Get yourself a "hype monkey" 🐒

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Get yourself a “hype monkey” 🐒

This is Trevor.

He’s technically a “Junior Media Intern” at Torq (a cybersecurity company). He posts memes, does ridiculous stunts at conferences, and stars in a whole video series called TorqTV.

He also doesn’t exist.

Trevor is a fictional character played by an actor. And he’s one of the best marketing assets in tech right now.

At conferences, people literally stop him to take photos:

That’s a Hype Monkey. 🐒

A Hype Monkey is a person (real or fictional) whose actual job is to post on social media all day from their personal profile and create positive noise for the company.

They post memes, behind-the-scenes moments, hot takes, and goofy content that has nothing to do with the product. People follow them because they’re entertaining - and eventually that goodwill transfers to the brand.

Every tech company should have one.

Your CEO can’t do this ❌

Your founder has a professional reputation to protect.

The Hype Monkey doesn’t need any filters. They can be sillier, edgier, more irreverent. They can post a meme making fun of your own industry without it reflecting poorly on the CEO.

That freedom is exactly what makes the content so good.

LinkedIn’s algorithm makes this 10x more powerful 🌀

LinkedIn is connection-based. That’s the secret engine here.

The algorithm shows you content from people you’re connected to, especially content that your other connections are engaging with.

It works like this:

1. Your Hype Monkey sends connection requests to 50-100 target prospects every week.

2. Then your other employees (sales, marketing, whoever) connect with those same prospects.

3. Every day, those employees like and comment on the Monkey’s posts.

4. Suddenly, LinkedIn’s algorithm understands that multiple people in the prospect’s network are engaging with the same profile, so it pushes the Monkey’s posts to the top of the prospect’s feed.

Now the algorithm shows the Monkey’s content to that prospect ALL THE TIME:

The prospect never asked for this. They just accepted a few connection requests. But now your Hype Monkey is making them laugh in their feed daily, and your brand is along for the ride.

All of this costs you one salary. No ad spend required.

The viral formula is stupidly simple 🧪

There are tons of great “Hype Monkey” examples:

Carmen Vicente from Slate, Max Pete from Sprout Social, Vince Chan from Gong (until recently), and my absolute favorite - Renee Shaw from tl;dv.

Renée’s LinkedIn title is literally “your mom at tl;dv”. She makes satirical video skits about everyday work pain points and has a huge following.

Her biggest posts are never about jumping on trends, Renée told me when I interviewed her (she also writes about it on her Substack). She takes a universal work problem and ties it to something completely absurd.

One of her most viral posts:

Do you see anything about tl;dv here? I don’t. Her content NEVER mentions product features - but everyone who follows her knows exactly where she works.

She also gave me a smart take on matching humor to audience: engineers love bleeding-edge memes, marketers respond to feeling “seen,” salespeople enjoy broad industry commentary, etc.

Your Hype Monkey needs to study who they’re posting for.

The “Hype Monkey” playbook 📕

Here’s how to actually do it:

1. 📍 Find the right person. You’re looking for someone young (ideally Gen Z) who wants to get into marketing but doesn’t have much experience yet. That’s the sweet spot, because when you hand someone like that their own social media account and say “your job is to be funny and post every day” → they’ll be 10x more excited about it than any senior marketer would.

2. 🦄 This can be a real employee or a contracted actor (like Trevor from Torq). Both work. An employee is more authentic, but an actor gives you more control and the character stays with the company if they leave.

3. 🧩 In between posting, they can help with operational marketing tasks that you shouldn’t be spending your time on anyway. So you’re getting a Hype Monkey plus a useful junior team member.

4. 🧠 Weaponize the LinkedIn algorithm. Get the monkey to connect with 50-100 prospects weekly. Get every employee to engage with the Monkey’s posts. This floods prospects’ feeds organically, as explained above.

5. 🌈 Put them everywhere. Conferences (where people will eventually stop them for photos), webinars, product demo videos, podcast appearances. The more surfaces they show up on → the stronger the effect.

Start with whoever’s loudest at your company 🐒

Pick the most charismatic person at your company and give them 2-3 hours a day to post and engage. Run it for 3 months.

Track whether sales is hearing “oh I already know you guys” on calls.

If it works (I think it will), hire someone full-time.

- Tom ✌️