Episode 13 | Content Sommeliers

This week on VelociTEA, Emily and Forrest break down their proprietary Influencer Activation Pyramid: a five-layer framework for B2B influencer content that moves from owned content at the base through sponsored, paid, earned, and organic at the top. They explain why you can't skip levels, why "paid is predictable," and what happens when brands mistake organic buzz for a birthright. Plus: why AI could never replace a great sales dinner, and the FTC disclosures your brand needs to be aware of.

This week on VelociTEA, Emily and Forrest break down the most common mistakes they see on both sides of influencer marketing: the brands and the creators. They talk about why brands get into trouble when they over-control messaging, chase only “big names,” or try to hide sponsorships instead of owning them. On the creator side, they unpack the pitfalls of losing your voice, overpricing yourself out of your ROI, overloading your audience with sponsored content, and letting AI flatten the very credibility people follow you for in the first place. The throughline is simple: the best influencer marketing works when both sides know who they are, act like real partners, and don’t try to be sneaky.

Traditional PR is dead. Attention is the new currency.  In this episode of VelociTEA, Emily and Forrest talk about how PR teams are adapting to a world where content creators can function like journalists, analysts, or something entirely new. They discuss how brands should think about influencer relationships, why treating creators like traditional press often fails, and how PR, marketing, and influencer teams can collaborate.

In technical communities, trust is hard to earn and easy to lose. Developers have a nose for authenticity and credibility. In this episode of VelociTEA, Emily and Forrest talk about why the best tech content often looks a little imperfect. From avoiding “AI slop” to letting creators speak in their own voice, they break down the subtle signals that separate credible content from manufactured marketing. *No wine was harmed in the making of this episode.

This week on Velocitea, Emily and Forrest break down the pendulum swing they’ve seen across marketing and engineering teams: fast, autonomous execution on one side and centralized, consensus-driven collaboration on the other. They explore why orgs drift toward process and visibility, what causes them to snap back toward small “special ops” teams, and how market pressure, redundancy, and leadership changes accelerate the swing. They also share practical advice for surviving (and influencing) the shift including why high-output teams often look “inefficient” on paper, how centralized teams can avoid becoming bottlenecks, and what to do when a new leader arrives and starts rewriting the rules.

This week on Velocitea, Emily and Forrest pull back the curtain on how they’ve built and scaled a fully distributed company in an era obsessed with return-to-office mandates. They unpack the real incentives behind RTO, the productivity myth of “visible busyness,” and why written culture, intentional connection, and flexibility matter more than shared square footage. From hiring outside tech hubs to designing workflows around real life, they share what’s worked (and what they’re still learning) as a 20+ person remote team. If you’re building a company and wondering whether in-person is truly required for innovation and performance, this is a candid look at what distributed can actually look like when done intentionally.

This week on Velocitea, Emily and Forrest break down the real differences between B2C and B2B influencer marketing: from affiliate links and promo codes to multi-stakeholder enterprise sales cycles that take months (or years).  They explore why B2C expectations often sabotage B2B programs, how to measure success beyond “vibes,” and why B2B influence is about renting social capital, not chasing clicks. They also unpack the looming question: will AI influencers replace real experts? And why that shortcut could backfire hard in technical markets. If you’ve ever tried to apply a B2C playbook to a B2B product and wondered why it didn’t translate, this episode is your reset.

This week on Velocitea, Emily and Forrest discuss how the tech world is currently having a massive identity crisis, how AI is alienating developers from the very work they used to love, and explore the question: What happens when tech disrupts itself? From the collapse of "tool-based identity" to the rise of vibe coding, they explore why this moment feels so chaotic. Along the way, they connect the dots between 19th-century naval battles, serverless hype cycles, and the very real possibility that we’re just in a messy transition phase. It’s a look at why the tech industry's ego is currently hitting a brick wall, and why the real disruption isn't the software, it's the incentives.

This week on Velocitea, Emily and Forrest are joined by product marketing legend Jim Walker for a deep, opinionated, and wildly practical conversation about what great product marketing really looks like. Jim shares his unconventional path from engineer to product marketer, why technical credibility matters more than buzzwords, and how the best marketers act as translators between complex systems and human understanding. They dig into why names like CockroachDB work (and why analysts were wrong), how to build a durable message stack across product, value, and company identity, and why product marketing should sit squarely inside the revenue function—not as a helper role. Jim also breaks down how to think about developer audiences properly (hint: “developers” are not one group), why vague words like robust and enterprise are meaningless, and how bad messaging quietly kills trust. This episode is a masterclass in clarity, audience empathy, and saying the real thing, even when it’s uncomfortable.

In this episode of Velocitea, Emily and Forrest break down what actually makes someone successful in this space (spoiler: do the work first). They also discuss why credibility beats clout and how to build an audience without giving off “desperate thought leader” energy. They get practical on the nuts and bolts too: why you probably shouldn’t have your spouse manage you, what creators love about working with F&F (briefs, fast pay, no agent fees), and why the world is supply-side constrained on real tech voices. They also dig into the big question: should you quit your day job to create full time?