Brands with channels beware: How to lose friends and not influence people

If something is to be a great piece of content, it has to be able answer tough questions. Favourites are: Is it good? Does it actually say something new? Does the audience truly need to know? Really though, do they?

About ten years ago my friend Tomas was auditing brands’ social networking and blogging capabilities. He’d identify the strongest internal candidates, build teams, that sort of thing. The clever ‘extra’ he bolted on though was to also assess whether or not they benefitted from being active on a particular channel in the first place.

As he said at the time (I’ll paraphrase because it was a while back): “If you can’t do something well, should you even be doing it in the first place? That’s the thing, all these people race to get on twitter or whatever, but they don’t have the bandwidth or expertise to do it right.”

This observation really struck a chord with me. At the time I was working with all sorts of global brands who wanted sophisticated solutions but weren’t able to commit to supporting them beyond the first iteration. Our recommendation at the time was almost always to do one thing well, and in breaking new ground, not to be too self-conscious or ‘down with the kids’.

We see brands stumbling on social from time to time. Some types of business just don’t suit a custom Snapchat filter or a bubbly twitter persona. Either because they’re not a natural fit for the demographic, or they struggle with the demands of consistently programming that much content and keeping it original (and good), or both.

And that’s fine. It’s okay to screw up (within reason) so long as you learn from it, you ensure it brings about a positive change and your shareholders don’t string you up too high. But Tomas’s tough questions work for mainstream tools too. For me, the main contender is the humble newsletter.

Scourge of the inbox, serial ignorer of a gazillion ineffectual ‘unsubscribes’, a persistently dull newsletter only has its own template to blame. Instead of being encouraged to discover amazing things and share them when they have something new to say, the poor creators/editors are often obliged to find ten stories to fill it each cycle and send it out, and do so religiously less they miss their KPIs. It’s not a recipe for success. And it’s not a sure fire way to ensure standout.

This week I used a web form to arrange a session with a personal trainer at a new gym. Instead of a confirmation email I got a “thank you for subscribing to our newsletter”, which I immediately unsubscribed from. Then on a follow up call the conversation went like this:

“I see you unsubscribed from our newsletter.”
“Yes, I don’t really want to get one. Sorry if that comes across as blunt, it’s just I already get so much email I’ll never read it.”
“Well to be honest it is a bit upsetting.”
“I am already trying to become a customer so you don’t need to sell to me.”
“But there’s lots of nutrition stuff in it.”
“I appreciate that but I’m happy with my nutrition and I just don’t want another newsletter.”
“It’s not just a newsletter though. It’s a series of emails that count down over time to your first appointment.”
“But my first appointment is tomorrow.”
“Well, we can talk about it when you come in.”
“I don’t not want to get confirmation emails from you. It’s just the newsletter.”
“We’ll talk about it when you come in.”

So now it’s like I’m embarking on a service where between reps I’ll be made to feel guilty for not reading stuff I don’t want to read. And of course, by the time you’re reading this I’ll have had that first session, and either had to mansplain my way through my negative attitude to newsletters or sit there awkwardly and do my best Hugh Grant apology. I like the team, I think it’s a really cool operation and I want to give it a good go, but it’s not the sort of experience I’d want a new customer to have.

It’s tricky to stand out, especially for small and medium businesses, but where it’s a personal relationship it’s worth considering the purpose and identifying an easily managed cadence. Better to send out a quarterly update that you can overdeliver on with the occasional extra announcement than struggle to fill a biweekly that runs out of steam.

An edited version of this article first appeared on The Future of Customer Engagement.