Chronically online, so you don’t have to be
Save, Share, Send is a publication about social media, audiences, creators, the creator economy, media, and occasionally whatever I please, because sometimes I’m not online.
Who’s writing this
I’m Anna Rawhiti-Connell, an audience and social media strategist and consultant based in New Zealand. I have spent more than twenty years in social media, advertising, communications, fundraising and journalism, most recently leading audience and off-platform strategy at The Spinoff before leaving to consult and do my own thing in March 2026.
I was a senior writer at the Spinoff and editor of The Bulletin for two years. I have written for Newsroom, North and South and RNZ. I used to write columns and once won an award for it. Hypocrite that I am, hating the whole award-industry complex, I get to say “award-winning writer” forever, but fair warning, that dates back to 2021 and sometimes, like everyone, my writing was and could still be, a bit average. That was a paralysing thought for me, but now, as hundreds of millions of people drop stuff online, watching it sink or swim on a daily basis, I figure it’s better to try and try again. It’s also practising what I preach.
I have a husband and two rescue dogs. I watch and love a lot of television. I actually read books. I cook and make videos about it, mainly because I’m Gen X and have a half-baked theory that we are averse to content creation and making videos, so I am forcing myself to get past it.
About Save, Share, Send
Like and subscribe used to be the mantra of vloggers. Saves, shares, and sends are now the strongest engagement signals Instagram uses to determine whether your content will rise up from the ashes of your follower base. Algorithms now rule social media platforms, and success is increasingly driven by audience signalling that indicates utility, shared experience and representation. It’s a microcosmic example of some very big shifts that make speaking the audience's language fluently critical and tricky at the same time.
The serious threads and paradoxes running through what I hope to jab at with Save, Share, Send:
Media power has moved from institutions to audiences and creators. Media power is also consolidating into the hands of the very wealthy few. It is a time to be alive.
Content creators are eating old institutions and modes of operating for breakfast while turning into mini media empires, operating around audience in ways traditional media don't and perhaps can’t.
Traditional media is struggling in the face of all this, but if Thanos snapped it away, what’s left?
Social media democratised broadcasting and then burned down the one-way structures and economic models that once propped up power. Social media is terrible for so many reasons, but it’s also vital and a real leveller.
People are lonely and isolated, staring at screens too much, yet certain kinds of collective activities and events are thriving.
Institutions and organisations cannot stand at the top of the mountain and shout down at people anymore. You have to come down not just to meet people where they already are, but to understand where they are. You can’t act as if you’ve arrived from a distant planet, dropping your looksmaxxing and 6-7 references six to seven years late. Like me, right now.
This is exciting, headspinning, concerning, terrifying and of great interest to me and many others. At the heart of it all is “audience” — the actual people — and the discipline and field of work. It’s my weird and ill-defined field of work. Despite being impossible to explain to people, “audience” sums up what I care about and think about more than anything else.
Some weeks, I will write about a creator, a podcast, or a franchise that has built a real audience from nothing. Some weeks, it will be about people succeeding in tapping into what others are looking for right now (wholesome nuns). It will be about the platforms, big bad algorithms, media, and occasionally a tangent I cannot let go of. Having penned a vital but mediocre investigation into whether Prince Harry was lying about having a frost-bitten knob at his brother’s wedding, I know those will be very popular in a 2020s kind of way — appreciated only by savants and those hunting niche commentary.
Why am I writing now? Why read me now?
Rolling around in the guts and glory of these big changes has been the crux of my professional work as an audience and social media strategist and writer, and despite years of trying to develop other hobbies, it’s the paper that lines the walls of my mind prison.
I spend an unreasonable amount of time online watching how people make things, find things, share things, decide what is worth their attention and wondering why. I have also spent a long time assuming this was something everyone did. Recent one-sided conversations with friends about the aforementioned wholesome nuns trending on TikTok and the merits of where the New York Times puts their back button suggest otherwise.
I’ve been online for 84 years. I had Twitter and Vine accounts that I think I can describe as moderately popular in New Zealand, which meant some nights, 100 people would watch me fall over in a cardboard box. This is the last remaining evidence of that early career as a Vinfluencer and social proof of my credentials.
Elon burned the archive, so this is all there is. I don’t look like that anymore, because it is 2026, not 2013. RIP to that absolute workhorse of a MacBook.
I have realised that perhaps it’s time I recognised I’ve been conducting a long-term observational study of the online world for two decades, and that I spared my friends and channelled it elsewhere. I am especially interested in young people, who tend to grasp the future of it all before it arrives, while everyone else is still arguing about it. I have always dreamed of being the kind of mid-forties freak who gloms onto what young people are doing; I know they love that.
As a personal/professional endeavour, I’m hoping Save, Share, Send will be the equivalent of some light reps to retrain the atrophied writing muscles that used to function well enough for me to write regularly in my own voice - with humour, insight, pragmatism, and, don’t tell anyone, but a bit of an earnest heart.
What you’ll get
Posts on social media, audiences, creators and the creator economy and media. Occasional posts on Gen AI, frostbite, the pope, and why being unable to find good socks in New Zealand is a microcosm of our economic woes. I swear never to say “excited to announce”.
I hope to do this often enough and focus on things close to home (New Zealand primarily, but perhaps ambitiously, one day, Australia, Asia and the wider Pacific), but as one person with many other jobs that pay my bills, all I can say is, “In this global economy and culture?” I expect no one to read this bit. It’s 2026; audiences aren’t obligated to follow polite rules or care about anyone’s daily drudge unless that’s the schtick they signed up for.
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