Dr Mamobo Ogoro's Marketing Playbook (Part 1) - turning social media, AI and personal brand into a DEI movement

Meet Dr Mamobo Ogoro - a social psychologist and the multi-award-winning co-founder of GORM, one of Ireland’s leading social enterprises, creating unity and fighting inequality through education and digital media.

As the first Irish recipient of the prestigious global Echoing Green Fellowship (alongside past fellows like Michelle Obama), Mamobo is an absolute powerhouse, on a mission to make Ireland — and the world — a place where everyone feels like they belong.

In this conversation, Mamobo shares a masterclass in impact-driven marketing: the power of storytelling to change hearts and minds, how social media and the GORM brand is the key to success, and how they use AI to supercharge their content (including MamoboGPT for her personal brand). Mamobo’s brand is skyrocketing - she breaks down the tactical strategies she uses to leverage her personal brand as a growth engine for the company.

At its heart, GORM is more than a company — it’s a movement. The organisation is scaling steadily, increasing their income by an impressive 65% in 2024. As conversations around identity and race become more polarised in Ireland and globally, the work of GORM is more important than ever.

If you’re ready to supercharge your marketing and social media, and scale your business with purpose, this interview is for you.

(This is Part 1 of my conversation with Mamobo — Part 2 drops next week!)

1. Tell me about your mission at GORM, what is the problem you are solving?

GORM is a multi-award winning social enterprise on a mission to unify across differences and advance belonging for marginalised communities. We’re based in Ireland.

Over the past few years, there’s been a rise of polarisation in Ireland and a rise of hostility towards marginalised communities. I’ve experienced it personally growing up as a migrant in Ireland. I moved to Ireland from Nigeria when I was 3 years old.

Today, roughly 1 in every 6 people come from a diverse ethnic heritage in Ireland. Research shows that with more diversity comes more division and polarisation.

But people tend to struggle with the skills to engage with that diversity in a healthy and positive way. We need to embrace diversity and all the beautiful benefits that come with it.

I decided to do a PhD in social psychology because I was obsessed with understanding why prejudice exists. When I was studying, I was like, ‘What can I build in order to bring communities and teams together to bring about social cohesion and cultivate belonging?’

I started a digital project to promote intercultural dialogue and that project snowballed into GORM.

At its core, GORM is an education company. We deliver intercultural media and education that supports group-based belonging and fights inequality.

There’s a great need for this work in Ireland and globally. It’s so essential for people to learn intercultural skills so they can engage with people from different backgrounds. I believe these are essential human skills.

2. What inspired you to take GORM from a passion project and make it into a full-blown business?

In 2020, we were starting to have real conversations about race in Ireland, sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement. I saw that as an opportunity.

At that time, we were just hearing sad stories of black people and discrimination. Sad stories will create an initial spark of awareness, but it won’t keep the fire burning. You need targeted interventions in order to create meaningful change.

Much of the work being done at that time was just wagging the finger and telling people not to be racist. But people didn’t have the practical skills and tools to intervene or to do that deep work within themselves. That was my moment. I thought, ‘I’ve trained on this - I have the practical skills and tools to support people.’

Storytelling is a very powerful way to grow empathy between communities. With GORM, we started to tell stories of people from marginalised communities. But we didn’t do it in a woe-is-me, pitiful way, we did it in a humanising way, ‘I’m a person who happens to have autism. And here’s my life with autism.’

Then I did a course called The Ideas Academy from an organisation called Social Entrepreneurs Ireland. It showed me what a social entrepreneur is, how you can build an organisation around your idea, and how you can make money from it.

Initially, GORM just did content creation for companies because I really love content creation and storytelling. But we weren’t turning a profit from it. One of my mentors gave me the lightbulb moment - I have a PhD in this area and I can teach it. We started to do talks and workshops with companies, which created a lot of impact and engagement with people.

Today, the core of our revenue model centres on delivering quality learning and development programmes for multinationals and corporate companies. That’s how we keep ourselves sustainable.

3. You are incredible at storytelling, it’s a tactic you use a lot in your online presence. Can you tell me more about this?

