Karan Chadda

Global digital marketing and communications leader

Brand

What’s the associative risk to brands from social media?

As social media companies grapple with fake news and extremist content, are brands at risk of being tarnished by association?

You’re launching a new campaign, you want a targeted way of reaching a particular audience and you’ve got a fun quiz to engage people, so you run some Facebook ads. Job done.

But what if your quiz lands in someone’s feed next to a post about a bloody revolt against capitalism, or climate change denial, or far right conspiracy theories? Will that damage your brand?

Association is important

Brands take time to cultivate, are powerful tools in building consumer preference and are expensive to maintain. Once tarnished, they can be difficult to rebuild.

And they can be tarnished, or improved, from unexpected quarters because association is important.

Timberland, the outdoors lifestyle brand which continually uses images of mountains and forests in its marketing, was embraced by hip hop and became the go-to boot brand for hip hop’s mainly urban audience. A brand focused on the great outdoors, became urban by association.

Burberry, the high-end fashion brand, needed a real brand clean up when baseball caps made using its famous check became the headwear of choice among less affluent inner city youths. It took years and a lot of work to make it an elite brand again.

In the same way that brands pay millions to celebrities to build associations of glamour and success, they need to avoid negative associations.

We’ve seen similar on YouTube

YouTube was the first social channel to see this problem. Algorithmic media buying meant that brands could see their ads sit at the beginning of videos about all sorts of unsuitable content. When this came to light, it saw brands withdraw and vloggers reported significant drops in income.

The problem is less direct on Twitter or Facebook. Content posted by brands on these networks won’t be placed as the precursor to someone else’s content. A brand’s post will appear as an independent piece of a person’s feed. The association is less direct.

Clean up or clear out

Yet, there is some risk. Twitter can, at times, feel like a mob that’s looking for something to rail against. Do you really want to put your brand on a network where it feels like a small misstep could be massively damaging? And not a day goes by where someone loudly proclaims how they’re “no longer doing Facebook.”

Recent Pew Research Center data reported by the FT showed that in the US the top 10% of tweeters on average posted 138 tweets a month, the remaining 90% averaged just two posts a month. Twitter has a definite skew to a loud minority. If this concentration increases, that could spell real problems for the network because it’s not good news for brands. If Twitter goes from being the place that people go to for breaking news, to the place people avoid because it’s angry and chaotic, brands will avoid it too.

Similarly, for Facebook, if it becomes a place where extremists post regularly and your friends post less often, then the risk equation for brands changes dramatically. Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has talked a lot recently about rebalancing the newsfeed towards more content from friends but will the changes come quickly enough?

The associative damage from discrete posts might be minimal, but if a social network or social media as a whole are viewed as damaged, then there’s a legitimate conversation to be had about whether the risk to brands is worth the targeted access to potential customers. If social media networks don’t clean up their feeds, then they might find that as average users leave, brands go clear out with them.

Simple or meaningless?

Social media is awash with quotes. Some accurate, some less so. Some deeply cherished by those who post them, others seemingly churned out of some quote sausage machine. Many love them, many loathe them. However, what is not in doubt is that they elicit engagement.

People are drawn to simple, clear messages. If those messages bring simplicity to complex issues, well then everything’s rosy. But there comes a point when something is made too simple. When so much context is removed that the message is meaningless.

Design

There is an excellent documentary series on Netflix called Abstract. In the first episode, Christoph Niemann, who designs covers for the New Yorker, discusses abstract design. He uses the example of communicating love. Everyone uses a heart shape. From a design perspective, the heart shape is the most abstract a drawing of a heart can be before it becomes meaningless. It doesn’t have the complexity of ventricles and arteries, but it is definitely a heart. If you made it more abstract, by turning it into a square or a circle, it would go from simplified to meaningless.

Language

Let’s apply the same thinking to language. A popular refrain in communications at the moment is that there is no longer B2C (business to consumer) or B2B (business to business), there is only business to human. The idea being that in the age of social media and the blurring of work and personal lives, we need to communicate to people as people. It is superficially appealing, but it is meaningless.

B2B is a useful simplification. It tells us, at a very top level, that we’re communicating to people who are making decisions for businesses. Similarly, B2C tells us we’re communicating to an audience who are making decisions as consumers.

Business to human, tells us we’re communicating to people. What’s helpful about that? It is shorn of useful context. It is the equivalent of communicating love using a square.

Fake News Memes

This year, fake news has made serious inroads towards toppling house prices and Rupert’s Tesla as the dominant dinner party topic of conversation.

