Virality of messages have successfully shaped brands and taken campaigns to unprecedented heights. It has made stars of normal people and taken brands off their pedestals. It has brought down barriers of information generation and it has leveled the playing field.
We have also known and seen the dark side of the viral nature of the media. We have heard of Dell Hell and the entire Middle East uprising started and fed by social networking sites. It has led brands to devise new ways of connecting with their consumers beyond the norms of marketing.
For a moment let us examine the base reason underlying this negative focus of social media messages. Human brain, according to some researchers has been programmed to recognize and act on negative / crisis situations. So the basic human behavior and open nature of the medium does have a tendency to focus on the negative or crisis and then spread it.
Is this situation new, due to the online world? Even before the advent of social media, negative messages for the brand used to spread by word of mouth and traditional media. What makes this situation unique then? The fact that it is consumer generated and often with none of the pre existing barriers in the other traditional media or marketing world.
I was reading the book "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He sums up the Black Swan event as something that hits you from the realm of "what you do not know". It is defined by three main characteristics rarity, extreme impact and retrospective predictability.
If I take this idea of the "Black Swan" to social media I can define it as situations that are bad for the brand or corporate, extremely innocuous and have the tendency to be ignored. Let us look at a couple of these rare and innocuous events.
When the Greenpeace started a campaign against Kit Kat for its unsustainable palm oil sourcing practices, the adverse reaction of Nestle to the Youtube video posted and thereafter the reaction of the person managing the facebook fan page snowballed into a large protest situation for the brand. One video that was first taken off YouTube was all that it took to start the tide of negativity for the brand. The surprising part is this was not the first time that Greenpeace clashed with Nestle over its practices, but what really turned the tide was the viral reactions it drew from the people and ultimately resulting in a campaign to boycott Nestle products.
Similarly, the Middle East uprising has been fed by the rise of social media. Six months ago if someone had written about the use of Twitter and Facebook and its role in the Arab uprising, most would have been skeptical. Six months later, we know that journalists, university students and opposition to the current regime in those countries have been communicating the events via social media.
Social media is the great global leveler. It does not matter which geography the 20 year old who tweets and social networks comes from, the fact that they have grown up on technology is very important. Hence messages that was previously very contextual for geographies have the tendency to spread across globally.
In both the cases of Nestle Kit Kat and the "Jasmine revolution" the event that triggered it was very small and almost mundane- but with the aid of social media spread very fast and furious. This lays to rest the case of why brands must track their negativity to be able to identify the "tipping point" of the messages and act before it goes viral.