How are brands reflecting their customers’ punchier use of social media?

Last night I had the pleasure of speaking at Syren Strategy and Well Hello‘s insight event – Women’s Values 2016 – at the Hospital Club in London.

The event was to present a mid-2016 update to a set of “trending female values and what we can learn from culture, media and brands“.

The values – http://www.syren-strategy.com

Speaking first, I set some context around the role social media is playing in many of these trends.

I began by talking about the way that we, as individuals, post content to our social media feeds that’s ever more polarised; either highly positive (attended a wedding, selfie with a celebrity) or highly negative (rant about a late delivery, broke my phone). Here’s how that might look on a chart…

This type of content defines our “digital persona”. Just think about how many people you only really know via Facebook – your perception of them is probably quite different to what it would be if you spent lots of time with them in person.

I then made the point that smart brands understand how their audiences consume content. Smart brands understand that their content is seen in and around the wedding photos, the pets, the first day of school, the selfies, the rants etc.

In turn, as our family and friends post more “extreme” content, brands need to push the boundaries to keep standing out from the crowd (i.e. the newsfeed).

Throughout the evening we saw numerous example of brands becoming more punchy, more quirky, more worthy, more amusing, more self-deprecating… perhaps even more aggressive.

Publish nice, safe content and you’ll disappear…