SOCIAL MEDIA
STOP DIGITAL SCHADENFREUDE
You’ve heard the term “schadenfreude,” right? Deriving pleasure when seeing someone’s failure or misfortune? Like giggling when a pro golfer hits a shot into a pond, laughing at a photo of a celebrity tripping on the sidewalk, or feeling a bit giddy when an egotistical athlete is caught with drugs. It happens to all of us.
The hottest trend going today, though, is digital schadenfreude: calling out brands for every social-media #fail. This is how some "social-media strategists" build their fan base. Instead of, say, sharing unique ideas for building a brand’s presence on social media, these folks only call out brands’ failures, describing each brand's shortcomings with a mixture of disgust and glee.
But here's the thing: When the teams that manage social media for celebrities or brands believe they’ll be ridiculed for anything less than perfection, they'll stop trying new tactics. They'll walk on eggshells, instead of expanding their repertoires. They'll do the boring, the rote, the safe. And when that happens, we all lose.
When I had a wonderful opportunity to manage digital content at Girl Scouts of the USA, I was ridiculed at least once a quarter by someone with a blog, looking for more fans. (Ridiculed for launching contests, for expanding our staff so that I could focus more of my time on strategy, for various posts and tweets . . . you name it). Girl Scouts is iconic, so if you mention the organization in your blog, you'll get a kazillion impressions. So even though we were experiencing explosive growth in our digital channels, doing it on a shoestring budget, bringing millions of alumnae back into the fold, growing membership, and snagging prestigious social-media and marketing awards in the process, every month or two, someone wrote a #fail post about our digital team in order to grow their own audiences, without also reporting all the great stuff we were doing, the awards we were winning, and the conversion rates we were achieving. It was gross.
Now, I was lucky. I had an incredibly supportive leadership team, who knew that our positive outcomes outweighed any negative press, so those schadenfreudian attacks never mattered. But what about content strategists who aren’t as lucky, who aren't working in such a supportive environment, or whose CEOs are skittish about social? How many of those teams will experiment with their social content—knowing that some of those experiments will backfire—if they believe they’ll get whacked for their mistakes in the blogosphere, and then get reprimanded by their leadership team for the negative press?
I'm not saying we can't learn from what other brands are doing, both good and bad. But maybe we can agree to stop reading anything with a #fail hashtag or a "You won't believe what [insert famous organization here]'s social-media team did" headline. Instead, let’s celebrate, learn from, and talk about the countless digital success stories that are out there every day!