Brands: Time to hand over your social media accounts.
Like the stock market, you need to be ready to react at all times.
Remember that? How everyone wanted their next campaign to be the next “Dunk in the dark.”
Hell, remember when the One Show had awards for banner ads?
Oh, how times have changed.
Barack Obama owes much of his 2008 campaign success to being one of the first politicians to really utilize social media. Now even Ruth Bader Ginsburg is on Twitter.
But, dunk in the dark was kind of a first. The copy isn’t really all that impressive, but man the turnaround for a social post was remarkable for its time. Oreo’s forward-thinking social media policies were killing it in the early 2010's, setting the stage for brands like Wendy’s to later basically own the entire platform.
Now every brand has an edgy voice on social media. It’s the only way to get anyone to care. I argue, there are only two ways for brands to amass followers.
1: Offer deals or incentives.
2: Talk like everyone else.
We use Twitter to see what mindless crap comes to people’s minds—even politicians are tweeting nonsense. Like, well I’m sure you can think of an orange-looking prime example of that.
My dream is having full reign over a brand’s twitter account. But, most clients are still uneasy about handing that over. Why? Is it the fact that we’re moving away from formal vernacular and replacing our language with a made-up colloquial dialect of fake words and acronyms? (See my other article, how we abuse our language). Is it because, with no supervision, a 20-something-year-old with holes in their ears and a tattoo on their neck could post something a little too un-kosher? After all, they’re giving their official voice to said punks.
But it pays off when you do it right. Wendy’s, Square Inc., Moosejaw, Charmin, Moonpie, Netflix, KFC, even the National Library of Scotland. They’re all brands with hilarious, nonsensical tweets, run by hipsters and young millennials, with little bureaucratic oversight. It lets brands be more conversational in the moment, embracing the culture they’re trying to appeal to, with fast responses to the ever-changing social media landscape. It makes them a brand people want to follow.
Social media is still a fairly new medium that brands are trying to navigate, all too lightly. There’s icebergs at every turn, and plotting that course is like driving with a blindfold. You never really know if something’s going to go sideways until it’s too late. Because imagine the backlash if Oreo had tweeted that and it turned out to be a significant threat happening. I wonder how different things would have ended up today.
Oh, my dear dunk in the dark. It’s been six years, and a lot has happened in six years. And as I sit here trying to download Tik-Tok to understand Gen-Z’ers, I wonder where it’s all headed.
