referenced, remembered, and recommended carries greater long-term value.
As digital discovery continues to fragment across platforms and technologies, brands will need to understand both the measurable activity happening in public and the less visible behaviors that indicate genuine interest. The strongest content may increasingly be the content audiences choose to carry with them beyond the feed.