by Tim Staples
In a similar manner, picking which wave to ride on the internet is analogous to how these surfers choose their waves. You can be proactive and do the work yourself, or you can let others do it for you. At Shareability, we use fairly sophisticated social listening tools to scan and document what people are talking about online. These tools scrape all the major social platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, singling out words and phrases that are being used frequently or paired together, for example. If all of a sudden there is a spike in a certain word or phrase, the listening tool alerts us to the rise in people using that phrase, prompting our social intelligence team to dive deeper. These tools are extremely effective, but they are also expensive. If you don’t have the resources to use them, there are much scrappier ways to identify trends and stay on top of digital culture.
The most up-to-the-minute platform, and the easiest one to monitor for the here-and-now of the internet, is Twitter. It has been used to great effect to ride the wave.
While Twitter receives a lot of flak for being an angry place full of bots and trolls, it’s also the heartbeat of the internet in many ways. It’s the most up-to-date and fastest-moving spot to monitor what’s happening in pop culture, breaking news, celebrity gossip, or the latest videos exploding across the web. Twitter is the place that brings it all together.
Generally, trending topics on Twitter end up as hashtags. These are easy to find, but the problem with hashtags is that unless it is something very broad, there can be thousands of active hashtags at a time. A better way to identify trending topics on Twitter is to use the “moments” tab. Clicking on the moments tab shows you what people are talking about on Twitter right now. Much of this content is news related, but it also picks up online-only trends that won’t make it to CNN or your local newscast.
We use Twitter to diffuse our content at times as well, but it’s primarily useful to us as a social listening tool. In order to use the platform to communicate with your customers, you need time to dedicate to real, one-on-one conversations. This is an amazing opportunity for a brand to talk to its consumers, and some brands are absolutely crushing the platform. But this is not something we typically do for our clients at Shareability, as most already have very capable social media teams running their day-to-day. For us, Twitter is more of a source of inspiration and a place to keep an eye on trends.
If Twitter is the heartbeat of the internet, Reddit is the nervous system. We refer to it as “the place the internet is born.” If there is a trending topic or a subject that’s starting to boil to the surface, odds are high that it originated on Reddit.
The platform operates like a massive bulletin board. It aggregates social news content, rates web content, and allows people to discuss that content. Posts can be sorted by subjects into user boards called “subreddits,” allowing you to narrow a search to your specific interest. The subreddits include endless topics from movies and music to food to animals or super-narrow and niched specifics like memes around one specific celebrity’s nose, for example.
Reddit is also very easy to use. Anyone can sign up for free as a “redditor” and submit content to the site. The top of the home-page has tabs allowing you to select from the categories “Hot,” “New,” “Controversial,” and “Rising.” Another tab allows you to narrow your selection geographically, by state and by country.
That’s all well and good, but take a step back and put on your marketing hat. You are now on a platform that is all about user-generated opinions and commentary, where the active population gives an up-or-down vote to each and every single post. Can you imagine a brand trying to shoehorn a commercial into this space? It would be shot down in a nanosecond.
This is why people often say that “Reddit is impossible to crack.” But this is a misconception. It’s based on the idea that in order to market, you have to somehow “crack” or “hack” or “break” a system, to force it to do something it doesn’t want to do. Well, if that’s your approach, you haven’t been paying attention.
Reddit is just like the rest of the internet—in order to make it work for you, you just need to feed it what it wants. For example, the John Cena meme that we brought to life in our “Unexpected John Cena” video originated on Reddit. When we launched the video, the creator of the original subreddit reacted to the video we made with one of the highest compliments we’ve ever received: “Wrap it up, boys. We’re done for.”
That’s validation that you not only grabbed the right wave, but that the other surfers in the water appreciated the line you chose and how you executed your ride.
If Reddit is the nervous system, BuzzFeed is your brain reading a gossip magazine. As a publisher, BuzzFeed reports on trending topics, much like a traditional newspaper. True, it may be more along the line of People than the Washington Post, but still. Correspondents working for BuzzFeed file posts and videos on buzzing topics that often veer closer to water-cooler conversations than hard news. While the site originally focused on viral content, it has since broadened to include traditional news stories across a wide spectrum of topics, and some of their best-performing videos are actually quite meaningful pieces on topics that concern humanity as a whole, from organic farming to restoring coral reefs. While people like to talk about BuzzFeed as a trending topic machine, our viewpoint is that once a story makes it to BuzzFeed, it’s often too late to catch that wave. Unless you have something very different to add to the conversation underway, that trend train has already left the station, and you probably need not bother chasing it.
Catching the Wave
So once you’ve identified a wave, how do you ride it? The first key factor is speed. You’ve been sitting in the sand, watching for the perfect swell, and when it finally comes, it’s not gonna slow down to pick you up. You have to be quick. Though the waves on the internet don’t disappear as fast as those crashing on Manhattan Beach, you need to catch that wave before it crests. All of these waves have fast-approaching expiration dates. If you don’t move quickly as a brand or as a personality, you risk losing clout as being internet-friendly, making it seem as though your strategy is being run by a committee that endlessly dithers over what to do.
