Global Connections

It was deja vu all over again when the Twitterati presented Qantas with a public relations challenge earlier this month. The unexpected negative response on Twitter following the launch of an online competition was just one among several similar social media PR predicaments this year for brands, including Southwest Airlines, Kenneth Cole and Vodafone. As a friend - a Joseph Heller fan - who works in PR said recently, it’s enough to make you long wistfully for slapping a variant of Colonel Korn’s Catch-22 rule on Twitter: the only people permitted to tweet are those who never do.
 
To me, these social media developments brought to mind observations made in the pre-Social Media dark ages by a certain American Postman. 

What the Postman Said

Educator and media theorist Neil Postman came up with an interesting term in 1985 to describe the relationship between information consumed and any resultant action: the Information-Action Ratio. Information in our age, said Postman, “comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it.' Pretty good comment, made circa 1990, by someone with an Old Media last name.

Over the past 5 years or so, with the online Social Media explosion, Postman’s Ratio has gone completely askew, weighed down by the deluge of “information” washing across the online world every minute of every day. To paraphrase what I wrote two years ago, people have always been active with their responses, views and opinions, but they just never had the right tools to reveal their own thoughts and take their conversations to the wider world easily and simply. Now they do, with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and a myriad of others. While the sheer volume of social media talk has unhinged traditional media types (or, as Norg Media CEO Bronwen Clune described them in 2009 at Media 140, ‘the audience formerly known as the media’) it has also overturned many public relations certainties for organisations of all hues.

The challenge facing organisations who are keenly aware that they need to do something about this revolution has sparked an innovative social media enterprise: expert services and tools to monitor and ‘filter out’ the noise for you, leaving only that which is most relevant to you.

But, for the Web, ‘relevance’ is a broad term (the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “Computing. The property of fulfilling the requirements of a user's search for information; the degree to which a document, web page, etc., fulfils such requirements”). Especially in the light of Postman’s Information-Action Ratio, this definition encompasses material of potential interest in addition to rarer information of pressing urgency. Within the ambit of media information that is ‘relevant’, what is singularly important is social media material with a potentially high Information-Action Ratio. The most imperative of all such media information is that which causes organisations to quickly roll out the PR heavy artillery for prompt reputation management: chain reactions of unpredictable user-generated negativity that erupt online. Because of its potential to cripple organisations’ cachet, it greatly helps to be forearmed to deal rapidly with such an eventuality - and to act promptly and effectively.

As the examples given early in this post show, when the negativity contagion gets out of hand, a single misstep can turn into a stumble in the social media minefield, causing reputations to fall apart. And bad news travels fast.
 

A bad case of Sentimentitis

What is it about negative sentiments that causes them to go ‘viral’, to use particularly apt social media-speak in this case?

First, it would do good to take a look at what the boffins have to say about why social media is so popular in the first place.

In 2009, just when Twitter was transforming from a tyro into an online phenomenon, I came across a quite interesting study by Princeton psychologist Emily Pronin and Harvard’s Daniel Wegner. The study focused on a link between situations that make you think fast and feelings of elation, power and creativity. However, the rush of positive feelings is seen only when the brisk thinking is varied; repetitive thoughts instead cause anxiety. This could partly explain the rapid growth of microblogs such as Twitter, vis-a-vis ‘slower’ social media such as blogs. ‘Tweets’ are often posted in relatively short bursts of activity, and the frenetic activity and varied content can leave microbloggers with a palpable dopamine surge.

An important ego-booster and motivator for tweeters is re-tweeting of their 140-word outpourings. Research at the Institute for Web Science and Technologies, University of Koblenz-Landau, suggests a potent recipe to increase the chances of your tweet being re-tweeted: a dash of negative emoticons, such as :-(, and generous helpings of exciting or intense sentiment, including annoying or unpleasant words. That old adage, ‘bad news travels fast’, holds very true for online social media as well - only, the velocity of this spread gets ramped up a geometric scale because of the massive connectivity that the medium provides!

And then, compounding the virulence, there’s the action-emotion link: the action of tweeting anti someone perceived as more powerful can itself cause feelings of emotional satisfaction (that dopamine surge again), thus feeding on itself and driving the social media user to tweet some more! And the language used by other tweeters on that topic, if it is trending and is emotionally provocative, will cause further ‘emotional action tendencies’.

The curious work of ‘rock star’ experimental philosopher Josh Knobe at Stanford University hints at an interesting insight that has relevance to our discussion. Knobe’s work suggests that situations that present enough detail for people to be able to make an ethical judgment are more likely to provoke a stronger negative response if they trigger cynicism, while any positive response in the absence - or paucity - of information inviting cynicism would be much more subdued. While tweetlengths do not lend themselves to much detail individually, it’s when tweeters begin to converge on a topic and start it trending that potentially damaging details (about the target of the ‘conversation’) can start to be shared at a furious pace, inciting further negative responses that lift up the Information-Action Ratio from the social media users’ perspective. This dramatically increases the chances that they will act in some way - mostly individually and online, but sometimes collectively and in the real world.

Ask a certain Hosni Mubarak about the potential consequences when the latter happens.

Conclusion

The conclusion from the above discussion almost goes without saying. Keep your ear to the ground and your antennae out for social media content with potentially ‘virulent’ negative sentiment, which has a potentially high Information-Action Ratio (from the users’ perspective). Act quickly but judiciously to quell the negativity when you sense the first hint of an outbreak.