Tag Archives: social media

Frontier Scientist, Thoughts and Opinion

I Take Comfort in Kerfuffles

frankenstein_mob

The culture of outrage is worrisome to me. We jump too quick without checking our facts, rally numbers in the hundreds or thousands in minutes, and react disproportionately to the offense. Calming voices tend to get shouted over, or worse turned upon in tribal cries of “if you’re not with us you’re against us.”

The torches and pitchforks sail along my river-of-news at least a couple of times a day on Twitter and Facebook. Every brand manager worries about the day those torches and pitchforks are for them; because of an ill-chosen word or lapse in judgement in content selection or bizarre confluence of events that made your brand today’s target.

My understanding of the human brain*, is that it is wired to continually assess its environment and identify danger. The rustling in the bushes that either signifies a wolf is getting set to pounce upon you and yours or that there is a slight breeze. Our brains are great big pattern recognition devices continuously taking on information and throwing it through the safe/threat filter. We huddle around listening to negative gossip and reading the salacious headlines and tuning in to the breaking coverage, because anything unsettling and worisome satisfies your brain’s need to identify a threat in your environment.

But that deep down need to watch for danger doesn’t understand the difference between here and now vs elsewhere; it doesn’t understand statistical likelihood. The rare occurance of a shark attack off New Zealand becomes an uneasiness to take a dip off the shores of Jersey. We get nervous to fly after word of an airline disaster despite risking our lives a hundred times more so in the drive to the airport. We take a single adverse affect out of a million doses to be reason enough to avoid life saving treatment.

And in the lack of actual real danger, we hyper-inflate the smallest of concerns to be real and immediate threats. The rustling in the bushes may have been a mouse instead of a wolf, but we’ll sound the alarm and grab our torches and pitchforks all the same. And therein is where I take my comfort in the inane kerfuffle of the day.

When you’re struggling to feed yourself, when you’re in actual risk of bodily harm, when you honestly don’t know if your child will wake up tomorrow, you don’t have time to take offense over a misspoken word, or a logo redesign you interpret to be lewd, or a piece of content you interpret with ill-intent.

The parade of pitchforks and torches chasing after the mice up and down my newsfeeds serve as a constant reminder that the days of wolves are long past and that we actually have a pretty damn good life. Slim consolation if you’re the community manager having to fend off the mob today, but consolation, nevertheless.

*note – I am not a neuroscientist. Haven’t even played one on TV. But I take an interest in how the mind works with relation to storytelling and why people seek out certain narratives as opposed to others. This conjecture is based on my current understanding of why we think the way we think, but I welcome corrections, should there be doctor in the house.

 

Marketing, Public Relations, Thoughts and Opinion

When is a Crisis on Social Media a Crisis?

dont_panic

One of the keys to understanding social media is context.

Although social media has been with us for more than a decade, in a business setting it is still quite new, and as such there is a tendency to inflate the importance of messages on these digital platforms because of that very novelty.

Anyone who has been in digital communications has, at one point or another, had to talk an executive off the ledge because they were out of their minds with what was said on a single blog. Rantings on a scraped together blog that’s read by the author and his mom, have your exec over the moon and demanding somebody do something right now! Yet, had the very same words appeared in a small town newspaper they would have shrugged it off.

It is fair enough because without any reference you could mistake any molehill for being a mountain. Having seen a lot of kerfuffles on the webbernets over the years, let me share with you the three points of reference that I use for context.

Where’s the hate coming from?

Even the most loved brands have a steady contingent of naysayers pumping out negative commentary. Or in Internet parlance, “Haters are going to hate.”

The more recognized your brand is, the more it becomes something that people adopt as a reflection of their own personality and beliefs; the more persistent and steady the stream of hate from those who are not your customers. Passion goes both ways; as much as your brand stands for something your customers are, for these people your brand stands for something they are not.

This hate-on will ebb and flow over time, dependent on how often your brand crosses their paths. This is one of the reasons that poorly targeted social ads usually bring with them a glut of negative posts. It’s important to realize that this doesn’t constitute an actual change in opinion, just a change in the engagement of that opinion. You crossed the paths of the haters and they’re going to remind you of that hate.

However, if the current displeasure is originating among those who were previously positive towards the brand, then you may have a serious problem. Keep handy a list of the authors of positive brand sentiment and start with a quick cross-reference to see what proportion of them are jumping into the fray.

Jumps from social to any other stream of media

If you review the news feeds of Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, you will see that a significant share of brand related content is linking to something. A video. A blog article. A news story. Especially a news story. Headline sharing is going to be a large chunk of what’s happening in social that day.

The moment a story jumps from social to the mainstream media, it will amplify the issue ten-fold and solidify what that message is.

Of course the idea is to try and mitigate before the jump occurs. So know and pay attention to where the analysts, journalists and people who cover the beat around your brand congregate.

