CHAPTER

FIVE LESSONS FOR BUILDING AND HONING A SOCIAL STRATEGY

Comcast. For most marketers, just reading the name is enough to send a shiver down the spine. Or mine, at least. Comcast is one of those brands that’s not just fashionable to dislike—walk into a room of people who’ve dealt with the brand, and you can just about guarantee that someone has a personal horror story. To be fair, we really only notice Comcast—a telecommunications company that primarily supplies Internet, phone, and television access—when something goes wrong. Nonetheless, the Internet’s hatred of Comcast runs deep.

In a 2015 roundup of the top Reddit posts of all time—not just in one particular community but across the hundred thousand plus active communities on the platform—a post about Comcast ranked number 6.¹ “Comcast.” the post reads, “If you upvote this, it will show up on Google Images when people search Comcast, cable or internet service provider.”² The attached image was of a Nazi flag—red background, central white circle, and large black swastika in the center. The post played on a familiar and very Reddit-y conception. Redditors recognize that highly upvoted posts tend to rank well on Google. By using particular keywords in a post title, there is a chance that the post will show up in Google’s search results. It’s a deeply meta form of participation—a boundary that Redditors push ad infinitum.

The post itself followed a long wave of backlash against Comcast both on and off Reddit. While stories of botched customer support were already enough to infuriate many Internet dwellers, Comcast supported the infamous Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), placing it square in the bull’s-eye of Internet disdain.³ While both SOPA and PIPA purportedly aimed to end online copyright infringements, both acts gave telecommunications companies new power to determine bandwidth distribution. Historically, Internet service providers have been considered “common carriers,” much like airlines, taxicabs, and freight companies.⁴ A common carrier is designated to serve the general public without discrimination, and SOPA and PIPA both aimed to remove that status. Internet denizens feared that companies like Comcast would have the authority to deprioritize sites they disliked, make deals with entrenched corporate superpowers, and disadvantage average Internet users. In short, you couldn’t find a company Redditors hated more than Comcast.

In a shocking turn of events, Comcast created its own community on Reddit in 2016 called r/Comcast_Xfinity.⁵ What I’m about to tell you may be alarming. You may not be ready for it. But it’s the truth, and you need to hear it. Despite the customer service horror stories, throttling Internet speeds, even the support for SOPA and PIPA, Comcast has a deeply strategic, best-in-class presence on Reddit. There, I said it.

According to the community description, r/Comcast_Xfinity is “your official source on Reddit for help with Xfinity services,” and, “If you have problems with your services, our experts are here to solve them.” Rather than fleeing from the community that fostered such vitriol for its brand, Comcast dove straight into the belly of the beast and addressed the problem head-on. Well, not so much the PIPA and SOPA stuff, but it backed off on messaging its support for those. It’s a brilliant example of acting on social listening and executing a strategy suited to a right brain, tangible experience with the brand. Customer service was one way for the brand to acknowledge the real concerns it had heard from the community. It was a genuine effort to add value.

The r/Comcast_Xfinity community is civil, it functions as intended, and most importantly, it provides a place to address problems. It fits naturally into the broader Reddit ecosystem. Prior to the formation of this community, it was natural for someone to mention a complaint about Comcast in a comment thread related to technology or Internet speeds. And inevitably, one bad customer service story bred more. It wasn’t unusual for comment threads to spiral into a medley of Comcast customer service horror stories. But now, because the nature of Reddit is to be helpful for fellow community members, when someone mentions a problem with Comcast, it’s natural for other users to direct that person to the r/Comcast_Xfinity community. And Comcast is usually very responsive and helpful.

Creativity and strategy are just as important in forming our channel strategies as they are in developing our content. No amount of research or referencing best practices could have generated this strategy for Comcast because it’s generally uncharted territory. Branded subreddits are few and far between, and even fewer of them are active. Comcast arrived at this strategy through strategic social listening and genuine consideration for what they heard.

In this chapter, we’ll explore some guidelines and suggestions for fitting this broader social exploration together into some actionable advice. It’s important that these general guidelines are balanced by the particulars of your brand and the challenges it faces. What works for Comcast probably won’t work for a boutique jewelry shop, and vice versa. As a strategist I worked with used to say, if you can take a strategy and swap in another brand without changing much, it’s not good branding. As I recommend to all of my clients, great marketing starts with listening, and what we hear may vary massively among brands.

1. SOCIAL LISTENING IS CRITICAL TO BUILDING A SOCIAL MEDIA–SAVVY BRAND

One of the cornerstones on which great marketing—and social—strategy is built is listening. Throughout this book, I’ve described different social networks and communities as ecosystems, meme pools, and cultures. That’s exactly how we ought to treat social networks and the cultures that reside within them. Listening is important for a few different reasons. In the most traditional sense, it’s how we get feedback from our customers and noncustomers—we listen to what they want and how they react to our products and messaging.

But really listening also means understanding. Listening helps us figure out from which channel we’ll get the most value and how we ought to interact within those channels. Listening enables us to act as natives within these cultures—or, at the very least, as conscientious tourists. That’s better than being foreign invaders, which is how many brands are considered in social networks now. Unless our brand is freshly launched and in its own category, odds are that there are important messages for us to find and hear throughout the Internet.