One of the best and fastest ways to build empathy across communities is through stories. Storytelling nurtures positive contact between groups and that’s when you can really break down prejudice at its core.

One way that storytelling can happen is through online content. At GORM, we elevate marginalised voices through campaigns, content and film.

Our storytelling is based on an understanding that we all have our differences - so that could be the different ways we dress or the different ways we eat food. But each and every human being has the same fundamentals: the need for belonging, for family, for understanding and for safety.

At GORM, when we tell stories of diverse communities, we highlight those differences in a way that allows people to resonate with the underlying need for safety and belonging, which anybody of any background can relate to, right?

For example, if you’re doing a campaign around women’s health, all women can relate to the health element. But the story can be told in many different ways. At GORM, we find that fundamental piece and we highlight it through different channels to meet different audiences.

The goal is that all audiences get the main message - at the end of the day, our humanity is what we all share, and that should be respected and celebrated.

4. Tell me about the role of social media in your marketing strategy

First, we use social media to showcase our social impact stories. Second, we use it to build awareness and attract clients for our services. Social media attracts them in and then we nurture them on email.

Social media has been the engine for our organizational growth. I grew up in the social media generation. It’s part of my fabric to post content. I’m very grateful I’ve been able to build my personal brand on social media - it’s one of the main ways GORM grows.

LinkedIn and Instagram have been fantastic tools for us to connect with people. When you’re talking about the work of diversity, equity and inclusion, you have to build trust with people first. It can be vulnerable for them and their organization to work with you on DEI. We build trust by being true to our messaging, our values, our mission and how our brand shows up online and in real life.

Before you do any social media, you need to build a strong brand. Understanding your brand pillars will guide you to figure out what channel is best suited to reach your specific audience and to achieve your marketing goals.

Social media has been a fantastic tool, but at the core of GORM, the brand is everything. We created a brand book that outlines our social media process, step-by-step: this is how we talk, this is how we post on LinkedIn, this is how we post on Instagram, here’s our visual guidelines. All of our team is very equipped to use social media without me being involved.

5. Are you using AI for your marketing, and how exactly?

We love AI - we use it a lot for our marketing. It helps us to be so much more productive and efficient.

We plugged the GORM brand book into an AI bot. Our lead on content creation, Eilís Walsh, creates a content plan each week. She puts the plan into the AI bot and tells it what channel each piece of content is for. The AI bot already knows how we talk and it creates the copy for her. She then edits it to make sure that it sounds like a human.

I leverage ChatGPT for my personal brand too. I’m a much better speaker than I am a writer. I need a lot of help with writing - I cannot spell for my life. Shout out to Grammarly.

I created what I call Mamobo GPT - an AI agent that is me, essentially. To set it up, I took all my posts from my LinkedIn and my old Twitter account and I plugged it into ChatGPT. I asked it, ‘Okay, tell me about myself. How do I write?’ It told me everything about how I write, how I use humour, all of it. Then I plugged in my brand pillars - the three things I want to be known for in my industry. It helped me write a brand book for my personal brand.

So now when I want to create a LinkedIn post or any written post, I plug it into Mamobo GPT. If I go to an event and I’m feeling inspired, I tell the bot that I went to this event earlier, and these are the learnings I had, and I ask it to write a LinkedIn post in my voice. Of course, I’ll edit it so it sounds like me.

6. Anything else to add on how you are using AI at GORM?

We use ChatGPT. We have the paid version - it’s the best €20 a month we spend.

One key thing is that we turn off the permissions for ChatGPT to use our data to train its models (click here to learn how). I only put in information that is available to the public. We’re a social enterprise so all of our information is transparent in terms of financials and the business side.

Myself and our Chief Operations Officer, Beatriz Gómez Moreno, are organisational freaks - we’re very proud of it. We document everything. We created our brand book. We also created GORM GPT for all things operational. It’s like a personal assistant for the organisation and the team. For example, if someone needs our VAT number, they just ask GORM GPT. I also use it for proposal writing. I love it!

Obviously, we edit it and put our own spin on things. I’d say our proposals are 60% AI and 40% of me adding, refining and making sure it sounds like a human. It frees up my time and frees up my mind for the bigger stuff. I use that time to go deeper in terms of my reading and research.

