Digital Debris & The Dialogic Deficit: Irish Brands on Twitter
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Like most people, I spent the long weekend exploring how a selection of Irish brands used twitter and considering the impact organisational cultures have on twitter use, and disuse. My selection of 20 brands is mostly FMCG from the top 20 of last year’s Checkout Top 100 list, augmented by a smattering from other Top Irish Brands lists.
In the (very roughly-formatted) table below, I have included some detail on the 20 brands that were involved, which you can pore over at your leisure. However, rather than doing any in-depth data analysis, the data acted for me as a stimulus for some broader thoughts about communications cultures and priorities. So, while I don’t consider the selection representative, I would hope that the discussion is still analytically generalisable.
If there is one unifying point to be taken from this article, it is that many organisations and brands pay little or no attention to twitter, despite maintaining a presence, and, unless they are willing or able to adapt their communications to the platform, should probably delete their accounts. On the upside, if brands can develop a better appreciation of where they fit in (rather than how to fit into) the broader social context that their brands already inhabit, twitter provides unique possibilities for engaging and effective culturally dialogic communications.
Initial Observations
Overall, I had two initial observations after looking at how this selection of brands used twitter. The first observation was the incredible diversity in how twitter was used by different brands and in different industries.
In financial & utilities, it is used by some (e.g. Electric Ireland, Bord Gáis Energy) to provide a mixture of customer support and brand communications. For others, there are separate brand and customer support accounts (Bank of Ireland has @BankofIreland and @talktoboi). AIB use their main brand account (@AIBIreland) for customer support and brand communications, while also having a separate customer support account (@askaib) whereas Three Ireland use their main brand account (@ThreeIreland) to direct people to the separate customer support account (@threecare), as well as doing brand stuff. Bank of Ireland appear to avoid this confusion by simply intercepting customer support @mentions to their main @BankofIreland brand account with the customer support (@talktoboi) handle, which seems like a neat solution.
In terms of brand communications, however, and especially for FMCG brands, twitter is used — by those who use it consistently — exclusively as a monologic brand communications platform. That is, brands are neither seeking nor creating a platform for genuine dialogue or interaction with their audiences.
The second observation, and considerably more striking than the variety of uses to which twitter is put, is just how many of the biggest brands in Ireland simply could not give a shit about twitter. Some that I had hoped to include in the initial analysis were left out because they do not even have a twitter account (e.g. Brennan’s Bread). And it would appear that many, many others embrace the spirit of judicious use of twitter by being so selective in their activity that they may as well not be there, giving rising to the phenomenon that l’m calling digital debris.
Digital Debris
As the table above illustrates, 7 of the 20 brands had tweeted fewer than 20 times this year, approximately once a week since the beginning of the year. And 4 of those 7 had tweeted fewer than 10 times. 2 of those 7 (Goodfellas Ireland and McVities Ireland) have not tweeted at all this year.
These accounts exist essentially as digital debris: detritus from a prior communications strategy that believed a presence on twitter to be worthwhile, presumably without leaving instructions for what that presence might look like. Although it seems unlikely that this level of inattention stems from a consciously executed plan. Otherwise, a pizza restaurant in Athens, Ohio would not have to pin a tweet to its profile to explain that it’s not Goodfellas Ireland:
One aspect of this digital delinquency that I found interesting was that many of those not using twitter still consistently use facebook. So, this is less of a social problem than a twitter problem.
At first glance, the rejection of an entire communications platform seems an excessive reaction to unwanted or insufficient attention. And, of course, these brands could argue that twitter doesn’t provide the necessary return on the investment of time and attention required to maintain a profile. Which might be perfectly true. However, given the discipline and sensitivity around touchpoints in other areas of brand life, it is still surprising that there is such laxity about the impression created by a brand’s sporadic and inconsistent activity on twitter.
Nonetheless, with these levels of inactivity, it is possible to see why deletion is preferable to neglect or misuse and that, perhaps, “give up” is a more logical response than “do better” to the challenges posed by the attention economy. This is particularly true of organisations/brands that are unwilling or unfit to meet them.
Cultural Causes of Digital Debris
My experience, both in the private sector and public sector, is that the lack of support for and engagement with twitter as a platform is likely to be a symptom of a broader organisational culture, some of which is also reflected in the language brands use to communicate internally.
My work mostly involves analysing the language people use to talk about various cultural phenomena, including brands, but also the language used within brands. And, previously (here), I wrote a short article about why ‘digital’ should be considered a legacy word and how it functions as a modifier to terms like ‘marketing’ and ‘strategy’ to construct ‘digital’ activity as non-standard.
From this perspective, the abandonment or downgrading of social channels may be shaped by habitual ways of talking internally about such platforms, in addition to corporate lexicons that construct ‘digital’ activities as secondary and ephemeral; as activities that stand apart from the serious business of brand communications.
However, this can only be a partial explanation. It explains why some brands abandon social platforms, but doesn’t explain why others neglect twitter and not facebook. Another part of the explanation for specific difficulties with twitter is what I call the dialogic deficit in brand communications.
Dialogic Deficit
Another aspect of contemporary corporate culture likely to produce a dispreference for twitter, particularly above facebook, is the culture of aggressive rationality that dominates most organisations.
