Why smart marketers are pressing pause in the ‘always on’ age
Content has enjoyed a long and illustrious reign. Since Bill Gates famously proclaimed 'content is king' two decades ago, brands have been falling over themselves to uphold and embody the principles of this new era: content, content and more content.
Why smart marketers are pressing pause in the ‘always on’ age
Now we’re oversaturated with brands on social media. In their efforts to recreate the magic of Oreo’s 'Dunk in the Dark' Super Bowl moment, brands have been pumping out far too much content. Their output ranges from mildly interesting, to completely irrelevant to a catastrophic blunder – and it is all too often the last two.
We seem to have adopted the belief that brands should be always-on and always reacting – even when the link is tenuous at best. With the future of a country at stake, is it really time to be trying to run a debate – alongside that of Clinton and Trump – about beer, cheese or wings? TGI Friday’s thought so with its (one of many) tweets: “What’s your favourite Everything But the Booze drink? #debatenight #AskingHardQuestions”. It doesn’t even make sense.
Unsurprisingly all this pressure for quickly churning out volumes of content has led to some pretty spectacular blunders. When the Seattle Seahawks tweeted in response to Martin Luther King Day trending on Twitter, it was accused of comparing the civil rights struggle to a recent championship game. Jumping on a hashtag without checking the context was a disaster for DiGiorno Pizza, when it tweeted “#WhyIStayed You had pizza” in a conversation about domestic violence. And if you’re going to comment on the Oscars, don’t get Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey confused.
These mistakes, usually committed by small teams under intense time pressure, can be fatal to a brand: Miracle Mattress has been put out of business because of its deeply insensitive Twin Towers sale in the run up to the anniversary of 9/11.
When scarcely a headline can go to print without brands jumping all over it, you get oversaturation and you get serious errors. For consumers, they have to deal with a stream of annoying and often irrelevant content that they neither want nor care about – all because brands feel the need to shout in a room of people (even if their key audience don’t reside there). Eventually people just get better at filtering this out in their heads, undermining all the efforts that brands have put in.
It’s time to press pause and rethink.
We need to put the age of “content for content’s sake” to bed. No matter how much it is drilled into the minds of young marketers or seasoned branding experts, #content is not a reason for making and sending out more content.
Before you dive in, come up with a pithy tweet and get your design team to quickly put together a graphic, ask yourself: is this conversation, moment or idea worth it? Will it make people smile or laugh? Is this the right audience for your message?
Most fundamentally, you need to know if reading this post would actually make peoples days better. Justification is vital if brands want to be accepted on a given platform.
A good place to start is by looking at historical social data. What conversations have already taken place around the topic and which audiences participated in them? Also look at how your competitors reacted to or engaged with them – did that activity translate into value or business success? But another, often overlooked consideration – is there a correlation to your brand DNA?
A brilliant example of a brand forgetting its DNA through social media messaging is Cheerios’ tweet around Prince’s death. Sure, it was a huge topic online, but what relevance does adding an image of Prince’s name with a singular Cheerio above the letter ‘i’ add to the conversation? Nothing. Perhaps if Prince had been a huge Cheerios eater there would be some relevance, however I’d hope that the content created would be a little more inventive than throwing something together for the sake of it. Polar opposite, and brilliantly executed, were Chevrolet’s reactive press ads. Using Prince’s own lyrics, they approached the subject of his death with class, subtlety and tact.
News travels fast and opportunities can come and go in the blink of an eye. Sometimes a news story will appear that’s perfect for your brand that hadn’t been planned for or anticipated in advance. When it does, it’s vital to ensure you have a legitimate licence to talk on the topic in question. At the very least, are you being witty or entertaining?
The days of ‘always on’, volume and speed are over. But when we do move quickly, it doesn’t mean we have to abandon being smart. The marketers that adopt this mindset and ask the right questions before they press go will come out on top.
Aaron Child is social director at Exposure Digital