The first time I heard the phrase “social media,” I was sitting in a Hanover House conference room sometime around 2004, and a young marketing assistant was explaining MySpace to a roomful of catalog men in their fifties. We had spent decades buying mailing lists from the SRDS, swapping co-op data with the Direct Marketing Association, and timing drops to land on kitchen tables the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. Now this woman, all of twenty-six, was telling us that a teenager in Topeka could effectively be his own broadcast network. We listened politely. Most of us, frankly, did not believe her.
She was right, of course. And the catalog people who survived the next twenty years are the ones who figured out, often the hard way, that promoting a catalog website online is not the same animal as promoting a printed book. The rules are different, the rhythm is different, and the audience — this is the part that took us the longest to admit — expects to be talked with, not talked at.
What an old catalog hand learned about social media
I retired from the consulting side around 2015, but I have kept up. Friends still send me their landing pages and ask, “Charlie, what would you do?” My answer hasn’t changed much in a decade: figure out the kind of attention you want, then pick the platform that actually delivers it. Catalog merchants used to obsess over four-color signatures and the cost of a 32-page versus a 48-page book. Today the obsession should be about which kind of attention you are paying for, and whether it converts.
So let me walk through the same five categories I used to teach in workshops, updated for the world as it stands in 2026. Some of the platform names have changed. Some have died. The categories have not.
Things people read
Long-form content still works, and I would argue it works better now than it did fifteen years ago, because the bar has dropped so low. A blog post on your own domain that genuinely explains how to choose a comforter, or what the difference is between a 12-gauge and a 14-gauge wire shelf, will earn you Google traffic for years. That has not changed.
What has changed is the ecosystem around it. Facebook, where catalog brands once posted three times a day, has quietly become a place where organic reach is essentially zero unless you pay. SlideShare, which I used to recommend for product spec decks, is still operating — Scribd bought it from LinkedIn back in 2020 and runs it as a paid subscription product now. Ning, the community-builder we all flirted with around 2008, has faded so far into the background that I had to look it up to make sure it still existed. It does, technically.
The honest reading list for a catalog merchant in 2026: your own blog, an email newsletter that you actually own (not rented from a platform), and a LinkedIn presence if you sell anything to professionals. That is most of what you need.
Things people see
Catalog people have always understood imagery. We invented the close-up product shot on a sweep table. So the visual platforms should be your home court.
Pinterest remains, in my view, the most underrated tool in the catalog merchant’s kit. It indexes well, the audience skews toward buyers rather than browsers, and a well-tagged pin can bring traffic to a product page for years — a long tail no print drop ever matched. Instagram is essential if you sell anything decorative, wearable, or edible, though Meta has been steering everything toward Reels, which means a still photograph is no longer enough.
Flickr is still alive, though hobbled — in 2025 they began restricting downloads of larger images on free accounts, which tells you where the company’s priorities sit. Picasa was retired by Google years ago. If you see an old marketing guide that recommends Picasa, throw it out; that guide will steer you wrong on more than one front.
Things people hear
Podcasts have grown up considerably since I first wrote about them. They are no longer a side experiment — for the right niche, a steady, well-produced podcast can build a customer base that no print catalog ever did, because the listener invites you into their car and their kitchen for forty minutes at a time.
The cautionary note from twenty years ago still holds, though: nobody listens to a thirty-minute commercial. If your podcast is a sales pitch in a trench coat, you will get the audience you deserve, which is none. The catalog merchants I know who have done this well — in cookware, in woodworking tools, in gardening — treat the podcast as a service to the customer, and let the catalog ride along quietly in the show notes.
Things people experience
This is the category where the most has changed since 2010. Back then I was telling clients to put videos on YouTube, and that was the whole conversation. YouTube is still essential and still the best long-form video archive on the internet. But TikTok has, in the last three or four years, become something genuinely new: a discovery engine that puts a thirty-second product video in front of strangers who never asked to see it. Industry forecasts I’ve seen project TikTok Shop alone driving north of twenty billion dollars in U.S. ecommerce in 2026. Whether or not that holds up, the direction is clear.
For an older catalog brand, the temptation is to dismiss TikTok as a place for teenagers dancing. Resist that temptation. The audience there is broader than the press lets on, and the format rewards a kind of plain, honest demonstration that catalog copywriters used to be very good at. Show the product. Use it. Talk like a person.
Things people share
Sharing is the through-line. Every category above ultimately succeeds or fails based on whether the work is good enough to pass along. Twitter — rebranded as X in 2023 and now reportedly down from where it was at the rebrand — is a thinner reed to lean on than it once was. Digg, which I see mentioned in old blog posts, was sold off and reinvented more than once and is no longer a meaningful traffic source for a catalog. The platforms come and go. The instinct to share something useful or delightful with a friend is older than mail order itself.
A few rules of the road, from someone who has watched the road get repaved
- Pick three platforms, not nine. The catalog merchants who try to be everywhere end up nowhere. Choose the two or three where your customer actually lives and do those well.
- Own your list. Email is forty years old and still the highest-converting channel most catalogers have. Every social platform is a rented apartment. Your email list is the house you own.
- Measure the thing that pays the bills. Likes are not orders. Followers are not orders. Click-throughs to a product page that converts — those are orders.
- Write like a person. The same plain, warm, slightly clever voice that worked in a 1985 Spiegel headline still works in a 2026 Instagram caption. The medium changed; the reader did not, all that much.
If you are over sixty and running, advising, or just rooting for a catalog operation, take heart: the fundamentals you learned still apply. The channels are noisier and faster, and a few of them will be gone before this article is. But a good catalog has always been about knowing your customer, showing your product honestly, and giving people a reason to come back. The internet did not change that. It just gave us more places to do it.
