Ever since marketers cottoned on to the potential for social media to drive influential word-of-mouth brand recommendations, they’ve tried to either foster or fake these discussions.

“I heartily endorse this event or product,” says a monotone Krusty the Clown in a snippet of video used to advertise everything from cough syrup to atomic particle accelerators. Krusty’s cut-and-paste approach to celebrity endorsement might be a long-running gag on The Simpsons, but the rise of influencer marketing in social media may mean the joke is getting just a little too close to reality.

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Attention span in social media can be measured in split seconds, not minutes. While your update hopes to entice me to click or interact with your content, there are hundreds of other posts right below yours also crying for my attention. And should your choice of eye-catching image cause me to pause for a moment, my finger is constantly resting on the screen, waiting to flick-scroll your content up the feed and off my screen with the tiniest of well-practiced muscle reflexes.

Here’s the bad news: This fleeting first impression may be the only opportunity many people have to discover your content. And if you waste that opportunity, it won’t matter how well researched, brain meltingly creative, and all-round wonderful your social content might be because we’ll never know.

Sure, you can’t judge a book by its cover but, in a crowded bookstore, covers help us find those books that we might enjoy while skipping over the thousands of others we haven’t the time to “judge” by reading. Similarly, when our social media feeds are choked with content links begging for attention, you better hope your choice of image causes people to stop and take notice.

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According to the famous 1993 New Yorker cartoon, “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Are any of us – brands and individuals alike – really who we say we are? Welcome to the quagmire that is authenticity in social media. Watch your step. It’s a minefield!

“Authenticity” has become one of those marketing buzzwords I love to hate, particularly when discussing social media marketing. Sure, authenticity inspires trust, and brands need to be trusted if their marketing is to be effective. But I do take a perverse pleasure in watching marketers tie themselves in knots trying to explain how authenticity is to be achieved.

I’ve read a number of articles arguing that authenticity must be at the heart of any marketing strategy… while also insisting authenticity isn’t about being strategic. Or that authenticity is not necessarily about being honest or transparent… but is absolutely about being genuine. Continue Reading

Sometimes I wonder how I’m still allowed to write a regular column on social media, never mind that it seems to be reasonably popular. I’m unlikely to ever write about Snapchat, for example, partly because I still can’t get my head around the platform, but mainly because focusing on the technical minutiae of specific tools seems irrelevant. It’s like discussing the art of the novel by analyzing the brand of typewriter George Orwell used.Continue Reading

Regular readers know I can be a tad disparaging of a lot of Facebook marketing. It’s not that Facebook is lacking as a content platform – far from it. My cynicism derives more from the low-quality content and threadbare strategies I see every day in my newsfeed or, more often, in groups dedicated to ridiculing those brands that merely chase “likes” and (**cough**) “engagement.”

There’s a PowerPoint slide that makes it into most of my workshops: “A Facebook page isn’t a content marketing strategy in exactly the same way that a telephone isn’t a sales strategy.”Continue Reading

In social media, the audience pulls the strings. Most of the time, our social media activities are designed to encourage the audience to pull strings that favor us – amplifying our content or spreading our message – but if the audience doesn’t agree with what we have to say or sees an opportunity for mischief, we can quickly lose all control.

While many marketers focus on reach and engagement, none of that matters if the message contained within our content doesn’t resonate with the audience.  Continue Reading

In Lewis Carroll’s fantastical tale Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, the eponymous heroine discovers a very different world on the other side of a mirror, occupied by people and creatures she never imagined could exist.

Yet, were we to look into the same looking glass, we would see ourselves reflected. Any different realities, ideas, and viewpoints of another world would remain out of view.Continue Reading

I woke up this morning with a sense of anxiety familiar to most writers — one that only comes from an impending deadline and absolutely no idea what to write. And then I switched on the TV to see that Prince had died.

Even while reaching for the iPad I knew there would be plenty of material to enable me to fill 1,200 angry words. Following a tragedy — particularly a major celebrity death — branded social media disasters have become as predictable as they are insensitive.Continue Reading