How Do You Balance Risk 🆚 Reward To Magnify Your Brand On Social Media?

Marketing Unfiltered #50 → You need to give your social team the freedom to flourish (but not enough rope to hang themselves).

Good morning, and welcome to edition #50 of the Marketing Unfiltered Newsletter!

Thank You! We’ve continued to receive great feedback on MU48 ‘State of Marketing 2030’ report. Our research paper had input from 130 senior marketing leaders. If you missed it, you can still find it here.

This week, Harry puts on his thermals and dives into the exciting, risky, ever changing world of organic branded social with some suggestions about how you can take your flaccid branded content from ‘Meh’ to ‘Mega’ in a few simple steps.

Cheers,
Harry & Danny

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Most brands suck at organic social. Their strategies are so turgid and internal content guidelines so prohibitive that Tweets, Posts, Insta pics, videos and TikToks are usually nothing short of generic, soulless platitudes. They’re ignored by both target audiences and the masses as a result.

With restrictions limiting content to boring company updates, cringey staff videos that would make Ricky Gervais wince, the occasional new hire post, product launches or self-congratulatory back slaps, of course the majority of brand-owned accounts get little traction. Even worse, for a channel like LinkedIn, personal profiles generate 5x more engagement than company pages, with 90% of brand impressions coming from employee content.

As a result, organic social as a channel becomes a very costly extension of a customer service department twinned with a hubristic vanity project. If it were a paid channel, most CMO’s would have taken it out back and put it out of its misery years ago.

Those that put their head above the parapet and generate real engagement are rare gems. To achieve greatness, they constantly tread the line between moments of ‘Ha’ and ‘Aargh’.

RIP Duo 🦉

Take language learning App Duolingo, often praised for its humorous commentary and lovably annoying owl mascot, Duo. With 16 million followers on TikTok, the brand’s social team (formerly led by the legendary Zaria Parvez) is a beacon of what good looks like on social however in 2022, it overstepped the mark.

A comment from Duolingo under a TikTok post about the infamous Heard/ Depp trial by NBC allegedly asked:-

“y’all think amber watches tiktok?”

Five words – yet enough to ignite significant backlash. The comment, one of numerous posts by brands keen to gain traction by piggybacking the trial’s global noise, was deleted with the individual responsible personally apologising.
However, some folks were up in arms that a brand would dare to make a light-hearted joke about a trial in which accusations of domestic abuse are a central theme.

Of course, they’re right. An active court case with such abhorrent accusations at its heart is no place for levity induced by the desire for social fame, reach and engagement.

That said, it was one of the biggest media stories in an already busy dance card of bad news in that post Lockdown year, and as such it would’ve sounded like a beckoning Siren to a reach-hungry social team. No brand social accounts in their right mind would venture into the war in Ukraine to garner Likes, and the energy crisis was a shallow pool to fish in, comedy-wise, so jumping on any available the trend is part of the game, no matter how icky.

The problem is, it’s so easy to overstep the acceptable social mark, how can brands tip toe between the mines to find the gems of rich social nirvana without getting hurt?

Social Brand Heroes

The heroes of branded organic social are few and far between and can be loosely split into three cohorts:-

• The Challenger Comedian

• The Content Crafter

• The Megabrand

Top Tier

In the first group, accounts managed by the likes of ALDI, Wendy’s, Greggs, Paddy Power, Thursday, KFC and of course Duolingo lead the way, with follower numbers to match. Their social teams have elastic bandwidth and effective carte blanche to make light of rivals, tag team complementary brands and generally have fun on platforms on which smiles are rewarded with social equity. With clear ownership, they can jump on trends as they happen (not a month later when Alan from legal gives them the nod, having butchered their copy with a red pen).

Tier 2

The second group comprises numerous beauty, fashion, lifestyle and media brands such as Gymshark, BooHoo, Innocent, Chanel, Airbnb, National Geographic, GoPro and Dove whose social accounts blend high production values with interesting, useful and trend-astute imagery, highly engaging video and audience-relevant social commentary.