There’s a problem here, and it’s related to the focused beam of attention manifested by our left hemispheres. When we focus on something, by definition, we’re ignoring a bunch of other things. That’s how experiments like the infamous “invisible gorilla” work.⁶ If you’re not familiar, psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons developed an experiment in which participants watch a video of two teams passing basketballs back and forth. Participants are told to count the number of passes made. And while many people get the actual number of passes correct, only about 50 percent of viewers notice that during the video, a person dressed in a full gorilla costume walks between the players, beats its chest, and casually strolls off camera.

The invisible gorilla experiment has since become synonymous with “perceptual blindness”—when we focus our attention on one set of stimuli, we often become blind to others. Relatedly, we must also be careful not to fall into the echo chamber trap of “confirmation bias,” in which we seek only evidence that supports our preexisting beliefs. As marketers, perceptual blindness and confirmation bias plague our industry. It’s how we sit on the same stale “insights” year after year and wonder why our creative outputs aren’t innovative. It’s also how brands end up spending millions of dollars and months of planning producing tone-deaf spots like Pepsi’s “Protests are silly, have a soda with Kendall Jenner” or Peloton’s “My husband surprised me with an exercise bike to shame my body, so I made him a selfie documentary.” If we start the creative process with a preconception of what the final outcome ought to be, our perspective loses integrity and the creative process breaks down.

True listening is more a right brain exercise than a left. Where our left brain focuses a beam of attention on something in particular, abstracting it from its context, the right brain interprets the world through a broader lens. The right brain, originally suited to predator detection, receives the world as it is presented to us and forms a fuller, contextualized picture of the world. When we jump straight into left brain “listening,” we’re essentially in a mode of pattern recognition. We have some preconceptions of what it is we’d like to find, and when we find a match, our preconception solidifies a little more. While we certainly need the left brain’s skill set for focusing on particular points and analyzing what we find, we need the right brain’s spatial awareness to establish the big picture first. All too often, when we go through the exercise of social listening, we report on what’s going right rather than painting a true holistic picture. That’s not so surprising given the tight leashes from which most social teams operate—many brands are quick to pull social budgets at the faintest hint of backlash. But the full picture—the good, the bad, and the ugly—is vital to our ability to stay relevant and self-aware as brands.

The listening process should start before we’ve even chosen which social networks we plan to prioritize. Ideally, we have access to powerful social listening tools such as Radian6, Sysomos, Brandwatch, or one of the many platforms that allow us to analyze social media trends, find patterns in how people talk about our brand and category, and spy on our competitors. More robust social listening platforms such as Radian6 and Sysomos often charge brands based on conversation volume for monitored terms, meaning they can get expensive, especially for broader-level listening. These tools tend to be more useful for brands with larger organic footprints and with high conversation volume. For smaller brands and startups, social listening can be an organic undertaking, using free offerings such as Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Tweet Deck, and other platform-built exploration tools.

Because social media sites, especially Ego and Superego networks, tend to be predictive about recommending content and customizing user experiences, it’s very difficult to find a truly agnostic view as a user. Social listening products can help us identify that bird’s-eye view of the social landscape we’d be hard-pressed to find as users. But even simple exercises like searching for our brand name, keywords related to our category, and competitive brand names can provide powerful insights for us. Because branded accounts on most social networks also treat us as they would any other user, we can use native functionality to aid us in listening. If, for example, we establish a new branded Twitter account, we ought to follow influencers in our space as well as competitive brands, monitor hashtags related to our industry, and try to understand the relationships between them to provide insight into the types of conversations we might enter.

While social listening tools can be powerful ways to analyze this information, their automated reports and pretty charts can create too much distance between our analysis and reality. Helpful as they can be, it’s important to remember that none of the users we hope to engage are looking at social media this way. For that reason, I encourage my teams and clients to post and interact directly within social platforms rather than using automated posting tools. It’s easy to get lazy about scheduling a month’s worth of content and letting the machine run. As much as we can, we should strive to participate in social networks the way other users do.

Listening should happen from the initial stages of channel selection all the way through evaluating which pieces of our branded content resonate best. In order to drive engagement, we need to pick channels on which our content has the potential to resonate. Goop isn’t going to find many fans on Reddit, and Call of Duty’s latest version of Nazi Zombies probably isn’t going to blow up on Pinterest. We ought to look for the kinds of content we hope to produce on behalf of our brand and identify the social networks on which that type of content thrives. In doing so, we not only can find meme pools in which our memes can compete but we can also learn from the nuances of format, voice, tone, and cultural norms how to create content that feels relevant and natural.

What communities, influencers, pages, and content aggregators tend to grow natural followings on the social networks of interest to us? If we’re a fashion-related brand, Pinterest and Instagram are likely candidates for our priority social channels. If our brand’s offering is complex or our content strategy is reliant on depth and discovery, we ought to look at networks like Reddit, Twitch, Imgur, Tumblr, Quora, and even smaller interest-based forums related to our brand territory. When we know our target audience fits a particular demographic—or that paid media and down-funnel objectives will dictate our success in social—more established advertising networks like Facebook and Google may be at the top of our channel priorities.

