Karan Chadda

Global digital marketing and communications leader

Communication

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.

Review: FuturePRoof: edition 3; The NHS at 70

FuturePRoof, the crowdsourced publishing project founded by Sarah Hall, has shifted its focus to the NHS for its third edition. The NHS turns 70 this year and, noting both the huge affection the public hold for it and the many challenges it faces, it is a good topic for study.

As with previous editions, the contributions are varied and most readers will find a few chapters that will immediately pique their interest. Personally, I moved quickly to chapters focusing on digital communications, technology and data, before moving back through the book to read the sections on trust and brand.

Rachel Royall’s chapter titled “Doing digital” provides an insight into the type of strategic comms that most practitioners are keen to be involved in. Nicola Perrin’s “Why do we need to talk about patient data?” lays out the importance of leading public conversations about the use of data. Taking recent data scandals into account, it is a timely call for better understanding and greater transparency of how personal data is used.

Regardless of the sections you read, what is immediately obvious is that the challenges faced by the NHS are faced by almost all organisations. For example, the chapter on doing more with less will be familiar to everyone, whether in house or consultant, indeed whether in PR or not. More for less programmes seem to be a permanent feature at all organisations these days.

There is a wealth of knowledge in these pages that applies much more widely than within the NHS or even healthcare. Those in totally unrelated industries will learn much from both the broad, strategic chapters and the more detailed practical ones.

FuturePRoof: edition 3 is out today. You can learn more about the book and purchase it at futureproofingcomms.co.uk.

How to apply a narrative arc

Within public relations it is taken as given that we are good storytellers.

Most PRs will have developed their craft by writing stories for journalists. These stories have a fairly standardised structure. They come in the form of a press release, with a headline, a lead paragraph, then more detail and some supporting quotes, and finally there’ll be some boilerplate.

Structure is often likened to a pyramid; the further down the page you go, the more information you get. It is designed to grab attention and, once that’s been achieved, it throws in additional information. It is a sensible and solid format.

But does this format work for a tweet? Or a video? Or a GIF?

The short answer is, “No.”

So if the pyramid doesn’t work, what does?

Enter narrative arcs

This is where thinking about a narrative arc helps. A technique that I was first introduced to by TV writers, it is a device they use to think about changes in their stories. We all know the classic story of the underdog who succeeds. Here the narrative arc starts low and ends high. In a tragedy, the play Macbeth for example, the arc starts on a high and ends very low indeed. Arcs can go up and down. They don’t have to start at one point and end at an opposite.

They are useful because they help writers think about the audience. Do we need to make them feel sad or happy? And if we want them to feel really happy, perhaps we need them to feel sad first so the shift in emotion is more dramatic?

Practical application

If you’re writing copy the purpose of which is to sell, you might want to build up to a high so your call to action is powerful. If you’re trying to pull together a quick six second animation, you might want to start on an eye-catching high so it grabs attention straightaway.

The trick is to recognise two things, one is that stories need to move down as well as up. You can’t keep an audience consistently in a good mood or it gets boring. The second is that you need to identify the sources of tension in your story. What’s the key the bit of information that causes change?

For PRs, this way of thinking about copy is useful because it offers flexibility and it lets us draw upon the experience of master storytellers from film, TV and other creative sectors. Above all though, it helps us focus on how the reader or viewer feels, and ultimately if we can make them feel strongly enough we might even elicit action.

How to deliver your Purpose: a practical framework

Businesses of all sizes have latched onto the idea of having a Purpose. The concept of working towards something that takes you beyond profits to a wider benefit for society fits nicely with current trends among the chattering classes and, if we’re honest, nicely feeds executives’ egos.

There is no shortage of advice about why you should have a Purpose. However, there is also no shortage of critics waiting in the wings to decry your efforts if you fall short. Conscious of this, I’ve been working on a framework that helps plan chart a path from Purpose to practical day-to-day activities.

POST

This framework is simple. Its success, however, depends on the clarity with which you define each phase of it.

Purpose
Objective
Strategy
Tactics

Based on the OST framework popularised by Alastair Campbell. POST places Purpose at the start. It assumes that Purpose is defined for an organisation by those who run it. This framework falls apart if different departments and teams are working towards different ends.

We then step down to your team’s Objective. This tends to be something agreed with or approved by senior executives. Your Objective should align with your Purpose, but it should not be abstract; it must be practical.

Then we move down to Strategy. Now, here it gets tricky. At this point in planning, particularly in large organisations, it’s not uncommon to find multiple strategies within teams. It’s a recipe for disaster. A team should have a single Strategy. For comms teams, that means a single communications strategy. You don’t need different strategies for media relations, digital, etc. Where this happens, it’s normally a sign of silos or teams not really understanding their Objective. The only caveat to this is internal communications which can make a pretty strong case for having its own strategy, probably one that aligns closely with HR’s.

Now we get to Tactics. This really should be the easy bit. What are you going to do? It needs to deliver your Strategy, which delivers your Objective, all of which needs to be aligned with your Purpose.

The key to successful delivery is getting this framework, or similar thinking, widely adopted within your organisation. If there isn’t a clear, simple way to link what you do everyday to your organisation’s Purpose, you will never deliver it.

#LondonIsOpen

One week after the result of the EU Referendum, Tech London Advocates sent a message of unity to the tech community thanking Europeans based in London for their contribution to the industry’s growth. Signed by over 150 Advocates, including the Mayor of London, the advert championed European ideas and global talent as the driving forces behind London tech.

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