Probably the fastest we’ve ever moved to catch a wave was in 2014. It started when we saw an adorable red-headed boy with a pudgy face from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, named Noah Ritter, who had become an overnight sensation in the way that only the internet can make happen. A local news reporter at the Wayne County Fair was interviewing kids about their experiences on the rides, and she put her microphone in front of Noah, who absolutely stole the show.
“What did you think about the ride?” the reporter asks.
“It was great! And apparently . . . I’ve never been on live television before. But apparently sometimes I don’t watch the news because I’m a kid and apparently every time apparently grandpa just gives me the remote I have to just watch the Powerball.”
It was a completely adorable stream of consciousness, breaking the fourth wall by talking about the interview itself, punctuating every third thought with the word “apparently” and generally just being awesome.
And then Noah literally took the microphone. He began walking around, orating like a pro, going into detail on the ride, and using the word “apparently” the way most teenagers abuse the word “like.”
The internet gobbled up the video and dubbed him “The Apparently Kid.” The video exploded across the web, racking up more than 30 million views.*
At the time, we were readying our first video for Freshpet and were knee-deep in developing creative concepts. But once we saw Noah sweeping across the web, we were hooked. And then a light bulb went on—what if we could get “The Apparently Kid” and pair him with adorable puppies? It seemed like an instant hit.
We pitched the concept to Freshpet, and to their credit they quickly embraced it. Green light. Now we just had to make it happen.
The thing that people may not realize is that when someone like Noah goes vi
ral, their life instantly becomes a raging hurricane. Thousands of people are suddenly calling the home phone or reaching out on Twitter or by email, be they journalists, brands, or just adoring fans. It can be quite overwhelming. In Noah’s case, the person at the eye of the hurricane was his Grandpa Jack. Jack is Noah’s best buddy and protector, and now Jack was the gatekeeper for booking Noah for media requests or brand deals. Things became so crazy so fast that Jack simply turned off his phone. So we were greenlit for a video that we knew would crush, but we couldn’t reach the talent. And the clock was ticking. If we didn’t put something out into the market extremely quickly, the internet would move on to the next pop-culture darling.
Fortunately for us, my business partner Nick Reed is a former agent and a relentless force when he needs to be. After two days of tracking down Jack around the clock, he finally connected. When Jack found out that Nick was a former military man, we were in! Jack committed to take our deal over all the others that were being offered.
The timing was crazy. It was a Thursday afternoon, and Noah was slated to do an interview with Ellen DeGeneres the following Thursday. Normally with our campaigns, it is a four-to-eight-week process to generate the finished product. But in this case, we had to script the video, have Freshpet sign off, fly Noah to LA, shoot the video, and then edit it all in one week.
We wrote the spot to play into Noah’s character from the fair and ride the wave of his popularity. And we also set it up so that Noah could just be Noah, as we knew that the best stuff would be unscripted.
“Today we will be talking about pets,” Noah starts on the spot. “Apparently, it’s my first-ever TV commercial.” He then talks, in his charmingly disjointed way, about the friendship between two dogs named Barney and Ed. The dogs lick his face as he talks about the food. “He didn’t like any of the food, and it made his farts stink every day and night.”
He continues in his quirky, childlike cadence, talking about how you will have to train your dogs and teach them to play fetch. Then, he brings out a huge plate of dog food for one of the dogs. “Apparently, Freshpet food is the best food than ordinary dog food—he wants to eat it every night and every day.” He continues to clown around and go off on charming non sequiturs. As one of the dogs wolfs down the food, he says, “Apparently, that’s some good food!”
We filmed and cut the video in time to take advantage of Noah’s appearance on Ellen. To capture the full wave, we dropped the Freshpet video the morning after the Ellen segment aired, as we knew his appearance on the show would generate plenty of buzz. The video rocketed to number two on YouTube globally.
Apparently, as Noah would say, we timed that wave just right.
You can also anticipate seasonal waves. Every year in December, the world is bombarded with holiday-themed advertising, but there are also less obvious seasons and specific days that are recognized throughout the year, from April Fool’s Day to International Talk Like a Pirate Day to National Hamburger Day. Every one of these can offer up a wave to ride, provided you time your pop-culture conversation just right.
We did that in 2016 when we developed the Mother’s Day campaign around photobombing, just as people jumping in to “bomb” the back of someone else’s photo had picked up steam as a pop-culture topic. We took these two seemingly disparate ideas and combined them, turning “photobombing” and “mom” into “PhotoMombing.”
The concept sold itself on the headline alone. The idea was that moms were eager to ingratiate their way into their kids’ lives, and because their kids were all obsessed with their phones and taking pictures of every single moment of their lives, moms would simply photobomb themselves into every last selfie.