Tier 3

The final group is reserved for the likes of Coco-Cola, Red Bull, Nike, BMW and Starbucks. With unlimited resources they can replicate and occasionally out-do the rich content from the upstart brands in group #2. With video honed by the best talent in the business, Megabrands set themselves apart using amazing content delivered at algorithmically perfect times in every available language by swathes of social teams localising across multiple geos.

Time To Differentiate

Not every brand has the resources to compete with the riches of Megabrands, nor do they have the brand positioning, personality and tone of voice to sit shoulder to shoulder with Content Crafters. So, unless they want to live in the forgotten doldrums with almost every other brand in the world, they need to stand out - to differentiate their social output.

Ths is most easily achieved by taking risks, whether they be contemporary commentary or brand-relevant jokes that get the public reaching for the like/ comment/ share button.

Despite its organic nature, running multiple social accounts across multiple platforms isn’t cheap. According to Glassdoor, the average salary of a social media manager in the UK is over £33,000, and then there’s production costs. AI has opened up so many doors for making images and video and speed, but has equally flooded the social market with even greater volumes of sludge for the public to wade through. UGC video is a rich seam to mine, but brands can’t rely on their followers all the time, and the content quality is inconsistent at best.

Are you a brand social match for cultural commentary?

Originality is rewarded, but at a cost – and only a few, highly unpredictable gems ever go viral. The low hanging fruit exists in social commentary – piggybacking an issue or stories Du Jour and hoping your brand’s take is interesting or amusing enough to capture the Zeitgeist.

And this is where the likes of Duolingo come unstuck.

For every successful collaboration, viral win or social juggernaut, there’s an uncomfortable miss-step, myopia in reading the room or simple F-Up, such as the one they experienced in 2022. Every brand in the Challenger Comedian group (as well as many Content Crafters and Megabrands) has suffered at least one of these utter fiascos – which shows that in the game of social fame, nobody is infallible.

You remember these gems?

· Pepsi’s Cristiano Ronaldo voodoo doll

· Arsenals #DareToCreate UGC nightmare

· Burger King’s ‘women belong in the kitchen’ campaign

· MissGuided’s Fast Fashion sweatshop bikini

· Sunny Delight’s tone-deaf mental illness joke

· Aldi’s #AldiPoorestDayChallenge

· PureGym’s ‘12 Years a Slave’ workout (OMFG HOW dis this see daylight? I mean, c’mon?!!

This list is in absolutely no way definitive nor comprehensive. Every brand’s social team has a Tweet, Post or Video they wish had never been born.

So where does that leave the poor social media managers? Challenged with hitting viral heights every day but with a very large axe hanging over their heads, it sounds like a thankless career path, littered with the corpses of talented individuals who unknowingly overstepped the mark.

Here’s what the great ones do:-

· Great brand socials are consistent, understand what their audiences respond to, and latch onto News Jacking opportunities with a balance of wit and sensitivity,

· They utilise AI and UGC when it’s appropriate (not all the time) and collaborate in an ego-free way with both complementary brands and rivals alike.

· They maintain a light-hearted self-awareness – they know they’re not saving the world – their purpose is to entertain the masses and build a community of loyal followers, loyalists, sharers and brand advocates.

· Sense checking everything isn’t always possible nor practical, especially when time sensitive newsjacking is concerned, so that leaves detailed, easy to follow brand guidelines and legal workflows as the only feasible backstop.

· On LinkedIn, personal posts get 6X the reach of company pages, so A/ ensure your employees are all empowered to post freely, B/ give them the tools and the freedom to talk about your brands C/ FFS, ask them to like and comment on your company posts

I’ve gamified the process in the past (admittedly with mixed results) but imagine the reach you’d get if 500 employees all boosted your branded posts with a comment? You’ve got your own private engagement army, so deploy it!

By outlining the ground rules, learning from the mistakes of others and having the absolute support of the CMO, CEO and legal department at all times, only then can branded social accounts be operated without social teams retreating into shells of safe conformity.

Even then, the PR disasters will slip through the net, and managing those astutely is a skill in its own right. If brands remain obsessed with capturing that ever-elusive social honey, they need to be prepared to get stung once in a while.

