Page 9 - Engage - no.9 - Summer 2017

Summer 2017
07
Authenticity, and Why It Matters More Than Ever
By Scott Stratten
Like transparency, I don’t find authenticity to be a strategy. You either are or you aren’t.
Authenticity is very subjective. It’s not even about being true to your brand beliefs, but it’s about being true to the beliefs that your market thinks you have. Sure, we support those things with our dollars, but 10 or 15 years ago, social issues didn’t help or hurt companies the way they can now. It used be about putting a pink ribbon on your product and donating a percentage of profits to breast cancer research. Now people know what actions you are taking to support what you believe in. And today, people buy into brands more than ever for reasons outside of products or services.
Negative feedback can be an opportunity for a positive outcome. A few years back, FedEx had a famous occurrence with a video that went viral of one of their couriers throwing a package over a fence. They came out the same day with a blog post saying it was not acceptable. It was quick and authentic, and they left the comments section open. They also told consumers what actions they were taking with the courier and the customer. In the end, they made themselves look better than before it happened.
Decide what voices you will listen to. Often, the outrage will come from people who are not and will never be your customers. Remember, authenticity doesn’t mean “good” all the time. A lot of brands are afraid to polarize, so they are not authentic. On my blog, I pointed out a restaurant in Georgia after they mocked a customer who gave them a bad review. Now, I am never going to dine there, so they don’t care what I have to say, and people who eat there like the fact that they ripped a customer online. So I may think they are awful, but at least they are authentic.
Being authentic doesn’t mean you have to share everything to everyone. I’m as open as it gets, but I never talk about religion or politics. I don’t share those things, because they have nothing to do with my brand or what I’m doing. At the end of the day, branding is what someone thinks when they hear your brand’s name or see your logo. It’s in the eye of the consumer, not the brand. The customer will vet your brand based on what they see.
Q: You use social media, especially Twitter, all the time. Why do some companies still refuse to accept that social media has a customer service responsibility?
Scott Stratten: Marketing people aren’t used to this type of service, because marketing has been classically outbound. The strategy was to never let the customer be part of things. From the customer’s point of view, they don’t see silos. If I see your Twitter account, you’re the company. So whatever
I need it for, that’s you. Our cable company here in Canada, Cogeco, has a customer service Twitter account, @cogecohelps. But if you tweet @cogeco, they don’t tell you that you’re in the wrong place; the customer service Twitter account jumps in. You never want to tell a customer they are in the wrong line, and that’s what often happens on social media. You might be an air traffic controller, telling people who goes where on social based on their needs, but you still have to be that voice.
Q: You mentioned an amazing stat in a recent blog post: 85 percent of Facebook videos get watched with the sound o . What does this mean for marketers?
SS: Facebook actually counts a “view” as anytime someone watches a video for more than three seconds. On YouTube, a “view” is anything over 30 seconds. If you are watching a video for 30 seconds, you are watching it, but three seconds can just be you scrolling through your News Feed. That’s not a view, so it’s not the right metric. I had a two-minute rant about millennials that got 14 million views,
but that is a vanity metric, because only 2.8 million watched it with the sound on and for longer than 10 seconds. With the sound off, there is no value to me of that video being played.
Q: So what can brands do to combat this?
SS: One good example is Tastemade’s videos, which you can watch with no sound because they are visual and closed-captioned, so words are being shown on-screen. In the case of my millennials video, I had shared it previously with closed- captioning and got 250,000 views. Then I reshared it without closed-captioning and added title bars across it that stayed there the entire time. It was
called, “What Old People Mean When They Say Millennials.” That same video clip got 14 million views with the title bars. You have to do things
in this Facebook News Feed way that is enticing
to make people click. That is not relevant to a YouTube video. We aren’t scrolling past videos on YouTube, because that’s what I’m there to do. So matching the content to the platform is hugely important. Contextual content is also hugely important. Facebook content needs to stand out on people’s News Feed, but YouTube is the second- biggest search engine in the world, so that content needs to be searchable.
Q: Based on your own blog posts, you seem to have a gift for attention-grabbing titles.
Any advice for brands that want to do this better?
SS: I believe we’ve all forgotten some of the main things about marketing and advertising— that we have to create and compel people to take action. That means a good headline, title, or subject line. We are caught up on what is
the best time to send your newsletter. The
best time to send your newsletter is when you have something compelling to say. The biggest problem right now isn’t that they are sending it on the wrong day; it’s that their subject line is “November Chiropractic Update.” We look at so many factors after things don’t succeed, but the issue is usually very fundamental: Is the content compelling and conceptual to the platform,