Hey friends,
Welcome back to Creator Etiquette®.
The stars aligned for this edition! A guest cancelled last minute, Camille and I had just run into each other on the beach, and I asked if she would like to join the podcast. And just like that she was sitting across from me in the Adobe studio saying yes without hesitation.
Camille is a brand strategist, a super connector, and someone I have genuinely looked up to on social media for years. She recently launched a planner built around brand strategy for creators and entrepreneurs, so go check it out!
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Do the Reps Online. Then Show Up in Person.
Camille opened by saying to do the hard work first. Post consistently. Build relationships digitally. Create a brand for yourself online over time. And then when you show up IRL at a conference, a dinner, an event, people are genuinely excited to meet you because they already feel like they know you. The parasocial relationship you built does the work of the introduction before you have even opened your mouth.
She is Canadian, recently moved to LA, and said that the move was the first time she truly felt what it means to let in-person connection transform what started as a digital relationship. You do not need the online relationship to meet someone in person. But the combination of the two creates something entirely different (and far more durable) than either one alone.
A Brand Deal Is Not the End Game
Camille's philosophy on relationships is that what you put in is what you get out. She calls herself a super connector — someone who links people together not because she expects anything back, but because she loves putting great people in the same room. When you walk into a room and the only thing on your mind is the brand deal or the client, people can feel it. It reads as transactional. It closes the conversation before it opens.
The creators and professionals she keeps coming back to are not the ones who pitched her the hardest. They are the ones who showed up to connect first and let everything else follow from there.
The Loose Tie Phenomenon
Camille has lost female friendships, not because she did something wrong, but because she grew. When she grew outside the box those friends had put her in, it threatened their sense of self. She called it the loose tie phenomenon: people who know you from where you have been only know that version of you, and when you start trying to become someone bigger, it reads to them as a statement about where they are. It is not, of course. But that is how it lands.
She heard this described in Ireland as "notions," or the idea that you are getting above yourself, too big for your boots. Her advice on her to manage it was to not be reactive in the moment. Give yourself time to actually think about what you want to do with a relationship before you do anything. Because managing those shifting friendships, she said, is basically a masterclass in managing any difficult situation in business. The skill is the same.
We Are Good at Buying. We Are Terrible at Selling.
The original context was investing, and the fact that we are quick to take on new positions and terrible at exiting them. But the principle translates perfectly to how most people manage their time, their clients, their friendships, and their workload. We are easy at taking on new things. We hoard. We keep the client that has not been the right fit for two years, the friendship that costs more than it gives, the project we agreed to in a moment of optimism that is now draining us every week.
To determine what stays, ask: is this servicing me? My energy, my time, my output? What I am getting from it? If the answer is no, it is not personal. It just has to go. And being honest about that, she said, has done more for the quality of her work and her life than almost anything else.
The Content Rut Nobody Talks About
Camille was in a rut about a year and a half ago. Working hard, but nothing was converting. Her entire agency runs on inbound sales, and the inbound had dried up. She had employees, expenses, and a lot of pressure. It was genuinely difficult to keep creating content in that environment. Then a client said to her directly: “I would not hire you right now based on your content.”
That is a hard thing to hear. But she respected the honesty and took the feedback to a friend with twelve million YouTube subscribers, asking him if this was normal. He said he he has reinvented himself probably ten times over his career. Because the algorithm expects newness. What was working stops working. The audience changes and the platform changes and the world changes, and you have to change with it.
Camille said you are going to hate yourself at least twice a year when you are working hard and it is not working. That is not a you problem, it is what building something looks like. The response is to keep thinking about strategy. What does your audience actually need, what problem are you still solving, and what do you need to change about how you are showing up?
Stop Resisting AI
She has a client doing twelve million dollars a month in sales using almost entirely AI-generated content. That client came to Camille because she has no community, no tribe, no brand codes. When she drops a new collection, nothing happens because it doesn’t look real and there isn’t an audience who cares. All of her revenue has to be driven through paid ads, which means the margins are thin, the business is fragile, and there is no equity in the relationship with the people buying from her.
Camille's advice is to stop resisting AI. Learn it and use it as a tool. But invest in human texture, because humans want humans and humans want taste. The brands that will last are the ones that have both AI to help them move faster, and a genuine brand world that isn’t AI generated and no AI can replicate.
Camille, thank you for saying yes last minute and for giving this episode everything. Go buy her book, follow her everywhere she posts, and take the ten-second brand strategy masterclass she gave at the end of the episode seriously!
Welcome to Creator Etiquette®. I am so glad you are here.
Xo, Gigi Robinson
Founder, Hosts of Influence® | Creator, Educator, Speaker, Author, Dog Mom 🐾
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