Bonus Content for Edition #50 / Harry’s Alternative Marketing Glossary

A/B Testing - You’re weak willed, callow and too indecisive to pick a favourite lest it’s the wrong decision. So you Teflon the responsibility to the data science team.

B2C Marketing - You think you’re cooler than those B2B SaaS folks, but you’re exactly the same, just paid less

Churn - The sick feeling you get when presenting a third consecutive negative ROI month to the Board

Design - A thankless task that would be made significantly more efficient, effective and painless with the removal of clients

Econometrics - A word you’ll likely use once, and once only, in your interview with absolutely no clue as to what it means or does

Forecast - An absolute, unmitigated and defendable guess, deployed with confidence by anyone with something to hide

GDPR - An ineffective and unpoliceable EU regulation designed to protect your data. TL;DR – it doesn’t

Happiness - The moment your payoff lands after yet another soul-destroying redundancy (the average tenure for CMO’s is now 17 months…)

Integrated Marketing - The other thing you drop into your interview when discussing experience. It’s code to suggest you know everything, which obviously you don’t

JavaScript - It’s a complex coding language – executed by people who are A/ more intelligent and B/ treated worse than traditional marketers

Key Performance Indicators - Calling targets ‘KPI’s’ somehow makes it easier to divert attention when you inevitably miss them

Lead Gen - The holy grail of B2B marketing. It used to be called ‘selling’, until several layers were added above it to make B2B marketers sound more intellectual

Marketing Automation - What every marketer claims they dreamt about with the advent of AI (while really understanding that it’ll be the end of their sordid careers one day)

Net Promoter Score - NPS scores are used in 2 instances:- A/ on your first day in the job when you show how steep the hill you’re climbing is and B/ on your last day in the job when you’re shown an incrementally steeper hill you’re at the bottom of

Omnichannel Marketing - It’s just frickin’ marketing. The other word is 100% redundant, but once again, deployed to make marketers feel smarter

Personalisation - If we could personalise campaigns to the extent we really want to, the world would be an incredibly creepy place – shortly before the rapture hits

Quality Score - A metric to measure digital Ad relevance. Normally hidden in an impregnable box, they may only be shared within the team to demonstrate exactly how shit your ad performance is

Reciprocal Links - Like the Stone Age for SEO’s (but who knows in AIEO 😉)

Sales - The supposed end goal of all marketing. In real life, treated like a turd on the sole of the marketing department’s shoe

TV Advertising - Let’s face it, 95% of it is utter horse💩, designed to win awards for agency creatives and fluff the ego of moist-gusseted clients.

Unique Selling Proposition - We’re told every brand should have a USP to succeed. Most don’t, but that really doesn’t matter if their marketing team has deep pockets and loose morals

Voice Search - Was meant to be the next big thing, ‘til people finally twigged that paying money to Google, Amazon and Apple to allow them spy on you was fucking insane. And now it’s all the rage with AI pilled hypers

Word of Mouth - The grail for a brand – to be recommended by its own customers. Trying to forcefully induce WoM is like trying to score a Triple 20 with a piece of cooked spaghetti

X - Kisses – if your brand’s social team uses these when engaging with followers then it’s too late – you’re already dead

Yes Men - We’re all this – except nowadays, we’re yes women and yes people, too

Zag… - …while others Zig. Everyone says this, nobody really does it. Don’t worry. We’re all swimming in the same turgid pool of mediocrity trying to reach the shores of retirement. It’s fine.

Many thanks for reading and subscribing to Marketing Unfiltered

If you have any feedback or would like to contribute an article, just hit reply or use the links below to chat with us.

Cheers,

Danny & Harry

Marketing Unfiltered By Danny Denhard & Harry Lang

Danny Denhard » If you need help 🚨: I coach leaders, consult with startups, marketplaces and challenger brands and advise companies looking to grow, so get in touch.

Harry Lang » Harry is a CMO and performance marketing/ brand strategy consultant who grows digital B2C businesses for fun. You can connect with him on LinkedIn or email him at Harry@BrandArchitects.co.uk