Listening should also be a priority at the level of the meme and meme machine. If we have some sense of the message we want to convey and the content we plan to distribute, we ought to pay close attention to the meme machines that propagate best. What characteristics do we find in common between viral pieces of content within that social network? Our goal here is to take the meme machine from its environment, infuse it with our own meme, and harness the evolutionary process to manifest our ideas to their greatest effect. As we release our meme machines into the wild, we’ll likely start to see them fall into the familiar Pareto distribution—20 percent of our content will probably drive 80 percent of our results.

Performance evaluation is another critical form of listening. What can we hear from our audience about what we’ve made? And I don’t just mean combing through the comments of our posts—having played the role of community manager for more than a few years for more than a few brands, I can tell you that nothing will make you lose hope in humanity faster than reading the comments on brands’ social posts. Most networks with established advertising platforms provide us with robust, exportable analyses of our creative performance. Unfortunately, most brands don’t put these reports to proper use.

Imagine that a month after launching our brand’s social presence, we’ve achieved a modest engagement rate of 1.5 percent. If we create one batch of social creative per month, and we learn enough from our previous batch of content to improve by just 5 percent per month, we’ll nearly double our overall engagement rate by the end of the year. Incremental learning is a vital part of the social creative process, and it’s not enough to relegate the task to analysts. There are just too many ways to slice the data. Did shorter copy work better than longer copy? Did one piece of creative resonate particularly well with one demographic over another? Did hotter colors grab more attention than cooler colors? Did one content pillar outperform the others? A copywriter, an art director, a media planner, a community manager, and a strategist will all find different ways to slice performance data if they look hard enough. It was (probably) Isaac Asimov who said, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (‘I found it!’) but ‘That’s funny.’ ”⁷

Creative performance evaluations don’t have to be overly complicated. The preferred format for these meetings among my teams was generally casual and almost brainstormlike. For each meeting, an analyst prepared a simple review of the last month’s creative. Screenshots of each post were accompanied by one or two key metrics—true engagement rate, share rate, conversion rate, whatever had been deemed the priority performance indicators. Then, with everything up on the wall, the team just . . . talked. What did great? What didn’t? Which was the most surprising? Who has a theory as to why?

Here are a few learnings from these meetings:

•   When copy is superimposed on a post to contextualize an image—when the meme machine is completely encapsulated—posts generated 46 times more clicks of the share button.

•   Recipes and crafts that include “process shots” drive significantly more engagement than static images of the final outcome.

•   Nature photography tends to generate more engagement when accompanied by a quote or personal story.

•   Complementary color schemes tend to grab more attention and generate more social actions.

•   Static images and gifs tend to drive more earned reach than videos.

•   Cute animals outperform everything else.

That last one is common sense, but hopefully it’s clear how these kinds of learnings help a social creative team find a path to continual improvement.

A traditional creative performance report is a corpse. Its learnings are difficult to apply to the living world because they’re rarely developed from the perspective of the people actually making the content. More often, performance metrics are used as leverage to prove value to a client or stakeholder. When performance evaluation becomes an active part of the creative process, the insights and learnings are tangible and alive. Plus, it makes social creative more fun. We all know that dopamine hit we get when we post something on a personal social media profile that gets some attention. If we can get our entire creative team aligned to the same evaluation of success, we all get to feel that dopamine rush when a brand post blows up.

When we arrive at a new learning, it’s important that we codify that learning in a living document. And no, dropping data once a month into a shared Google doc isn’t good enough. Past learnings should be part of every creative briefing for rounds of social creative. While veteran team members may feel this exercise to be redundant, maintaining a set of brand-specific best practices keeps us from making the same mistakes over and over again. It also helps to onboard new team members and provides an impartial third party for reference during disagreements about style and direction. Anchoring our teams in democratically sourced, data-backed learnings minimizes the clash of egos and helps to align different disciplines to the same goal. If you’ve ever worked in an ad agency, you know that minimizing clashes between egos is half the battle.

2. CHOOSE AS MANY CHANNELS AS YOU CAN DO WELL, AND DESIGNATE DISCRETE CHANNEL ROLES

When a new social network starts to become popular, parallel conversations arise in just about every brand organization. Should we be there? What would our presence look like? Can Intern Jonny take on another social media site? He’s only handling seven right now, so . . . probably, right? I watched this happen with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Vine, Tumblr, and poor Google+ (you tried, guys). Then, I stoked those very same conversations when I joined Reddit in 2016, which is around the same time that brands also started to adopt Snapchat. I gained another level of awareness of my own naïveté as I watched brand after brand dump money into Snapchat—an app that was originally designed for discretely sending nudes—while hearing that Reddit was a “brand safety concern.” Years later, many large brands have broken through their hesitation with the Reddit platform to great effect, but what surprised me most about brands’ willingness to jump into Snapchat was the lack of strategic rationale.

Joining a new social network as a brand is a big step, and it ought to be taken thoughtfully and strategically. Don’t get me wrong, Snapchat is a strategic channel for some brands. Brands that find creative uses for lenses and augmented reality experiences and brands whose content fits particularly well into extremely short-form video are a perfect fit on the platform. But for brands that strive to earn reach, integrate into culture, and build a meaningful following, Snapchat is often an uphill battle.