Kerfuffles of Future Past and the Velocity of Content

Hindsight is 20/20. So knowing what issues in the past have had an actual impact on reputation and business, use that as the benchmark moving forward. Knowing that the current event is only one-tenth the reaction of your last online issue, and that there was only nominal impact to the brand from that, gives you clarity as to just how strongly you should react.

I would strongly recommend not benchmarking just the totals, or looking solely at the peaks. What your really need to know is the velocity of reaction. If the speed at which new content is being issued remains constant, how soon will you hit, or surpass, that peak? If the rate of new posts is increasing you will surpass that peak even sooner and you need to react faster. If the rate of new posts is decreasing then it is quite possible that the issue is already past and any action on your part risks blowing on those embers and rekindling the matter.

If your brand has been fortunate enough to not yet face a crisis moment online, you can use other brands experiences to inform your own. It’s all publicly available information, after all. When everyone around me is insisting that it is the end of the world, I like to use what I refer to as the Z-index as a point of reference. It’s real easy. Using Google Trends, which provides a normalized measure of search traffic, I compare against “walking dead”. Seeing how deeply your issue penetrates into the minds of the general population in comparison to a fictional zombie apocalypse helps keep things in perspective.

Long Story Made Short

  • Take the time and collect your points of context.
  • Know who your promoters and detractors are.
  • Figure out where the journalists who write about your brand are congregating.
  • Use past events to better understand today.

Having context will save your blood pressure from spiking with each and every grumble or mutter on the Internet. You can be clam in the face of adversity, knowing that today’s tempest belongs in a teapot. More important it will free your time and budget to focus on proactive versus reactive measures and let you focus on what really matters.

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cross-posted from Linked-In Pulse

Frontier Scientist, Thoughts and Opinion

Patrick Stewart and the Tralfamadorian Greeting

Patrick Stewart at Comicapalooza, Houston 2013 - photo by Randall Pugh
image by Randall Pugh

When the media was only a handful of channels, only the most significant of stories would find their way to us. Massive life changing events that could only be described with, “Oh the humanity.”

The everyday stories. The things that we tell each other over a drink or at the evening dinner. The little anecdotes that we experience. Those were always too small to reach the media save in drips and drabs. The disease of the week. The consumer advocacy tale. The plucky little kid that started a bottle drive. The elderly gent blowing out the candles on his hundredth birthday. But really they were just fillers. Noise to fill the air between commercial breaks because not every day was an “oh the humanity” day.

These stories and happenings would be just memories to the few people who witnessed, and those witnesses may share the tale when the context was right or when trying themselves to fill the time with a prior more interesting event. And once you’ve relayed the tale to those that you know and they’d heard it once, twice, a dozen times too many, it would simply become a memory. And then it would be gone.

Take a moment to watch this video.
And then read Heather Skye’s own words recounting the event. And then finally watch this last video.

The advent of digital media and the ability to distribute it through social channels is freeing these stories from their temporal and geographical and anecdotal limitations. You did not need to be in Houston last weekend in order to catch this particular moment. You did not have to be a friend of one of the people, and happen to have mentioned Star Trek or X-Men, sparking the “did I tell you about the time I saw Sir Patrick Stewart” story. I caught this tale on Facebook, from a friend Mike Wood. Mike had seen the story on Gawker and posted it. The author of the post on Gawker picked it up from GeekoSystem. None of these people were in Houston this weekend and none of them are friends of Heather. But the author on GeekoSystem found the YouTube video, shot by Oswald Vinueza and posted by Heather.

Through that video and Eugene Lee’s photos and Heather’s words the moment was preserved.

Heather was never at the book launch for ‘Created Equal’, where the actor spoke quite movingly about his own personal experience with domestic violence. But someone from Amnesty captured the moment on video and posted it to YouTube in 2009. Heather only came across the video a couple of months ago but says, “After seeing Patrick talk so personally about it I finally was able to correctly call it abuse, in my case sexual abuse that was going to quickly turn into physical abuse as well. I didn’t feel guilty or disgusting anymore. I finally didn’t feel responsible for the abuse that was put upon me. I was finally able to start my healing process and to put that part of my life behind me.”

People opine about the disconnection that our devices and networks create. People talk about living the life through the viewscreen of a smartphone or tablet instead of in the moment. Would they really choose the world in which these were words and moments that none of us would have had the opportunity to share in? Too small for the evening news and unlikely for Heather’s words to find their way into any magazine or paper. Trapped in the minds and photo albums of the few who happened to have been there in that room, at that moment.  Would they be happier for these moments to be transient experiences, fleeting and then gone?

The people who tweet and instagram and film and live blog and check-in or status update aren’t missing out on the moment. They are preserving it and sharing it and making it more than just a memory.  I think that Heather’s life is better for having been able to share the moment from that book launch from 2009. I know that I’m glad to have been able to share in Heather’s moment with Sir Patrick Stewart. I hope that you’re all enriched a little bit from my having shared these moments and that you go on to share across your own platforms and networks.  Thanks to social media we are all of us unstuck in time and space and able to experience this together whether it was before, or now, or still to come.