An hour-long conversation with the CEO of a global training organisation, on how to do digital right, in other words, “Can you speak with my Head of Marketing, and get him to accept change, and convince him to go beyond the rules?” got me thinking.
What rules? And what changes? Simply put, does an organisation benefit from having just one identity across platforms on social media, or is there merit in allowing all the pro-active groups and program directors do their own thing?
Groomed in the era of an LPG world (Liberalisation, Privatisation and globalisation) I have heard this query being aired across the last 3 decades in various industries, right from American brands, which could go from Apple to iMac and iPod to iPhone, iPad and Macbook in a jiffy to South Korean Chaebol’s like Hyundai or LG which couldn’t or Japanese Keiretsu’s like Hitachi or Mitsubishi that didn’t want to. The truth then, as now, depends on the audience. What you want to communicate is important, but more important is who you want to communicate with, and finally, who has the ‘last mile’ connect.
In social media terms, while global organisations would like to have one corporate page on say, Facebook, the viewer in India, and the user in Indonesia would be looking for different things and different idioms to engage with. Facebook allowed large brands to set up Global Pages in 2012, to cater to different geographies, and even at this time, enables organisations to create market pages to target content and messages to different audiences. But, what’s the right time to empower various team internally, who feel restricted under One Company, One Page social media guidelines and what core messages or issues to control?
This is, of course, assuming Facebook as a default option for social media, which it is not. Demographically, geographically, as well as interest- wise the whole phenomenon has morphed beyond simple definitions. For Instance, young populations across the world are more frequently on audio-visual platforms like Instagram (a Facebook platform) and basis location and socio-economic strata on TikTok, Helo, Viigo, etc. than on any Facebook entity.
Whatsapp (yet another Facebook platform), has become the default for messaging, probably replacing email and Slack outside organisations, but so has Telegram, WeChat, Imo, Botim, to name just a few that I have personally used. Twitter has become the place to be for politics and news, both finding it easier to break their messages first on the micro-blogging platform, but folks in Europe and elsewhere are moving to Mastodon ( toots are replacing tweets, among the trolled classes). On the other hand, Linkedin with all the bells and whistles of a business Facebook, is still struggling to create resonance with audiences beyond the jobseeker and the B2B sales consultant.
And while Google drew a blank on G+ as its social network option, Youtube has created a band of YouTubers who are making it big with their own user-generated content.
So, the rules to break are to do with message ascendancy, “what comes first, etc.” and the new rules to follow, are based on lateral saliency. In other words, the messaging pyramid becomes irrelevant to Millennials and Gen Z’s as they skip across platforms, while they discover, engage and share content, which they can resonate with. Control and command structures in communications are breaking down (and rightly so) as organisations discover fans, and front-line staff using social media and digital platforms in more realistic and engaging ways than the Head of Marketing and Communications could even fathom.
That changes the dynamics of brand building for training organisations completely. And I proposed the following based on Digiqom’s ideation design philosophy. App-ify/ Game-ify/ Crowd-ify.
Most learning is happening online and experientially. Apps like Coursera, uDemy, UpGrad, or even the oldest online varsity- University of Phoenix Online can claim to have millions of users. And while gamification is built into all these platforms, starting with the basic Amazon feature, “people who bought this, also bought that”, the core takeout of learning at work or higher education, that of an alumni that works together, or helps each other out (Crowdification) is missing.
This could well be thanks to the serendipity engines built into the algorithms of all large social media platform newsfeeds, which suggest possible solutions, or even place user content in front of relevantly ‘magical’ people to respond to. A bigger reason for the break in the crowdification is possibly the increasing isolation of individuals trapped in echo chambers, who look for conversation prompts from social media, instead of each other and in groups.
When the most collaborative youth platform becomes the PUBG game instead of a Scrabble or a Monopoly Board game at home or with friends, the need for shared experiences like group travel, group activity or even the need for exploring the dynamics of diverse groups start to give way to “singleton” experiences.
Enter the Influencer, as a crowdification engine, with the complexity of “paid partnerships” or some kind of a beneficial rub-off hinted at, and the suspended disbelief of social media results in extremely low activation on the ground gains traction. So much so, that ads look and sound more believable than user reviews and Fake News goes viral even after fact checkers have debunked it.
How does all this help in the world of experiential training? And how should social media be used? I had run an experiment in the early 2010’s at a management institute when almost everybody with a laptop had a Facebook account, and almost no one was on Twitter. I had conducted the class on new age communications, with a few slides and a video and asked the cohort to express their thoughts and questions on a hashtag. The result was a plethora of users engaging on a hashtag, across platforms, increasing awareness among the group of the content of my lecture, including a heated debate among students that carried on days after the class, and a fairly high demand to repeat the class from other departments at the school and other institutes as well.
What would this look like in the 2020’s? I imagine groups doing their own local experiments, on themes that are most relevant to their audiences and contexts, on topics not limited to, climate resilience, sustainable living, energy efficient zero-carbon lifestyles, collectively sharing on worldwide platforms, attracting and self-selecting their own cohorts, and sharing their own and collective initiatives and findings among larger connected audiences.
May a Billion Connected Ideas bloom!
Communicator 