surfelport

I had this problem as well, for me, Jetpack had nothing to do with it. What worked was changing the tag name. So I changed out the tag name in the Featured Content section of Customiz from “featured” to “sticky,” then updated the post with that tag, though I suspect any variance of a tag name would work.

That fixed it.

I’ve now upgraded to 3.8. Now I receive a message above the Grid or Slider option:

“Use a tag to feature your posts. If no posts match the tag, sticky posts will be displayed instead.”

What’s interesting is that if I make a post “sticky,” that still doesn’t cause the post to act as a Grid item on the top of the site.