31: The future of social with Michael MacLeod

For this episode Matt and Steven are joined by Michael Macleod, who has had an amazing career taking him from the Wee County News in Alloa to Instagram, Conde Naste, and finally his startup life in Beams. He shares his experience of what it’s like having the keys to the Instagram account on Instagram (with 380 million followers), how worried the world of publishing is in these times of digital disruption, and what new communities look like. As people are questioning their loyalties to the big social networks, many are finding new tribes elsewhere. Clubhouse is the Zeitgeist example - although not an overnight success, it certainly felt like one as this year everyone rushed to grab their OG username in the last couple of months. But it feels like there’s even more opportunity for new ways of finding your community online - via voice, images, video, text chat. Is the medium the message? And how do you curate these things? Would Michael have Trump on Beams? All this is discussed and more. Michael was a journalist for the first ten years of his career, then went into TV production. Having realised writing the news was mostly doom and gloom, he quit to learn more about tech on CodeClan’s second cohort in 2015. Then he joined Instagram in 2016 to help with the launch of a new product which became Stories. Three years with Conde Nast, specifically Vogue followed. And now he’s five months into start-up life with Beams, a new social platform.