Hype about a new emerging channel seems to short-circuit our strategic wiring. When AdAge publishes an article praising a brand’s early adoption of an emerging channel, many brands have an inclination to chase the same success. Chasing “early-adopter” status is almost always a losing battle, unless it’s executed with full consideration for the middle- to long-term implications for the brand. What will this new channel allow us to do that our current channels don’t? How will we evaluate the success—or failure—of our participation in the new channel? How much resource and media budget can we reasonably allocate to it?

Even young brands have a tendency to spread themselves thin across a wide number of social channels. For smaller brands without big brand resources, this approach not only exhausts resources but it also almost guarantees low impact. When we create content that attempts to appeal to every channel, we’ll likely achieve only lowest-common-denominator results from each of them. Conversely, investing ourselves fully into one or two channels humanizes us, allows us to engage in meaningful ways with our audience, and with consistency, builds the momentum we want from social media.

In brand building, we walk a fine line between strategic planning and real-world behavior. Brand builders in traditional agencies often lament the lengthy, exhaustive conversations behind every brand decision. What would it mean for us to change the hue of this brand color? What if we replaced this word on our packaging? Can we move the logo up four pixels? Social media has pushed us to think faster and forced us out of our lengthy conference room planning sessions because by the time our 10-person committee has agreed on the exact language to use in this tweet, the trending hashtag we hoped to engage has been all but forgotten. At a macro-level, that’s a good thing for our industry. It has loosened the reins on driving a brand. But there is a risk in swinging too far into this “act first, ask questions later” approach.

In 2011, entrepreneur Eric Ries wrote a book called The Lean Startup, which was revolutionary, particularly in the world of tech.⁸ The essential premise of the book is that companies, especially startups, ought to change their approach to building and launching products. Ries brilliantly identifies the often wasteful, needlessly long process most large companies have adopted in building and evolving their products. All too often, companies spend weeks, months, or years developing a product that is introduced to potential customers only after it’s finished. What if customers wanted something slightly different? What if hearing feedback early on could inform the building of that product so that customers get what they really need?

Ries’s proposed solution revolves around the minimum viable product (MVP). Rather than dropping a finished product in customers’ laps, Ries recommends delivering the MVP to generate feedback throughout the development process. By delivering the MVP, organizations minimize the time and resources wasted during development and allow the customer to inform the product’s ongoing evolution. With examples ranging from startups run out of garages to Fortune 500 companies, Ries makes a powerful case for the “lean startup method.”

Lean startup thinking has made its way into social media thinking too. I suppose we have the common ground of Silicon Valley to thank for that. And in many ways, Ries’s approach is an antidote to the stagnant, ultraconservative brand building process of the TV advertising era. While we can—and should—apply the tactics of Ries’s “build-measure-learn” approach, we still have important lessons to glean from our more conservative branding forebears. As products, if we’re valuable enough to our customers, there’s a chance they’ll wade through some missing features and broken code to bear with us. But as brands, we simply can’t think that way. For brands, first impressions matter.

From determining which social networks in which we’ll participate to what we optimize our content toward, we need to consider the full impression of someone encountering us. If we’ve spread ourselves too thin across too many channels, odds are that we’re going to have shallow content for each platform and even shallower engagement to show for it. In many cases, a semi-active presence is worse than no presence at all. If a small fashion brand lazily posts the same product shots to 10 different social platforms, they’re unlikely to make the impression they want to make, and they’re certainly not going to sway any opinions. If their Instagram account only generates a few engagements per post, that doesn’t bode well for users interested in attaching themselves to the brand as a form of self-expression.

I wish this next paragraph could tell you, “Here are the exact right social channels for your brand to use!” I’d even use an exclamation point so we could both get extra excited about it. But I can’t do that. The right channel mix and strategy is different for every brand. As we try to answer this question for our brands, we should first ask ourselves what we’re trying to accomplish. Are we trying to attach our brand to popular culture? Do we aspire to build a community, or are we satisfied with being a voice in a community we don’t manage? Are we looking for down-funnel sales metrics as measures of success, or does our brand need to build upper-funnel awareness and affinity first? My advice is to choose as many channels as can be thoughtfully attended to and to designate specific goals for each. Sometimes those goals may overlap, but if they do, we should have a strong rationale as to why we shouldn’t consolidate those channels.

The exception to this advice is squatting. Sometimes, squatting on a username or page that may be mistaken as an official brand presence is a worthwhile defensive tactic. It keeps users from trolling us with spoof accounts and demonstrates to users that we’re at the very least aware of the platform. We don’t necessarily have to execute a full content and engagement strategy for every channel on which we’ve secured a username, but whatever we do should feel intentional. Squatted channels should be skinned to look and feel consistent with the brand. If we’ve secured a channel and we’ve themed it to look and feel like our brand, and we don’t intend to use the channel to engage people, we simply need to make that clear to people. Even something as simple as a message to people who land on the page should suffice: “Hi, there, thanks for finding us! If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can find us on Twitter via @TheCatMassageInstitute or contact us directly through our website: www.TheCatMassageInstitute.com.” (I wish that was a real website, but sadly, it isn’t.)

