attention industry

Exclusionary Definition and Actual Personality.

In my last post, I mentioned that I feel too many brands act like pick up artists when it comes to social media.

My suggestion is a solution that eschews an algorithmic approach - my stance is generally that algorithmic approaches don’t do a good enough job when it comes to emulating or replicating something that’s based on complex human behaviour.

(n.b. - when I say complex, I don’t mean complicated.)

While I understand and support the need for brands and agencies to retain control over what is being said, and how, in online spaces, I think a prescriptive approach is deadening, from a verisimilitude standpoint - when you say ‘you must be X,Y,Z’, or even more specifically, ‘you must SAY X,Y,Z’, the chances of the outcome feeling real are slim to none. A way around this is exclusionary definition.

Basically, tell me what we aren’t. Tell me what we don’t say. I’m advocating a practice of essentially outlining a brand’s online taboo system, and thereby creating the bare-bones cultural dynamics that will influence online actions.

Some of these are dead simple: we don’t swear in public, we don’t do anything lewd, we don’t discriminate based on age or influence or looks.

Some of these are more complex: we don’t speak about specific numbers, we don’t identify individual staff by name, we don’t attempt to moderate behaviour by using embarrassment.

While exclusionary definition still includes limitation, it crucially does not define who a community manager or social media representative must be - it merely states what they must not do.

The upshot of this is that if you can explain it, you can ensure it won’t be part of the planning for your community. The downside is that you can’t know that something you didn’t consider will not come up - that’s too bad. This is the price of human interaction.

Developing an actual personality is different. I’m not talking about necessarily using a specific, public-facing individual as the focal point for your brand online. I’m talking about figuring out what you brand would be like as a person, and then outlining that personality for those who are going to be representing it, and interacting with it, online.

This isn’t the same as pulling out a brand pyramid, and saying that your brand essence is your actual personality.

When I think of this, I think of it in the context of a creative exercise that I once read about, in relation to the author Greg Rucka. The gist of it was, he creates entire backstories and explanations of every character he writes. Not just history, but political leanings, favourite authors, music, comedians, opinion on kids, what TV they would and wouldn’t watch, and more crucially, why. 

As an example, Apple’s brand is, in my mind, about focus, quality, simplicity, and innovation. Apple’s personality, however, is about the kind of person who cares about those things, who also often cares about creativity, design, and the optics of what they buy and do. If you’ll notice, Apple interacts with these people directly and socially, they just do it in retail locations, rather than online.

The key thing about a personality is, it is expressed as subtext, through action. Brand messages are tailored to the situations they are expressed in, yes, but they still rely on telling you about what they mean.

A personality is about what you do, what you like, and how you react to things. This is what you need to know as you ask someone to develop a social content strategy for you, because this is what people will actually react to.

Is your brand the kind of person that would post Nyan Cat on their Facebook page, or the kind of person who would share serious links about the clean-up efforts happening in London? What if it’s both?

By nailing down both your taboo system, and your personality, you give those creating and executing your social media strategy the chance to make it actually live, and relate to things outside of your brand’s keywords and upcoming promotions.

And as an added bonus, this offers brands enough control, input and influence, that they don’t need to be hands off, to create a social voice and policy that is both human, and capable of creating meaningful positive associations.