As a medium, twitter leans more towards the intimate and conversational than facebook; it is a platform for dialogic communication more designed for exchange, as well as storytelling. However, rational organisational structures produce cultures that privilege quantity over quality, predictability over improvisation and monologic broadcast over dialogic communication.
On the brand side (rather than customer support), large rational organisations are essentially uninterested in uncontrolled qualitative engagement; they are not designed to encourage nor value inbound conversations. Instead, they are more likely to define engagement in terms of countable eyeballs and, as such, unlikely to be impressed by intimate — but unscalable — conversations.
Ultimately, however, most of the problems brands have with twitter are questions not of the quantity of communications, but quality.
Even those brands in the table above that are obviously committed to twitter still treat it predominantly, and here I am talking in terms of brand communications rather than customer support, as an augmentation to traditional monological communication. Rational organisational cultures privilege control over creativity and the tonal discipline that characterises traditional brand communications reflects organisational structures that are at odds with the levels of flexibility, agility and spontaneity that characterise twitter interaction.
This highlights the cultural difficulties many brands have when it comes to successfully exploiting the possibilities of twitter communications, particularly its dialogic potential.
The entire basis of the ‘social’ turn in communications (and the clue is in the name) is in moving communications from monologic to dialogic communications, moving from pointing communications at people to including and integrating them into that communication. And, for brands themselves, I am sure that they believed the ‘social’ turn would amount to more than using facebook and twitter as digital billboards or spending their days asking people to DM them their details so that they could investigate yeasted flatbreads with unequal distributions of cooked meats.
Of the 20 brands whose twitter activity was initially examined, only 4 (Bank of Ireland, Cadbury Ireland, Guinness Ireland, Three Ireland) averaged over 10 interactions per tweet. What is interesting, however, is that the tweets that perform best for these 4 brands all share a common theme: that of a connection to or dialogue with a cultural context beyond the immediately commercial.
A Potential Solution: Cultural Dialogue
The original inspiration for this article was a comment from Diageo’s Jerry Daykin a couple of weeks ago that judicious use of social media channels is a sign of mature marketing; itself a response to recent reporting of brands announcing that they no longer did social. So, it seems appropriate that looking for ways out of this morass should lead us back to recent twitter activity by Guinness Ireland.
As an example of judicious use of twitter, and mature use of social media, Guinness Ireland have averaged just over one tweet every two days in 2018 so far; selective tweeting that has nonetheless generated an impressive average of 113 engagements (RTs or likes) per tweet.
If we recognise that authentic consumer conversations are, for the most part, unrealistic for brands, and that traditional monologic broadcasting is not the greatest use of a dialogic platform like twitter, we may be able to identify an alternative approach to brand communication by examining why certain tweets perform so spectacularly well.
One of the best-performing tweets in the entire sample was the below tweet by Guinness Ireland:
This is a great example of brand communications that is responding to, and creating a dialogue with, a broader social context. It feels authentic and spontaneous, rather than parasitic and pre-planned, sharing a cultural conversation rather than imposing itself on one. Like natural conversation, it encourages responses and dialogue (it received over 50 replies), without explicitly inviting or asking people to do so.
My impression is that it performed so well on twitter because its reflects the strengths of the platform: agile, smart and culturally dialogic.
And when we look at the other tweets that generated hundreds of engagements, there is a similar pattern, the best-performing tweets are generally those that relate to a broader cultural, rather than purely commercial, context: Electric Ireland talking about Darkness into Light, Three Ireland’s relationship with the Irish women’s national team on International Women’s Day or Bank of Ireland’s tweets about rugby. Even when Cadbury Ireland is tweeting about Creme Eggs at Easter (one of their best-performing tweets here), they are not (just) talking about themselves but participating in a shared, and timely, cultural conversation.
What this suggests is that, for brands interested in communicating better on twitter, greater sensitivity to where and how their brand and their communications fit within a shared socialenvironment (because they already do) is required, rather than trying to figure out how to artificially insert themselves into people’s lives.
Upshot
Whatever the reasons for abandoning twitter, whether it is because brands (humbly) conclude that they cannot do it well or because they (less humbly) do not see it as important, at least deleting your account can be seen as an active response to a communications platform that is an awkward (or even unworkable) fit, particularly for highly rationalised or centralised organisations.
It is surprising that so few brands really know what to do with twitter, but what makes less sense is those brands that continue to sporadically and inconsistently maintain digital shadow lives. And more peculiar still is how some of the largest brands in Ireland have brand channels floating around the internet, unloved and unmanned.
As someone who is concerned with the social worlds and cultural contexts that inform and reflect how people perceive brands and organisations, I am pleased to see that twitter rewards, in terms of engagement, those organisations who make an effort to acknowledge the external environments that shape their meaning and determine their relevance. The prospect of a culturally dialogic presence on twitter suggests what is possible, if brands care to commit (culturally) to that level of responsiveness.
Emmet Ó Briain is founder of QUIDDITY — an insight consultancy specialising in cultural analysis using naturally-occurring language and linguistic data. If you are interested in discussing context, naturally-occurring data, or have lots of linguistic data that you don’t know what to do with, get in touch!