7. In just a month, you grew your following on your personal Instagram and TikTok profiles by a whopping 40,000 followers. By sharing more openly on social media, your personal brand grew, and your company brand got a boost alongside it. Can you tell me more about this?

To backtrack, storytelling is part of my family. I’m the child of a filmmaker and a musician. My family are very creative people. My dad tells stories for a living. My mom is a pastor now so she gets her message across through stories.

From a young age, my parents were throwing me on stages and putting me in front of people. I remember doing gospel performances on the streets of Wexford, mortified because I was seeing my secondary school friends. That early push into being in front of people and being visible really set me up for growing my personal brand as an adult.

I kickstarted GORM by telling my own story and positioning myself as an expert in the DEI space. People buy from people, so if they feel connected to me online, they will be more likely to work with us. People often tell me that they feel like they know me from LinkedIn. Nurturing that relationship with my followers has been a huge way to grow the business.

Once I started sharing my story, I found that clients, partners and the general public connected with that story and connected with the wider mission and movement. GORM grew as a result. We now have around 65,000+ followers across our social media channels between my personal accounts and GORM, and it’s growing fast.

8. Why do you think your personal brand took off so much in the space of that month?

I had three videos that went viral at the same time. What I consider viral is anything over 100,000 views.

I had a vision board at the start of this year (2025) and one of my goals was to grow to 10,000 followers on Instagram. At the start of September, I passed 20,000. I manifested it. It’s been surreal.

When it comes to the academic world, we tend to go very deep on a subject and that often doesn’t resonate, it puts people off.

I’ve had to figure out how to engage with people in a much simpler way. I started making bite-sized posts on cultural psychology: how our culture shapes our behaviour, why different cultures clash. It really resonated with people.

One video on Tiktok got 100,000 likes and a couple of million views. I was blown away. So now I know my audience love these little nuggets of social and cultural psychology to apply to their everyday lives or have a fun fact at the dinner table.

With those videos, people started to flood in to my following. It’s not a million followers, but it’s very cool to see how much this resonates with people.

I love that it helps people understand how their cultural biases influence systems of oppression. I love that they’re learning small things that they can do to ensure they’re more inclusive and cultivate belonging in their own groups. And all the time, I’m building trust with my audience.

I’ve started weaving our GORM services into my posts as well. I’ll drop that in here and there, so people can decide for themselves if they want to work with us. First, I’m highlighting that the problem exists. And then I’m saying that our organisation can help you sort that problem out if you want to do that within your team or organisation.

 

 

 

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9. Do you have any other tips for founders who want to invest time in growing their personal brand?

You need to figure out what I call your ‘strategic authenticity’ - how you want to be perceived and known to the world. What are the three things you want to be known for? Those three things are going to be your personal brand pillars.

My brand pillars are social entrepreneurship | diversity, equity and inclusion | and personal development. Regardless of what I’m doing - if I’m going to the gym, or if I’m talking about hair, I weave those brand pillars in.

I share nuggets on intercultural learning, my journey as a social entrepreneur, my lessons, and some stories. And then I weave my business and services into it here and there.

Sometimes people think, ‘Oh my god, personal brand, I need to share my entire life and my family life.’ You don’t. If you stick to your brand pillars, you can share what you feel is authentic to you, but with boundaries. You don’t have to over-share or over-expose yourself. Your audience can still feel connected to you.

I had gotten into a rut of just promoting the business and I forgot myself in the process of that. I’ve really connected back to my authentic self in a strategic way that resonates with people. I do it through education, but education that is very entertaining and digestible.

Another great way that I grow my visibility is through things like giving keynote speeches at events and featuring on podcasts. I’ve hosted a radio show on Newstalk. I’ve also won many awards, which helps build awareness and trust.

If you’re building your personal brand, take some time to figure out, ‘What are your brand pillars and how do you want to be perceived?’

Tune back in for Part 2 of this conversation - Learn how Mamobo has built a commercially successful business while also driving impact, how humour and curiosity are her secret weapons for engaging people in DEI activism, and the online tactics that are generating income — not just clicks.

Connect with GORM: Website | Instagram | LinkedIn