The Importance of Attention Paid to Employees and Industry Trends
Serving as the CEO of Honeycomb Media, Belmont English alumna Kat (Waggaman) Duncan (’14) has watched the digital marketing landscape transform over the past decade firsthand. The industry trend comparisons from her first social media role after college to today draw stark contrasts, both in terms of technology and university experiences offered to students.
“When I was in college, social media majors weren’t even a thing,” Duncan laughed. “You could minor in social media or a concentration in socials, but that was it. We hired an employee who majored in social media marketing somewhat recently, and she has became one of our best. But even then, she knew a lot about marketing, but it was very different to apply it — experience can’t always be replicated in a classroom.”
With Honeycomb Media, a South Carolina-based business that has made over $1 million under the care of Duncan and owner Alex Harrelson, Duncan is constantly looking to innovate from both a culture and performance standpoint. The business is currently comprised of 15 employees, all of whom are women. The flexible work culture it has established as a fully remote company often attracts mothers and recent female college graduates.
“We interest a lot of these women because we always provide education and training,” Duncan said. “We welcome people who don’t have any experience in marketing to come and join our team, and I think that’s attractive to mothers and students fresh out of college who are not sure where to go next. Our training isn’t the bro marketing courses you find online, but courses that actually train you for the work and for successful careers.”
Duncan credits Belmont with much of what she has learned about community and forming relationships, something she keeps at the forefront of her leadership style at Honeycomb. 
“Belmont is a great place to hone your community competencies, and I think a big reason for that is everyone is looking to be somebody’s fan,” she added. “I think it sometimes goes overlooked how people at Belmont want to be everyone’s fan and see everyone succeed, regardless of talent or trait. You feel it from faculty and other students.”
Just as Duncan is constantly searching for ways to reinforce Honeycomb Media’s culture, she also must remain on the cutting edge of industry trends and tools to outperform the competition. The rapid emergence of artificial intelligence software such as learning language models and generative AI models have posed new benefits and challenges to Honeycomb.
Gone are the days of going viral on Pinterest without much work, she says, and hello to sophisticated algorithms, software tools and AI.
As do many, Duncan works with these tools daily to draw inspiration for long-form storytelling, SEO articles, caption writing and even graphic design. However, Duncan never relies on their output alone, instead opting to tweak, redefine and tailor its responses to fit the project and the Honeycomb brand.
She likens the “heart of AI” to the 2004 Disney Channel original movie “Pixel Perfect,” a film she encourages others to watch to understand the potential and limitations of AI.
“AI will never be perfect because it’s just a computer with no emotion — it just tells you what it thinks you want to hear,” Duncan explained. “You can never just copy and paste from any of these tools either for that reason. It uses specific jargon that people are getting very good at detecting, and I could never pass off an AI-generated photo without a pass through Photoshop or even Canva.”
Over her digital marketing career, Duncan has held a variety of positions that have offered insight into different aspects of the organization she now supervises. With a background in social media, copywriting, account management and onboarding, she encourages students looking to enter the digital marketing field to bring their personality and own flair to a profession becoming increasingly dominated by machines.
“I was in class with Dr. Sue Trout, trying to be this classical literature-type gal with a quill pen in hand, crackers and coffee,” she recounted. “Dr. Trout said ‘no, you’re a glitter pen gal and that’s okay.’ That really encouraged me to lean into who I was, and Belmont was a group of people that encourage you to be who you are and making you feel good about it.”
Duncan further the usefulness and practicality of an English degree across all marketing fields to aspiring marketing students.
“An English degree is one of the best degrees you can ever have,” she said. “It helps so much with communication and understanding — I will go to my grave preaching that. You can do anything with an English degree, not just teach.”
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