Social Content: The thin line between sharing and scaring

The latest .rising leaders post comes from Max Pepe, Head of Clickwork7, a global performance marketing company which specialise in lead generation, customer acquisition and mobile app promotion for clients such as Amazon and Wowcher.

Here Max explores how marketers should instill sincerity and implant trust in the new world of content consumption, where the consumer has the loudest  voice. Don’t  forget to get involved in the discussion by commenting below or tweeting @dotrising.

 

They say there’s no such thing as bad press, that no publicity is bad publicity. Well at least they used to. Unfortunately this statement is now grossly out of date, and about as relevant to the modern digital marketer as the minidisc is to a music lover with a Premium Spotify membership.

It could be said that no-one believes what they read in the papers, the content is simply written to sell papers. Television news is one-sided and every bona-fide digital news portal will adopt varying degrees of bias to propagate their stance and keep their audience nodding.

Considering these channels have dominated legitimate media content since forever, it’s no surprise that historically brands have indeed concluded there is no such thing as bad press. A marketer will take a sour news story, a locker room scandal, or a hero-to-zero media take down, and learn to treat it for what it is – free air time, a twinkle in the spotlight and a useful marketing alliance that will further plant your brand within the subconscious of the buying public.  After all, consumers are familiar with the style adopted by the media, and everything is absorbed with a pinch of salt.

But media content, and the way it is consumed, has now changed for good. We live in a social, 24/7 uber free-speech, provocative-comment driven, hide-behind-a-twitter-handle, culture. It’s the consumer who has the loudest voice now. We may not trust traditional media, but we sure as hell trust our peers, and our peers’ peers, and our peers’ peers’ peers (oh would you look at that, I’ve just gone viral).  So when something spreads across social media, we don’t view it through the same cynical spectacles we use to protect ourselves from the press. Quite the opposite in fact; our guards are down and our trust levels are up, so we listen, we learn, and we allow ourselves to be influenced (consciously or sub-consciously) by what our peers are saying.  This brings with it a whole new set of opportunities and challenges for digital marketing and PR.

Quite rightly, social media is now perceived as a highly powerful marketing channel and is deservedly being treated very seriously by top level CMOs and Marketing Directors alike, with 93% of marketers now professing to utilise the channel.  But it’s fair to say that Social Media Marketing as a discipline, is still at a rudimentary state of evolution.

The viral success of any given piece of social marketing content is often measured by its shareable qualities and volume of organic engagements. The problem here is that the quantitative data points alone (a share, an engagement, a re-tweet, a like) really don’t give enough valuable insights to judge success.  5,000 shares doesn’t tell you whether engagement is positive or negative. It could represent 5,000 brand advocates, or it could represent 5,000 disgruntled customers who strongly disagree that your new product is ‘better than ever’ (as you have stated) and are determined to share this opinion and expose your false claim.

The point here is that what you say as a marketer, and even more importantly, what you do as a brand (product or service), is open to aggressive and contagious social scrutiny that can quickly turn a share in to scare.

Unlike other digital marketing channels, Social Media Marketing needs to consider the power (and cause) of consumer-generated content with as much forethought as self-generated content. The former, of course, is much harder to predict and control, but when utilised correctly can be monstrously successful. One of the greatest examples of Social Marketing ever seen is Coca-Cola’s genius bottle naming initiative.

Printing names on bottle labels drastically improved the brands social media presence, without them ever having to create or distribute a single piece of self-generated social content. Launching a product such as this encouraged consumers to take photos of Coca-Cola bottles, tag their friends, and share across all social platforms, whether the sharer was a Coke drinker or not – very clever. It wasn’t just a smart branding piece either; traffic to the Coca-Cola Facebook page rocketed by 870% and physical sales increased by a colossal 7% through-out the campaign.

Consumer generated social content certainly works when the general consensus is one of positivity. But Coca-Cola have been on the flip side of this coin also. In June 2014 YouTube broadcaster ‘CrazyRussianHacker’ uploaded a video showing what happens when you boil a can of full fat Coke in a pan – the physical result being a thick black sludge of repulsive tar like consistency.

The fact that the video is quite simply demonstrating the sugar caramelisation process is irrelevant, the video went viral in a matter of days and has now been watched over 22.5m times. Millions of disgusted people shared the video on Facebook and Twitter, and thousands of prolonged health scares emerged as a result, with many people declaring they would never drink another Coke again. In August 2014, just two months after the video went viral, it was announced that Coca-Cola sales had dropped by 2.1% in the UK.

Self-generated content is of course an integral part of any a social marketing strategy also. Posts, pictures and tweets can act as a genuinely idiosyncratic unveiling of a brand’s desired personality projection, cut and spliced in to something digestible that really helps you get to know the people behind the logo, the culture behind the slogan.

The social content produced by cosmetic brand Dove is a fine example of this. Last Mother’s day they released a video across social media interviewing mothers and daughters about self-esteem issues, and celebrating natural beauty. This projected their personality perfectly, without ‘selling’ Dove in any way at all. The video received over 800k views, and thousands of heart-warming comments and shares.

But far too often the intention behind the content screams ‘share me’ or ‘like me’ with such blatant prowess, the only quality being demonstrated is that of social ignorance diluted with a hashtag-hint of lucid desperation. The result of which leads to a level of ‘viral’ success that far greater suggests the medical connotation of suffering and illness, rather than marketing wizardry in a digital age.

For example, in June 2014 Audi decided to jump on the #paidmydues bandwagon due to its trending popularity (a practice known as hashtag-highjacking), and were as a result completely slammed for sharing irrelevant content. Just look at some of the reactions below.

Driving positive engagement from your audience through your content is imperative, and as a result you really need to understand why your audience wants to interact with you through social channels in the first place.

As demonstrated, all forms of social media content are to a degree, synonymous with an intrinsic lack of control for the marketer. It is for this very reason that when received positively, the organic nature of the reception creates campaigns (and advocates) that are able to sell your brand with incomparable sincerity, and implant trust in to your audience better than any other channel.

A brands self-generated content is important, but it’s just the first step – the subsequent engagement, and genuine real-world consumer-generated commentary will act as the true voice of any ongoing social marketing strategy, and ultimately dictate its success.