PhotoMombing: Because Moms Are the Bomb
We pitched the idea to a prospective client who we thought the video was perfect for, but they didn’t bite. We pitched it to another, and then another, but found no takers. We couldn’t understand what was wrong. We knew we had a hit on our hands, but nobody seemed to understand it—until this small telecom company we had just started talking to lit up and jumped all over it. Cricket Wireless got it, and that was the beginning of our multi-year partnership with them.
The video paid homage to moms, but did so in an entertaining and amusing way that teenage kids would also enjoy and, more important, would share. The delivery came through a group of mothers on a mission. “Who do you think pays for those unlimited data plans, you little snot monsters,” one says, declaring it’s time for moms to act. “That’s why I am going to photo-bomb the f . . . un out of every single selfie.” After PhotoMombing their way through their kids’ soccer games and parties, the moms all come together to declare: “Talk to your mom. It’s Mother’s Day, for Cricket’s sake!”
The video struck a chord with moms and kids alike, went on to accumulate over 10 million views, and increased Cricket Wireless’s Facebook engagement by more than a factor of ten in one month.
Don’t Be a Kook
If you’ve never heard the word “kook,” please understand that it is a derogatory surfing term about a beginner with an exaggerated perception of their surfing skills, often coupled with a lack of surfing ethics, which leads them to interfere with the other surfers and their fun in the water. In other words, kooks ruin it for everyone.
In terms of social media, there have been many brands that have accidentally played the role of kook by trying to ride a pop-culture wave without thinking things through. Most of the time this happens when brands try to ride a wave by latching on to a movement to create the illusion that they truly care about a cause, but then fail to actually care in any real or significant way. In short, you have to be authentic when you ride the wave, or you will get busted.
As a result, the shores of the internet are littered with PR wreckage. In 2018, several brands tried to latch on to International Women’s Day. The scrutiny was extra high because the #MeToo movement was in full swing, with women telling their stories of being sexually harassed, berated at work, or treated as less than men. Many big brands were eager to come out in support of women on their day, which is a wonderful thing if done authentically, but a few of them missed by a spectacularly wide margin.
Among them, there was McDonald’s. The fast-food company decided to flip its iconic golden arches upside-down at a restaurant in Lynwood, California, making the “M” a “W” in supposed honor of International Women’s Day. It also flipped the “M” on uniforms and packaging at a hundred restaurants. To bring attention to the campaign, McDonald’s announced on social media, “Today, we flip our Golden Arches to celebrate the women who have chosen McDonald’s to be a part of their story, like the Williams family. In the U.S., we’re proud to share that 6 out of 10 restaurant managers are women.”
This all sounds great in theory, but the trouble was that McDonald’s wasn’t being genuine. The backlash was swift and immediate as critics jumped on the fact that McDonald’s was one of the biggest offenders concerning policies and practices that support women workers. Notably, the company has long battled against increasing the minimum wage, which unjustly affects women more than men.
The company was subsequently blasted on Twitter. “Glad to see McDonald’s ended sexism by changing their logo into a ‘W’ for women,” one person tweeted. Another wrote: “If McDonald’s has flipped their arches upside down to make ‘W’ for International Women’s Day 2018, does that mean all of the other days when it’s an ‘M’ celebrate men?” The executive director of the Democratic Coalition, Nathan Lerner, called them out by tweeting: “Hey @McDonalds, maybe instead of a cheap PR stunt where you make the M a W to ‘support’ women, you do something real—like pay your workers a living wage.”
McDonald’s unexpectedly had to spend several days on the defensive. A spokesperson tried to clarify the situation by passing the blame on to its franchisees, saying that more than 90 percent of the chain’s restaurants are independently owned and operated, and that those owners set their own policies, wages, and benefits.
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bsp; But that wasn’t the end of it. The backlash against McDonald’s gave rise to a new wave for companies to support women in the workplace. In Britain, the activist group Momentum released a video highlighting how low wages and zero-hours contracts at McDonald’s meant some women workers faced poverty and even homelessness.
If McDonald’s had managed to somehow ride the wave in an authentic and genuine way, they could have benefited. For example, if they took the opportunity to announce that on International Women’s Day they were flipping the “M” to a “W” to announce a global initiative to bring real salary parity to the company, or a goal to bring more women into its management ranks, the reception would have been one of cheer rather than scorn and ridicule. Instead, they rushed to catch the wave and were not authentic with the message they tried to ride on, and as a result, they wiped out hard.*
In Malaysia, Kentucky Fried Chicken also made an attempt to ride the wave by changing the image of Colonel Sanders to that of Claudia Sanders, the founder’s second wife. A representative of KFC’s marketing agency said that KFC was looking for a way to support International Women’s Day and found the story of Claudia Sanders, the supportive wife of Colonel Sanders.