Stop Trying to Make Social Media Serious: What Utah’s DOT Gets About Social Media Strategy
Social Media
Business women working at a desk smiling

There are people who get it. They understand social media is a marketing tool, sure, but they’ve stopped white-knuckling it toward a hard ROI number every time they post. Some of them have realized it might not even have to be about ROI at all. And that’s okay.

That thought has been sitting with me since the weekend. As a social media manager, I love working with the people who actually get this. They’re not asking for salesy social. They’re looking at the fuller picture: awareness, views, leads, engagement, how social fits into everything else in the marketing mix. (There’s still a place for looking at each channel on its own and figuring out what’s pulling its weight. I’m not arguing against that. That’s not the point here.)

Here’s the phenomenon I keep noticing: brands that have figured out how to be entertaining and useful at the same time. No one proves it better than the Utah Department of Transportation.

The department that shouldn’t be this funny

Transportation is not a sexy industry. Let’s be honest, it’s often a contentious one. Road closures make people furious. Construction makes people late. “The DOT” is an easy villain. UDOT flipped that script by leaning all the way into edutainment: education plus entertainment.

Their social team (reportedly just four or five people) has turned lane closures, bridge repairs, and snowplow routes into some of the most-watched government content in the country:

  • “BridgeFest”, a campaign covering 62 bridge projects in one summer, pitched itself as “the Utah Coachella”: construction instead of a concert, set to Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train.” It was a finalist for Best Organic Campaign.
  • “Bridge surgery”: replacing a bridge without shutting the road down for months, framed like a medical procedure. It turns a genuinely disruptive construction timeline into something people can follow, and root for, instead of dread.
  • “Baby bridge”: a new bridge gets treated like a birth announcement. Infrastructure as milestone, not inconvenience.
  • A 15-second Microsoft Paint animation announcing a freeway closure, set to Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles,” pulled in about 2 million views. Their own social media manager called it “so low-key and quick, but really impactful.”
  • After wildfire melted culverts under SR-153, they turned a genuinely serious infrastructure problem into a clear, human explanation of the fix and the disruption it would (and wouldn’t) cause.
  • Their team, led by social media manager Aimee Colton, won the 2025 Golden Post Award for best social media team in government.

None of it undercuts the message. It delivers it. People walk away from a UDOT post thinking “they’re on my side,” not “they’re the agency slowing down my commute.” That’s the win: comedy as trust-building, not comedy for its own sake.

It’s spreading

Washington State DOT has become its own social media force under Rachel Terlep. Bridge demolitions edited like a girls’ lunch date. Road closure news timed to a Taylor Swift album drop. Iowa DOT and Nebraska DOT are moving in the same direction, more cautiously. Not fully leaning into the humor yet. But clearly paying attention to what’s working.

The real question behind every social media strategy: whose terms is it on?

Here’s what I keep coming back to: what is your message, and are you making it adapt to social media, or are you trying to force social media to adapt to it?

Think about why people are actually on Instagram or Facebook. Killing time. Scrolling on the couch during TV. Bored at work. Looking for a mindless disconnect from everything else going on. Education and research happen there too. But usually as a secondary motive, not the reason someone opened the app.

Different brands solve for that in different ways, and humor isn’t the only lever. Look at accounts like Hey, Sleepy Baby (sleep help) and Kids Eat in Color (feeding help). They take an emotionally loaded topic and lead with empathy instead of jokes. Moms feel seen and heard first. The education comes wrapped inside that. Same underlying strategy as UDOT, opposite tone. Both are meeting people where they already are, instead of asking people to come sit in a classroom.

Where this leaves Stratos

I’ll be honest: we just rebranded, and I love where we landed. But this line of thinking has been sitting uncomfortably with me, because Stratos has always leaned hard into the education arm of what we do. We’re good at it. Maybe too reflexively good at it.

Here’s the thing: we know how to run this playbook. We just haven’t always turned it on ourselves.

Take Driftless Chocolates. We lean into humor for them, and it works. Customers have told them directly that they came into the shop because of something they saw on social, and they consistently say their audience loves the humor. (one more example)

Or Team Wilpers, where we balance entertainment (running and workout tips) with something closer to empathy: rallying a community around the fact that what they’re doing is genuinely hard. (one more example)

We know how to meet other people’s audiences where they are. But for our own brand? We’ve done so much education, and not nearly enough asking why our own viewers are on social in the first place. They’re probably not there to think about marketing strategy. They’re there to get away from work for five minutes, same as everyone else scrolling.

So here’s the question I don’t have a fully resolved answer to yet, the one I want to keep chewing on this month: how does Stratos’s brand voice show up in a way our audience actually wants to receive it? Not just the way we’re best at delivering it.

P.S. If you want to explore what a social media strategy built around your audience (not just your message) could look like for your small business, book a call. No pressure, just a conversation.

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