While chatting and chomping with Stephen Waddington in the more down to earth surroundings of Frank’s cafe on Southwark Street, we talked about the demise of the sub-editor, rediscovering the lighter side of Twitter and the joy of making and doing.

The conversation led to the idea of creating memes based on word plays of fake news. Over the following week, I peppered social media at odd hours with a range of these memes. The full collection is displayed below.

This isn’t a clever commentary on the news business. It’s not an analysis of the state of our civic debate. It’s certainly not content marketing designed to build trust, show leadership or sell consultancy. It’s a little bit of fun. Because it’s fun to have fun.

Twitter ads, disclaimers and highly regulated industries

Twitter is a tricky medium for advertising but its user base is valuable.

On average, Twitter’s UK user base is better educated and higher earning than the population as a whole. That makes it a bit of a prize for some products, including some which are highly regulated like financial services.

Twitter users are also an opinionated bunch who often angrily coalesce around an issue and their regular flare ups become fodder for news outlets. So there’s a notable risk when advertising to them.

A look at financial services

So how to advertise Twitter users? Let’s take a look at some ads by financial services firms to see the approaches different firms are taking.

Hargreaves Lansdown, which provides investment services to retail investors, has been running ads that link to information about the funds that are most popular with its ISA clients. They have a clear disclaimer that there is a, “risk of loss.”

Meanwhile, UBS bank’s digital wealth management offering, called SmartWealth, is running ads with a clear call to action telling investors to, “place your money into UBS SmartWealth.” They too run a disclaimer that informs us, “Capital @ risk.” The disclaimer is certainly less blunt Hargreaves Lansdown’s but is just a clear. Interestingly, UBS SmartWealth only uses Twitter to run ads. It has not tweeted in an effort to build an audience or a conversation.

Standard Life Invest, use no disclaimer in this Twitter ad. The account, which in its description says it’s only for investment professionals, instead takes an approach whereby you click through to a screen which requires you to confirm you are an investment professional before proceeding to take you through to the advertised content. This approach certainly frees up characters in tweets and also allows for longer and more complete disclaimers. A drawback to this approach is that the bounce rate is likely to be quite high.

Brand building

BNY Mellon take the approach of using Twitter as a brand building tool. A simple ad, linking to a nicely designed (if a little too self-reverential) quiz that seeks to place BNY Mellon as an innovator.

What should we take from this array of approaches? Well, firstly, on Twitter there’s no standard way to deploy the disclaimers highly regulated industries need to use. That’s probably a good thing from a creative perspective. Certainly, in the examples cited, when sharing information that might be seen as financial advice, the disclaimers are delivered before you get to the content.

Another point to note is that targeting is poor. One of the ads is for investment professionals (and I’m a long way from being one) and two others promote wealth and investment management brands which provide services that, to put it politely, I’m probably not the target customer. That’s not to say those managing the accounts have chosen the wrong audience targeting. We all know that Twitter’s targeting can be a little off sometimes.

Finally, we should note that Twitter, in its thus far fruitless drive to turn a decent profit, is constantly developing new ad products. Financial services and other highly regulated industries tend to be cautious spenders but also big spenders. It’s likely Twitter will keep launching new ad products and tweaking its services to capture this lucrative market.

Who’s controlling the social media treadmill?

The ideas that attention spans are shorter and audiences operate in discrete silos are received wisdom. As a result, companies produce and repurpose more content than they previously did. All this happens under the presumption that consumer habits are changing and firms need to keep up.

Last week, Instagram rolled out polls. The move, mimicking functionality from Twitter, enables users to run polls in their Instagram Stories. It’s an incremental and unsurprising move. And yet, when you note the vast array of other changes (like trialling swipe up links for some accounts) that are only available for those publishing Stories, it’s obvious that it’s all designed to encourage more, and more frequent, posting.

Meanwhile, posts published on Google’s My Business, which helps firms take control of how they appear in search, only appear in search results for a week after they are published. After that, they expire. Again, this is a move to encourage more frequent publishing.

Over on Facebook, for those seeking to maximise their organic reach the consensus seems to be the consistency with which you post (alongside how well received your posts are) has a dramatic impact on reach.

So, alongside the received wisdom that consumers want targeted, bite-sized content, we have social networks increasingly shrinking the lifespan of content.

Consumers and platforms are turning up the speed of the treadmill. Companies are the ones doing the running, but they’re not in control.