The social minefield

What happens when you try to outfox the wisdom of the social media crowd’s bullshit detector

Welcome to IMTW issue № 47. By the time you read this, I plan to be wandering the hallowed halls of The Royal Academy, having put this week’s briefing together for you last night. I hope you find it valuable.

👉🏻 Read on to learn why:

① Lack of authenticity will fell any social media marketing.

② The best defence against negative PR is integrity.

③ Acquiring affluent millennial clients is expensive.

④ Corporate reputation matters, not least to regulators.

⑤ Data and digital will be key for financial marketers.

⑥ Offices will never be the same again.

⑦ A handful of financial firms are walking the talk on ESG.

What's new?

This week, The Verge ran a story about Amazon disbanding the Twitter army it paid to tweet about how great Amazon is.

In short:

“Amazon has shuttered a controversial influence campaign in which it paid workers to tweet about how much they love working at Amazon. Employees at the retailer’s warehouses were paid to share positive impressions about the company and to deny widely-reported workplace failings.”
“The scheme launched in 2018 in response to waves of criticism of Amazon’s safety standards and working conditions. Workers were selected for their ‘great sense of humor’ and told to respond ‘in a polite — but blunt — way’ to the company’s critics, including policymakers and politicians.”
“The exact identity or number of ‘ambassadors’ was never clear. A Bellingcat investigation found at least 53 accounts active on Twitter, but noted that users tended to deploy similar language, tweet the same pictures, and even swap ownership of accounts, created a blur of overlapping identities.”

Why does it matter?

This story matters as an example of how not to do employee advocacy. Now, you might think Amazon’s mistake was to pay employees to say nice things about them but I’m not sure that’s the heart of the problem (after all, what are marketing teams if not employees paid to paint you in your best light?) No, I think the issue here - as it often is when social media campaigns go wrong - is lack of authenticity.

① Public relations pros will tell you there’s no audience more cynical than a seasoned journalist. But I’d venture the collective crowd (or should that be lynch mob?) on social media has an even more powerful bullshit detector. I sympathise with the impulse to fight a negative narrative with positive messages but having employees so blatantly share - often identical - upbeat stories about their company was always going to look too artificial to be taken seriously. No surprise then that the accounts quickly became a target of criticism and mockery.

There is a tolerance for corporate social media presences - indeed, I’d argue a need for them - but what people really want on social is to engage with other people. Real people. And that means being true to yourself. There’s nothing wrong with talking about work but your opinions need to be your own and - just as you wouldn’t rant relentlessly about the same subject in any other social situation - you need to mix it up with some of your other passions on social media too. In short, be human. Be yourself.

What's next?

Take action

I offered you advice on running employee advocacy programmes back in issue #8. I strongly encourage you to do so because leveraging the power of your employees’ networks and the credibility of their reputations to those networks is hugely valuable to your brand. Broadly speaking, it’s about being inclusive, honest, clear, prolific (in your content production), then empowering and trusting your team to share appropriately. And, yes, of course, monitor and adapt as needed.

② That said, I think the best action you can take this week in reaction to the Amazon story is to take a look at your business and ensure it’s run with integrity, ethics and a concern for your employees. Your staff should feel valued and content to be part of your team. As long as they are, you won’t have to worry one jot about what they say about you - on social media or anywhere else.

Get help

Visit InMarketing, my resource library for leaders in finance or technology who want to innovate, interact and influence.

If you have a question or comment, just hit ‘reply’. I’d love to hear from you.

Can I ask you a favour? If you found this useful or know someone who would, please share it. It would really help me to grow the community of regular IMTW readers.

What else?

Three other articles that are worthy of your time.

FINANCE

UBS targets US millennials with Wealthfront acquisition

③ Acquiring affluent millennial clients is…expensive.

Source: The Financial Times, 26 January 2022

“UBS has agreed to buy US robo-adviser Wealthfront in an all-cash transaction valued at $1.4bn, as the Swiss bank expands further into the US wealth market.”
“California-based Wealthfront, which is popular among millennials and Generation Z customers, has 470,000 clients and $27bn of assets.”
“The US expansion will draw UBS more into direct competition with Morgan Stanley, which also targets the mass affluent sector, clients with between $250,000 and $2m of assets. UBS already has about 2m US customers in that segment.”

I got my calculator out so you don’t have to, dear reader.

$1.4B for 470,000 clients is…$3,000 per client.

TECHNOLOGY

Facebook gives up on crypto ambitions

④ Corporate reputation matters, not least to regulators.

Source: The Financial Times, 27 January 2022

“The Silicon Valley group has been stung by recent scandals over content moderation and privacy, contributing to a drop in popularity for its main social networking products Facebook and Instagram, a trend that threatens its $85bn-a-year ad-based business model.”
“The project faced pushback from regulators from the outset. It suffered a difficult origin when a wave of its founding members — including PayPal, Mastercard and Vodafone — quit within its first year after the project attracted regulatory scrutiny. In particular, watchdogs raised concerns about money laundering and monetary stability, given Facebook’s size. The company also faced a backlash over the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal.”
“Diem initially sought to create a digital coin backed by a basket of real-world currencies. But in an attempt to appease US regulators, it narrowed its vision in 2020 to focus on launching a coin backed one-for-one by the dollar, known as a stable-coin, and hired former HSBC legal chief Stuart Levey as its first chief executive.”

MEDIA & MARKETING