MY KIDS MIGHT BE BETTER AT SOCIAL STRATEGY THAN YOU

I work in Comms and I’ve got two kids.

That means I overhear a lot of YouTube.

Instead of birdsong I wake up to the even chirpier “Alright mate” of SpencerFC.

What I’ve realised is kids quickly develop an instinct about what they like and what’s not for them.

Thinking about it a different way, they know what to expect.

And that’s why my 7 and 9 year old could be better at content strategy than many big brand senior marketers.

They understand relevance.

While the obsession with “harnessing the power of social influencers” is a brilliant technological advance that simply couldn’t be done before Instagram started in 2010, it’s also a tempting shortcut for trend-hungry marketers.

Bikini clad ex-reality stars holding Protein Powder has become so common it’s background noise.

Filtered out by a generation so in-tune with the channel that anything too forced stands out like a sore thumb (which is exactly what you’d get if you had to scroll through all those protein powder posts...)

The answer’s simple. Make it relevant and transparent. Simply sticking #AD or #SPON on a post isn’t a get out clause for making content that’s forced.

Buying Reality TV stars like pick and mix then dropping them like a stone isn’t really a strategy.

And when their account is “pruned” to make way for yet more sponsored posts, are they still an influencer? Were they even one in the first place?

“600,000 followers on Instagram you say? How influential!”

It’s dangerous to mistake reach for influence, as this (much better written) blog points out.

Anyway, paying for reach without relevance must be the social-media equivalent of shouting at strangers in the street. You wouldn’t in real life so why do it on Instagram?

Brands should be aiming for real, honest, and long-term relationships with social influencers.

I was at PR Week’s PR360 conference last week where this was debated.

One thing that resonated was the line “people don’t subscribe to brands, they subscribe to people.”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of Brands working with influencers. But only when it’s real and relevant.

Meantime I’ll continue to let my kids be the judge of that.

(I wrote this for the Pegasus Pulse blog, have a look at our team's thinking here)