When we choose to join a social network, our presence should embody what our brand aspires to be. That doesn’t just mean creating content from our brand’s perspective. It means that we’re active, engaged, and invested. While there are certainly benefits to maintaining a wide social footprint, we’re better off with one or two outstanding presences than we are with a handful of mediocre ones. We should look for a combination of factors in choosing our priority social networks. First, can the channel accomplish the goals we need to achieve? Second, will people there care about our message? And third, do we have the resources to ensure that our presence lives up to the brand we’re trying to build?

3. MANIFEST BEHAVIORS WITH RIGHT BRAIN APPEAL, THEN TELL LEFT BRAIN STORIES ABOUT THEM

In the previous chapter, we examined how aspects of the right brain’s perspective, characterized by presence with immediate experience, big picture thinking, and exploration of the unknown, correspond with behaviors in anonymous Id networks. Likewise, the left brain’s represented version of the world, cleanly categorized and focused on the utility of the tools it’s able to recognize, correspond with Ego and Superego networks, wherein we represent different aspects of ourselves. As we consider on which social networks our brand can make the biggest impact, we should be mindful of how we balance ourselves between these two modes of online expression.

As we might expect, left brain networks tend to have clearer lanes for interaction between users. These Ego and Superego networks also tend to have more developed tools for paid media distribution. Facebook/Instagram and Twitter are among the most developed advertising platforms the industry has ever seen. In general, left brain networks tend to be more discretely organized, they have more platform-enforced rules, and participation tends to be more formulaic. On Facebook, we can make posts, comment on other posts, and message the people with whom we have mutual connections. On Reddit, we’re free to participate in over a hundred thousand interest-based communities, each of which has its own rules and cultures, and our mode of participation is more open-ended. Right brain networks tend to be less predictable in terms of how people—and brands—interact with one another. That can be a challenge or an opportunity for differentiation.

Left brain platforms like Facebook and Instagram have tight control over advertiser profiles and how many people those profiles are able to reach. Their algorithms are centralized and opaque—it isn’t clear to us as users how a post worked its way into our feed. Because they’re organized around individual user feeds, left brain platforms have the problem of balancing content to maintain user engagement. Too much advertiser content risks alienating users from the value they derive from the platform, while too little risks losing advertising clients. Earning reach on these platforms is extremely difficult without a baseline of paid media because the platforms themselves keep most organic advertiser content out of user feeds. An earned impression effectively takes dollars out of Facebook’s pocket, so it’s no surprise that brands’ organic reach has been on a steady decline for years.

For challenger brands and brands striving to create organic impact in a social network, investing in Id network activity has greater potential payoff. Functionally, even more developed Id networks like Reddit maintain a clearer separation between paid and organic advertiser activity. That’s largely dictated by the structure of the network itself—user pages aren’t destinations. Communities are. Because communities play a greater role in content selection than the left brain networks’ opaque algorithm equivalents, as brands, we have a clearer path to success. We have to win over the community rather than the platform itself.

When a community on Reddit collectively agrees that the content we’ve posted adds value, the Reddit platform treats our post just as it does any other user’s. When an organic post reaches the front page of Reddit, the number of impressions generated can rival large media buys. In 2019, Reddit reported having 430 million monthly active users, and because the platform prioritizes community-level over user-level curation, savvy brands have real potential to drive massive amounts of organic reach and engagement.⁹

While right brain networks do have greater potential to create virality and word-of-mouth momentum for our brands, organic activity in general is much less predictable than paid media. For most brands, the optimal channel strategy requires a balance of both left and right brain networks. Left and right brain networks require different approaches, but that doesn’t mean we can’t build strategies that create synergy between them. Our right brains experience the world, and our left brains represent those experiences by telling stories, creating identities, and storing learnings for our future selves. Likewise, as brands, we should strive to create value adding experiences that appeal to the right brain, then tell left brain stories about those experiences.

Assuming we’re still pretending to be the marketing team for The Cat Massage Institute, imagine that we decide to give away our patented cat massagers to owners whose cats have recently had . . . some kind of cat injury. A torn lickament. No wait, a purr-forated muscle. (I’m sorry.) Anyway, we give away our Cat Massager™ to a few people on Reddit—that’s the behavior. Hopefully, those people now have a much more positive impression of us, and hopefully, they tell their stories to others within the Reddit community. One person posts in the r/AskVet community, and we’re the top post in a community of over 66,000 people. Great! Even if we reached every single one of those people, that’s probably a relatively small number compared to even a modest media buy. But now we have a story to tell.

Maybe our public relations team pitches a story about “Five Injured Cats Who Got Special Massages on Reddit.” I’d click on that. Or maybe we create our own article or album titled, “Five Cats on Reddit who Needed Massages.” I’m really going deep on the clickbait titles, but hopefully you get the point—behaviors are the foundation for expressing who our brand is to the world. To maximize the impact of those behaviors, we have to balance them with stories that represent us in ways that are suited to light engagements with a broad audience.

