{"id":208,"date":"2023-03-14T16:21:54","date_gmt":"2023-03-14T16:21:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/?p=208"},"modified":"2023-03-22T17:58:29","modified_gmt":"2023-03-22T17:58:29","slug":"just-because-it-trends-doesnt-mean-it-should-blend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/just-because-it-trends-doesnt-mean-it-should-blend\/","title":{"rendered":"Just Because It Trends, Doesn\u2019t Mean It Should Blend"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s an old adage in the news industry: \u201cif it bleeds, it leads<\/em>.\u201d I\u2019d like to propose a new one for the modern media landscape. Some brands and digital shops seem to think:\u00a0if it trends, it<\/em>\u00a0blends<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

What exactly do I mean by this? I\u2019ve mentioned brands in the past who do a great job thinking visual in social \u00a0(I mentioned Oreo\u00a0in June 2012\u00a0as a brand to look at that was killing it). Then in\u00a0February\u00a0of 2013, the entire marketing industry exploded with buzz about\u00a0Oreo\u2019s real-time reaction\u00a0to the Super Bowl power outage. So much so I even\u00a0made a meme\u00a0joking about how much coverage this single tactic received (kudos to the marketing team at Nabisco and their creative agency for great execution).<\/p>\n

Anyway a lot of other brands piled on this event, as they\u2019ve been conditioned to as we\u2019ve continued to transition to a real-time web (and world). And many continue to pile on the big news each day with either image macros or inserting their product\/brand sometimes in an interesting, but more frequently tasteless take on the topic du jour.<\/p>\n

But to try to attrition attention from the day\u2019s news in social\u00a0just because something happens<\/em>\u00a0is an awful strategy to follow.\u00a0There has to be a rationale. It has to logically make sense in the larger story you\u2019re telling. It has to be organic and feel natural, even\u00a0improvisational. You definitely can be scrappy (scrappiness\u00a0is encouraged, actually).\u00a0However this is as much an art form as it is a science of understanding trending topics \/ monitoring and taking action on their\u00a0associated metrics. It\u2019s just so easy to do stuff that feels\u00a0cliche\u2019d, contrived and otherwise \u2026.well, awkward. Just like listening to a jazz musician riff on an improvised melody, this is either stunningly cool or equally painful.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not going to call out any of the bad examples, but it\u2019s clear what is happening. Marketing, PR and ad agencies are all thinking the same thing: if it trends, it blends (aka, needs to be remixed, mashed-up or otherwise used to blend up with a brand and serve as content in stream). The meetings with teams or agencies goes something like this: \u201cwe better remix this, quick, because it\u2019s happening right now and x or y competitor is doing this.\u201d Or, \u201coh, hey an opportunity to inflate my social KPIs, why not hop on this.\u201d And while in some cases, this is executed really well (and is the essence of pull PR, a concept we\u2019ve\u00a0been talking about\u00a0for years) this is not\u00a0necessarily<\/em>\u00a0a good idea for every brand at every single event or news item.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d challenge you to think critically about any reactionary content you\u2019re publishing. If you\u2019re doing it creatively, following a strategy, it\u2019s out of love and makes sense, it\u2019s a great thing. If you\u2019re doing it to check the box, you are causing more harm than good. I\u2019ve already seen plenty of ridicule of some, and it\u2019s not entirely undeserved. It\u2019s\u00a0polluting the stream.<\/p>\n

As has always been the case, focus on\u00a0your signal to noise ratio. Ruthlessly. The nature of the stream has not changed, but the amount going into it has continued to increase. Having built\u00a07-figure social communities\u00a0many times over I can say from experience: you will always have a more interested, dedicated community and greater\u00a0outcomes from social\u00a0when you realize it\u2019s not what you say,\u00a0but what you don\u2019t say\u00a0that defines you.<\/p>\n

Just because it trends does\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong>necessarily mean your brand should blend, remix or otherwise be a part of it.<\/p>\n

Note: this post done with all respect to\u00a0BlendTec, who are actually really thoughtful about what they blend for marketing purposes.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s an old adage in the news industry: \u201cif it bleeds, it leads.\u201d I\u2019d like to propose a new one … <\/p>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1281,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-buzz","category-digital-marketing-and-pr","resize-featured-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":209,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions\/209"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}