Senior digital marketing and communications leader
A pebble thrown into an empty pot rattles,
Ricocheting around the void,
Clinking, clanking, echoing.
The social media activist prattles,
A single thought bouncing around his mind,
Typing, posting, retweeting.
There is no nuance,
There is no delete,
His dedication is absolute,
Unless he has to use his feet.
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?
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.
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.
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.
You’re at a conference, you’ve taken on a ton of information. Your brain’s trying to make sense of it all and then, very occasionally, a speaker steps up and just totally blows your mind. That happened to me recently when I heard Roeland Dietvorst, a neuroscientist who works with marketers to improve campaign outcomes.
His talk ranged from football playing bees, to monkeys’ innate sense of fairness, and from Kahneman’s systems 1 and 2, to MRI scans that can be used to draw the images you’re picturing in your mind (yes, really). All of it was amazing and I it’s been circling round in head ever since.
In practical terms, for digital comms and marketing there were some very pertinent points. Some of them intuitively feel right, but it’s worth formalising them.
The immediate priority for me to is to refocus on flow. People are busy living their lives and do many everyday things with little thought or effort; they’re using Kahneman’s System 1, the automatic, easy, low power mode. When they’re scrolling through Facebook, they’re definitely in System 1.
Traditionally, marketers interrupt people with messages. We’re trying to create some space in their minds for our brand or product or service while they’re busy doing other things. For example, we drop TV ads or billboards into their day. Online, we break into their feeds with ads. Typically, we finish our messages with a call to action – we want them to do something (usually buy from us).
The immediate lesson isn’t to not interrupt people, it’s to not interrupt them in a way that makes them think. If they’re using System 1, don’t switch them to the harder work of System 2 (the slow, deep thinking process) because it means they’re concentrating harder, are more critical and less likely to buy.
For instance, if you’re selling winter tyres, don’t evoke images of the tyres saving people from accidents because you’re making people think of accidents. Better to go with lighter messages that don’t make people think critically, that don’t raise fears.
You’ll be thinking this is obvious, but in an age where marketers increasingly seek to shock people to get attention, it’s a timely lesson to learn.
Our brains make choices faster than we realise. They make instant judgments. When asked to explain our choices, we post-rationalise them.
A good example of this is the performance improvement made by booking.com from a small, subtle change to its website. They switched black bullet points to green ticks. It led a significant uplift in conversion.
If you asked a typical customer, what made you go ahead and make your recent purchase, no one would say, “the green ticks really swayed me.” But they made an observable impact. Those ticks changed the choices people made.
The lesson here is not to over rationalise people’s choices. It is better to observe and optimise.
Everyone doing anything digital will be testing and learning constantly. Dietvorst cannot endorse this enough. Don’t overthink through which pricing option or call to action will work best, run tests and see which does. Constantly improve performance through repeat and ongoing testing. And it doesn’t have to be the big things. The composition of an image, or the type of bullet point you use can lead to statistically significant uplifts in performance.
The trap many people fall into when they learn about things like heuristics and automatic preferences, is that they take this understanding of how our brains use shortcuts and then try to apply them as a general theory. Beyond understanding that our brains automatically make choices quickly and not rationally, nothing else should be taken for granted. Don’t a single observation and apply it generally out of context. Instead, test, test, test.
Keeping people in flow, optimising to increase sales, testing and learning. None of that is controversial, but it does raise ethical questions. We know people don’t always make the best choices. If you’re in the business of selling something, even something relatively benign, I think we all have a responsibility to think about customer outcomes, not just selling more. So while optimising is important, there should be a parallel stream of work to protect and properly serve more vulnerable customers.
So, you’ve been asked to present to the bigwigs at the top of the firm. You’ve got some data, you’ve got an ask, you need to impress. Here are some hints to help you hit the mark.
1. How does it relate to what you’re trying to do?
This is the first and most important question you need to answer. It goes without saying that you can only answer it effectively if you actually know what you’re trying to achieve.
You go to senior management because they make decisions, but you’ll only get the decisions you want from them if they have a clear understanding of what you’re asking for and how it fits with what your organization is trying to achieve. So, cut out the tangential data, the colourful anecdotes and side stories. And start with why what you’re saying is related to what they’re doing.
Percentages are great for clarity and comparison. However, they are also abused by those desperate to impress.
Never, ever use the percentage change between two percentages. It is the last resort of those with unimpressive results and the first choice of chancers and charlatans. For example, if you’re market share has gone from 20% market share to 24%, don’t call it a 20% increase. You’re padding out your 4%.
Moreover, if you’re going to talk about percentage increases, you need to anchor them to hard numbers. How large a market are we talking about? What’s the actual value? That 4% from the earlier example might be worth thousands or millions, we don’t know without context.
There’s a lot of shoddy data out there, there’s also a lot of good data that’s shoddily treated. Understand your data sources: how they’re gathered, what assumptions underpin them, and how those assumptions affect the final output. Know things like sample sizes and sampling methodologies. Only then can you reasonably draw conclusions and confidently assert opinions.
Stats are great but they are too abstract for most people. Share relevant real-world examples to make your data relatable. Make sure your examples highlight challenges your organization faces and the value in overcoming them. The plural of anecdote might not be data, but anecdotes help make data relatable.
You don’t want to be following your competitors but it’s important to highlight where you are in the market and what others are doing on similar fronts. If you can identify others moving in the direction you propose, it can help reassure people about your plans. Similarly, if you think you’ve spotted a gap others haven’t, highlight it by comparison.
Beware of what you’re pitching and don’t oversell. If you go in with bold claims, you will be held to them. So, go in with your caveats. Tell them what you don’t know and what factors might limit success. It doesn’t undermine your pitch, it shows you know what you’re doing.
Be prepared for tough questions but don’t try and blag your way through if you don’t know the answers. It’s better to say you don’t know, than to make something up and be pulled up on it later.
Titles, labels, sources, etc. You must put them all in. Your presentation will go in for pre-reads, or people will ask for a copy. It will be disseminated (unless it’s terrible) and you want to make sure that people know how you came to your conclusions.
There’s another reason for including all the details too: you want questions to be about your proposals not about sample sizes, or where you got the data from.
Finally, the boardroom isn’t the place for options. It’s your job to filter through the options and choose one. Execs only need to give approval. If you go in with options, you’re abdicating your responsibility.
Photo by Adeolu Eletu on Unsplash
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.
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?
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?
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.