As a general rule, right brain networks tend to be more fruitful grounds for manifesting these behaviors, while the stories we tell should be suited to left brain networks. But this giveaway strategy could work on Twitter or Instagram too. The tactics and channels we choose to manifest behaviors and tell stories can fluctuate depending on where our behaviors and stories will resonate best. Old Spice did exactly that in a 2018 stunt that absolutely nobody saw coming—they created a new character class for Dungeons and Dragons players.¹⁰

The Old Spice brand recognized the power of igniting a fandom that may on the surface seem too niche to warrant engagement. Dungeons and Dragons is a tabletop role-playing fantasy game beloved by Internet dorks worldwide. When starting a new D&D campaign, players create characters based on different kinds of “classes,” or archetypes. The barbarian class specializes in close combat, a cleric wields divine magic, and a bard . . . well, a bard plays magical music. Bards are the dorks among dorks. In a true first-of-its-kind brand move, Old Spice created a new class called The Gentleman. The Gentleman (or Gentle-woman) wasn’t just a goofy, “Wouldn’t it be funny if . . .” left brain representation of a character. It was a fully playable character, delivered with lore, special abilities, and a player sheet that looked and felt like something out of a traditional D&D book.

The Gentleman, like other D&D classes, gained special abilities over the course of leveling. Old Spice took liberties to create skills that were hilarious representations of its brand but had real application in a D&D game. The Gentleman started with an ability called “Punchline,” characterized as “a humorous phrase to confound their enemies.” At level 5, The Gentleman gained an ability called “I’m on a Horse,” which allowed the character to “say, ‘I’m on a horse’ and a horse will appear beneath him.” And yes, that’s a reference to one of their own ads.

While Old Spice made the announcement of The Gentleman class on Twitter, one of the social channels in which they’ve invested heavily, the team engaged on Reddit when users in various D&D communities took note. Over 20 organic posts about The Gentleman were created throughout different subreddits. That may not seem like a lot, but sometimes one post in a relevant community is enough to ignite a fanbase. Old Spice reached the top of communities like r/DnD and r/Pathfinder_RPG, both of which are highly influential among fantasy role-players. Acclaim from these communities drove a wave of media coverage in The Nerdist, The Gamer, Comicbook.com, and a huge number of other gaming and D&D-related publications, citing the enthusiastic reception for The Gentleman among D&D players.^{11, 12, 13}

Had Old Spice simply represented The Gentleman—had the company simply tweeted a mockup of what the player class might look like or asked Twitter, “If Old Spice made a D&D character, who would it be?”, the reception and resulting media coverage would likely have been minimal. Old Spice dove headfirst into the behavior because it understood that the success of the stunt relied on the approval of real fans. If D&D communities rejected The Gentleman, the media coverage would never have snowballed.

One player wrote on r/DnD, “This is neat as shit that they would go out of their way to reach out to a community like that. . . . This is the best kind of commercial honestly.”¹⁴ Another responded, “What’s crazy [is] it’s not even half bad. I’ve seen more unbalanced options in Unearthed Arcana. Color me impressed.” The depth, craft, and real applicability of The Gentleman won over users in right brain networks. The left brain practice of abstracting that behavior out into a consumable story broadened the campaign’s appeal from “people who actively play Dungeons and Dragons” to “people who know vaguely what D&D is.” That allowed the story to spread to Ego and Superego networks—if I come across this story, I can start a Facebook conversation about this with my friend who played D&D in high school, or I can make tongue-in-cheek jokes on Twitter about dorky D&D players finally wearing deodorant. Not that I would.

Whenever possible, we should strive to find these synergies between manifesting real behaviors in the world that have a tangible impact on people’s lives (right brain) and telling those stories in ways that are generally interesting to a broad audience (left brain). Not only does that generate effective social content but it also maximizes the impact of everything we do. Old Spice generated thousands of shares across Twitter and Facebook by making something appreciated by nerds on Reddit. In order for our right brain behaviors to successfully engage people, they must connect with people in a real and tangible way. Without that genuine connection, the stories we tell feel shallow and contrived. The secret sauce isn’t so secret—it’s just difficult. We have to give people a reason to like us.

4. START YOUR CREATIVE PROCESS WITH THE MOST COMPETITIVE CONTENT ENVIRONMENTS IN MIND

Sugarcane farmers in Australia during the 1930s had a rough time. Their crops were being eaten by cane beetles, and in a desperate attempt to contain them, about a hundred South American cane toads were imported.¹⁵ Indeed, the cane toads solved the beetle problem. And then some. Today, there are more than 1.5 billion cane toads in Australia, and they’ve conquered more than 386,000 square miles. Cane toads are a textbook example of what biologists call an “invasive species.”

Most ecosystems are relatively insular, evolving without foreign species being rapidly introduced. That means predators and prey exist in an ongoing evolutionary arms race that keeps things relatively balanced. On a broad scale, this is an environmentally stable system. When a plant or animal evolves in one ecosystem and it is then introduced into another, it often fails to propagate because it hasn’t evolved to survive in the new climate and among those other life-forms. But sometimes, invasive species like cane toads dominate an otherwise balanced ecosystem. Invasive species have a few particularly relevant traits to the meme metaphor you probably saw coming. Invasive species tend to reproduce easily and often. Invasive species also tend to move from more competitive environments into less competitive environments. That’s not always the case—sometimes invasive species move laterally into approximately equally competitive environments. But, for example, it’s unlikely that a species of climate-sensitive flower will invade the Arabian desert.

Memes follow a similar pattern. Invasive memes are ones formed in competitive meme pools and carry an evolutionary advantage over memes in less competitive meme pools. Be like the cane toad. Take the most successful memes from your most competitive meme pools, and allow them to invade less competitive meme pools.

