I wrote this in DMs to Akshyae Singh, who's trying to start something to help bring people together to improve AI Safety communication. After writing it, I thought that it might be useful for others as well.
I'd like to preface with the information that I'm not a marketing expert, haven't formally studied in any way and haven't been paid for it either. Just a measurements nerd that cares about messaging and communication and think most marketing people actually do it quite badly, if you measure good/bad by conversion success (there are exceptions, ofc, e.g. several online creators, Nike (one of the first to notice outrage marketing), etc) . If you'd like some evidence of my competency, I've run 3 AI Safety events so far this year, which respectively attracted 165, 159, and 298 prospective AI Safety researchers
I think social media is going to become even more saturated than it already is, with AI video generation being an integrated part of every platform - so they'll have to compete with that, if they're doing social media.
I think IRL stuff though, especially in person, is actually extremely neglected rn, due to marketing companies and marketing departments wanting to save money and overhead - and when working with very large brands, e.g. Coca Cola, Nike, etc, it's hard to measure conversion rates for ads, so it's often just based on number of views - the marketing people are incentivzed to get those view numbers as high as possible, so their bosses are happy and the platform is as well, so that they can charge more.
So if AI Safety people actually realize this and market in person, where there is much less competition and much lower quality competition, that could be a winning strategy.
I think if you want other AI Safety orgs to adopt you and use you, think of you as useful, etc, the best thing to do is be very useful, at scale
A relatively simple way to do this would be to develop Guides for messaging/marketing that are tested and kept up to date
The majority of AI safety organizers don't really know how to do social media, how to do messaging, etc.
If you know or get in touch with growing tiktokers, youtubers, douyin creators, etc, have them brainstorm and learn what actually works best for ai safety messaging, to actually get conversion, not just views, and keep that guide up to date - or just date when it was last tested - that would be extremely useful
You could also charge for this and have it be a way that you're financially aligned
So that you make more money by actually being good at ai safety messaging
Rather than essentially every AI Safety org rn, which is financially misaligned - they make money from writing a funding application, having the first page of their research look important, etc