Working across London, Dubai and New York has changed how I see this industry. Trends surface in one city months before they reach another. Client expectations, platform habits and even the pace of a working week shift from one time zone to the next. Rather than applying a single template everywhere, I treat the work as a constant act of translation: reading what a market wants, then shaping strategy to fit it, without ever losing the thread of a brand’s identity.

That international perspective only holds up if I stay close to the source. The best material rarely comes from a brief typed up after the fact, it comes from being there: on site during a shoot, in the studio as a scheme takes shape, present for the installation that will only ever happen once. I capture content in real time, inside a studio’s own calendar rather than around it, and that is the difference between social media that documents a project and social media that simply reports on it after the moment has passed. It is also why I keep the client list deliberately small. Being in the room is not something that scales.

Three Cities, Two Kinds of Presence

Those three cities are not the same kind of presence, and it is worth being straight about the difference. London is home and the principal market. Dubai is where I am moving to, and where I am already on site with clients: in studios, at shoots, at the fairs. New York is a market I have worked in for years and still visit, but the relationship there is a managed one. The strategy, the planning, the direction of capture and the reporting all sit with me, while the shooting itself is handled locally by people I brief.

That distinction is worth knowing before you choose who to work with. If you want somebody physically in the room every month, that is London and the Gulf. If you want senior marketing direction, a plan that holds, and one person accountable for whether it works, that travels, and in New York it is exactly what the work has been.

Beyond Posting

The title “social media manager” undersells the role considerably. Posting is the visible five per cent of what I do. The rest happens well before anything goes live:

  • Building a strategy that reflects a brand’s actual positioning, not a generic industry playbook
  • Planning content months ahead, mapped against launches, press moments and the studio’s own workload
  • Directing capture on site, knowing which angle, which detail, which moment will matter later
  • Writing copy with the same care given to a project description or press release
  • Scheduling with intention, so output feels considered rather than constant
  • Reading engagement and performance data honestly, and adjusting course accordingly

None of it happens in isolation. I sit between the people already telling the story (the studio, its architects, its PR contact, its marketing lead) and act as the bridge that keeps every version of that story consistent, wherever it is being told. When a project needs a specialist I don’t cover myself (a photographer for a particular shoot, an Arabic copywriter for a Gulf campaign), I bring one in and brief them personally, so the work still arrives sounding like the brand rather than like a supplier.

Social media is not a channel to fill. It is a record of a practice being built, one considered decision at a time.

Why Integration Matters

Design brands rarely have the luxury of viral moments. What they build instead is presence, the slow accumulation of recognition that comes from being visible, credible and consistent over years, not weeks. That kind of presence depends on social media, SEO and PR moving in step rather than in parallel. A well-placed piece of press coverage means little if the language around it isn’t reinforced in search. A striking Instagram post loses value if it never connects back to a website built to convert that attention into enquiries.

So I treat them as one system rather than three jobs. Content built for social feeds is written with search terms in mind; press coverage is echoed and extended across channels; the SEO work is informed by the language clients actually use when they talk about a project online. Handling all of it myself is the point: nothing sits in a silo, because a brand’s reputation doesn’t sit in one either, and there is no handover between departments for it to fall through.

Looking Ahead

As studios expand into new markets, this integrated, international way of working only becomes more relevant. A practice opening a second office in Dubai or New York needs its digital presence to travel with it, coherent in every location, adapted to each without ever feeling foreign. That is the work I want to be doing: building a global rhythm out of local detail, one project, one market, one considered post at a time.