For major brands, social media is often the absolute last consideration when planning content and establishing messaging hierarchy. But social networks are also the most competitive meme pools in which our brand messaging competes. More than ever, we see television programs borrow from social media for content. News programs and morning shows now rely on social media to indicate what’s popular, as commentary on live events, to reference memes and trends—after Grumpy Cat blew up on Reddit, she had “interviews” with Good Morning America, the TODAY Show in Australia, and even Forbes.^{16, 17, 18} Media flows downstream from the Internet, but for some reason, most large brands’ advertising cycles revolve around TV and traditional media.

It’s relatively easy for us to test ideas in social media. Social networks allow us to be less precious about polishing our assets, and sometimes content that’s a little rough around the edges actually works better. When we’re planning a major campaign, social networks ought to be our first stop rather than our last. When we want to test new campaign lines, concepts, funny skits, product demonstrations, and so on, social media provides us with a simple way to receive candid feedback at whatever scale we deem appropriate.

Even during our traditional creative processes, most of the memes we try don’t survive. We cull our ideas by evaluating them against specific criteria. How effectively does the meme communicate the brand value? Will it solve the business problem the brand faces? As we weed out the ideas that fail these most basic criteria, we start to make stylistic and value judgments on behalf of our audiences. Will this concept grab people’s attention? Does it feel true to what we know of their experience? Will they find it compelling? And while some advertisers have become very good at predicting the answers to these questions, we’re still making educated guesses. Wouldn’t we rather our audience give us some indication of which concepts are most interesting and relevant to them?

I’m not recommending that a brand’s creative approach be crowdsourced. Most of the time, crowdsourcing is another path to the lowest common denominator of success. It’s vital that we enter any creative exercise with a well-established strategy to frame our output. But the proverbial pendulum has been stuck far in the direction of finger-to-the-wind instincts of creative egos when we have abundant opportunities to hear feedback directly from our audiences.

In a traditional agency creative process, a broad brainstorming exercise generates an abundance of ideas. Then, a creative team, usually consisting of a copywriter and art director, begin down the frustrating road of concept submissions and rejections until they satisfy a creative team lead. And an account lead. And a strategy lead. And some random, unrelated VPs who inexplicably inserted themselves into the feedback process. Finally, the concepts are presented to a client, who feels a need to deliver a huge amount of feedback, proportionate to the huge amount of money they’re paying the agency. Rinse and repeat three more times, and finally, things move to production.

Because the rest of the process has been so painful and wrought with approvals for every bit of minutia possible, the script becomes the bible. The process leaves no room for improvisation or opportunistic captures—you know, the things that keep videos from feeling overly scripted and contrived. The spot is unleashed on the world in 60-second, 30-second, and 15-second formats—then the pesky social team requests a 6-second version so that at the very least, when the video auto-plays in feed for 2 seconds, the team can put “30 percent view-through rate” on their recap slide.

Despite this robust process and massive investments of time, resources, and money, at no point have we consulted our audience. Throughout the process, we’ve generated hundreds, maybe thousands of ideas and culled all except a small handful. Why can’t our audience help us choose which ideas to pursue and which to eliminate? If you’re thinking, “creative egos,” then touché. Here’s an idea, though. Rather than going straight into full-on production, let’s find the most simple, straightforward way to communicate our concept and promote it to a small audience on our social channels. If we decide we want to film real testimonials about how much people enjoyed our product, we might create some static images-with-quotes-superimposed and see how people react. If we want to feature an interesting life hack or way to use the product, we might use some simple phone photography to capture the concept. If we’re choosing between a few jokes as openers in our TV spot, we might film low-production talking-head videos to see which resonate best.

Not only does light, low-production content humanize our brand and get our audience invested in our creative process but it also allows us to test the viability of various memes in a real, competitive environment. When we create a piece of content for a 30-second TV slot (a fishbowl), and we try to release our creation into the Internet (the ocean), our poor creative is likely to get swallowed immediately or wash quietly into the depths of YouTube alongside 11-year-olds’ Minecraft gaming channels and daily chemtrail conspiracy vloggers.

There’s nothing quite as painful as spending six months producing a piece of content that gets 12 views on YouTube and zero comments. At least backlash makes things exciting. But the truth is that the vast majority of branded content finds itself in the cold and lonely landfill of stuff that wasn’t interesting enough to earn attention. Take the meme out of the lab. Let it run around. Take it through the obstacle course. See how it performs before putting it in the big race.

5. TIMING CAN BE AN EFFECTIVE TACTIC, BUT IT’S NOT A STRATEGY

Since Oreo’s iconic “Dunk in the dark” moment during the 2013 Super Bowl, brands have been chasing real-time engagement as if it were the holy grail in social media. Some brands have gone so far as to create “newsroom” models for content creation equipped with TV monitors hosting charts that nobody actually looks at, community managers scouring for trends, and bored creative teams on deck to whip up timely but often insubstantial content. After all, that’s how Oreo did it.

