Hey haters, hate this. Part 2

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc / LMMiami.com

• The social media lynchings we’ve witnessed lately will come back to haunt us.
• The average CMO is scared to such a level of sh**lessness these days that it will make it close to impossible to get anything fairly disruptive approved.
• Creative-wise, that is.
• And, by osmosis, strategic-wise, advertising-wise, marketing-wise.
• I’ve read some Linkedin posts by self-righteous agency people chastising Pepsi et al and finger wagging about the whole thing.
• Hey, I enjoy a bit of schadenfreude and Monday morning quarterbacking just like the next guy.
• Hindsight is 20/20.
• But don’t push it too hard.
• Your agency/client might be next.
• The social media troll patrol is looking for the next sitting duck to punish, chastise, satirize, eviscerate.
• They are constantly throwing the spaghetti of their faux self-righteous outrage to the social media wall.
• The second something sticks they jump on it with both feet.
• The intention being to turn their hurt feelings into a global trending topic.
• As I said, their outrage is mostly a pose.
• Behind their stick-it-to-the-man shtick lies a deep-seated craving for attention.
• What did you expect?
• They were educated by helicopter parents to believe they are unique and special.
• That their brittle feelings are the most important thing in the universe.
• They are thirsty for validation and attention.
• “Snowflakes” as the alt-right likes to call them.
• I love the “snowflake” concept, despite the fact that I hate the alt-right (wink wink nudge nudge).
• So brace yourself.
• It’s coming your way.
• Sooner or later, your brand/product/service/POV will in the receiving end of somebody’s outrage.
• Whether you like it or not.
• Is your skin thick enough to ride the storm?
• Is your job secure enough to avoid a kick in the rear end in the name of damage control?
• The paradox of it all is that social media hate and the tons of earned media that come with it can actually be good for your or your employer’s brand & bottom line.
• A loud minority is still a minority.
• Regardless of the amount of bile they can spew.
• Don’t let the social media echo chamber fool you.
• Haters tend to be a minority.
• Haters force people to take sides.
• And, despite the fact that a majority of people keep their allegiances to themselves, majorities tend to side with the hated.
• Either that or majorities suffer from a bad case of collective, lemming-like masochism.
• Remember, we have a semiliterate president who rode a wave of hate to the White House, both centrifugal AND centripetal.
• It is a known fact in the digital world that, for search engine purposes, bad reviews are better than no reviews. *
• Odd & counterintuitive?
• You bet.
• But hey, algorithms beg to differ.
• Have you ever met someone who doesn’t hate their cable TV, ISP or mobile carrier?
• I can’t repeat it enough: the old cliché is true about all publicity being good publicity.
• It don’t matter what they say about you as long as they spell your name right.
• Once again, need I remind you who the POTUS is these days?
• Indifference seems to be the real enemy.
• Don’t shoot me, I’m just the messenger.
• Good news & good reviews elicit no reaction.
• Bad news begget outrage and schadenfreude.
• If it bleeds, it leads.
• Plus, in the age of 24/7 social media and hyper accelerated news cycles, consumers have the attention span of a goldfish.
• They are one forgiving, amnesiac lot.
• To be continued next week.

*When I bought my first car in this great country, I had arrived a few months earlier, the salesman who screwed me over at the dealer -they always do- told me something that’s stuck in my mind ever since: it is better to have a bad credit history than to have a blank credit history.