Oreo did more than buy a traditional Super Bowl spot during the game. It also assembled a “war room” social media team to create real-time content throughout the game. When the stadium’s power went out, the social team took the opportunity to shine (no pun intended). They created a simple tweet that read, “Power out? No problem.”¹⁹ The tweet featured an image of an Oreo surrounded by darkness with a caption that read, “You can still dunk in the dark.” The tweet generated over 14,000 retweets and nearly 7,000 likes. Coverage of Super Bowl ads were particularly enthusiastic about the tweet, with the first line of a Huffington Post article reading, “One of the most buzz-worthy ads of the Super Bowl on Sunday wasn’t even a commercial—it was a mere tweet from Oreo during the blackout.”²⁰

While brilliantly executed and well received, the “Dunk in the dark” moment became a false idol for many major brands. Some attempted this 24/7 newsroom-style social strategy, which usually netted a high volume of extremely time relevant but ultimately low impact content. Some of my own teams scrapped perfectly valid social strategies following feedback that the output “wasn’t time relevant enough.” There are a few important elements of Oreo’s success that aren’t often factored into the evaluation. First, the Super Bowl is a rare moment in time with reach and awareness so broad that just about everyone in America knows what’s happening. Second, the Super Bowl tends to be as much about the ads as it is about the sport. While 14,000 retweets and 7,000 likes is undoubtedly a high-performing tweet, it’s unlikely that the tweet would have generated nearly as much media coverage as it did during a less advertiser-centric moment. Oreo was able to harness an audience of advertising beat writers looking for new angles on an annual story—“This year’s best Super Bowl ad wasn’t even a commercial!”

About a month prior to my writing this, a video, posted by an average user, reached the front page of Reddit titled, “Wendy’s Training Video is what I wish we were still doing today.”²¹ The video isn’t a spoof. It’s actually a training video, likely from the 1980s. Or at least that’s what the Internet suspects based on the whole “person gets sucked into the TV to learn how to cook hamburgers” plot. The post itself generated over 41,000 upvotes and 2,000 comments totally organically. We’d be hard pressed to find an ad for any brand that could intentionally reach the front page of Reddit with such velocity and positive sentiment.

A 1980s training video is as untimely as it gets, but there’s something deeply compelling about it. It’s a window into a previous era. It’s also ultracheesy and reminiscent of the terrible info-tainment millennials were fed as children. The video wasn’t meant for broad consumption, so it’s like peeking behind the scenes as we watch. And this wasn’t a case of “recently found footage” either. The video had been popularized by a radio host named Brian Fink on Twitter in 2018, where it had been reposted hundreds of times.²² The same video reached the top of another Reddit community a few months prior and was shared in a smaller Reddit community three years before the front page blowup.^{23, 24} The point is that timeliness is only one factor in the broader category of relevance. This Wendy’s video could have been posted days, months, or years prior—or after—and it likely would still have generated the same level of engagement. The same can be said for much of the content we strive to create as brands: a timely post will eventually lose its relevance, but a relevant post doesn’t always have to be timely.

Timeliness is important for a particular kind of content. It’s important for content related to events that, in the words of The Office character Jim Halpert, “if you didn’t see them live, you wouldn’t really care that you didn’t see them at all.” Creating real-time content can indeed help a brand stand out from the noise, and it can signal to users that the brand is actually engaged in the conversation. But the shortened planning process and robust network of approvals most brands require prior to posting make creating good timely content very difficult, and unless the already complex content creative process happens in lockstep with a media promotion strategy, we’re rolling the dice against network algorithms.

Before we fully commit to the tightrope walk of creating quality, timely content, most brands should get into a rhythm of creating high-performing evergreen content. If something is interesting, useful, or entertaining in its own right, the Internet doesn’t care so much about when it was created. An album of life hacks from 1910 managed to generate nearly 5,000 upvotes on Reddit and over 500,000 views on Imgur, simply because they were interesting and useful.^{25, 26} With the right framing, great content will remain viable long after it’s created. Removing the pressure of faster-than-light turnaround and focusing on improving overall engagement will also hone our instincts when it comes time to make something that actually is time sensitive. If we haven’t mastered engagement outside a time constraint, we’re adding significantly more complexity and uncertainty to our process by trying to do so in tight time windows.

There are some cases where timeliness contributes meaningfully to social strategies, and this is in no way meant to diminish brands that successfully capture attention during events and around trends. For brands with light and lean creative processes—usually smaller brands without lengthy approval processes—inserting the brand into real-time conversations can help us connect with new audiences and grow our organic reach. When an event is particularly relevant to our audience, participating in organic conversations can be a strong way to build connection between the brand and the event itself. Especially on platforms like Twitter, which prioritize timeliness and foster more real-time conversations, applying a lens of time relevance can lead to meaningful improvements to brand perception, relatability, and overall engagement.

While timing can be an effective tactic to utilize, it must be couched in a broader strategy and leveraged during moments of particularly high impact. Timeliness is not a strategy in and of itself. Tweeting trending hashtags can help us generate more organic reach, and particularly for new accounts and budding brands, it can be an effective way to get noticed. For the vast majority of social media creative development, maintaining a steady rhythm and focusing on incremental improvements by analyzing past performance will generate better return on investment. A great creative strategy is one that allows our brand to bring a unique and interesting perspective to a conversation. More often than not, great content today is still great content tomorrow.

KEY TAKEAWAYS