Trust Inc.

How Business Wins Respect in a Social Media Age

Matthew Yeomans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781783538102
• eBook ISBN: 9781351111614
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

We are entering the age of sustainability – a business era where every company, big and small, must adapt its way of doing business to meet the realities of climate change, a finite supply of natural resources, evolving attitudes about inequality, increasing digitisation and automation. At the same time companies must meet the demands of consumers as they adjust to this rapidly changing way of life. Supercharging this change in consumer behaviour is social media – a communications revolution that is democratising and disrupting society in ways never seen before.

In this book, Matthew Yeomans explains why embracing sustainability is key to helping companies articulate their sense of purpose (and their reason to exist) in a world where social media is eroding trust in all institutions. The book shows how social media has made sustainability a mainstream concern for all society, how it compelled companies to be more authentic and accountable in their actions and how it will continue to shape how companies communicate the importance of sustainability to all of society.

This book is a powerful guide for both communication and marketing professionals in business, especially Fortune 500, FTSE 250 companies and agencies, on how to use social media to communicate with their audiences and stakeholders in an authentic way. It is also a guide/text book for the growing field of sustainability communication in higher education.

Part 1

The social age

Chapter 1

A short history of social media

Breaking the lock on corporate message control

On the evening of September 12, 2004, a 25-year old cycling enthusiast called Chris Brennan posted a detailed description on Bikeforums.net of how he had “cracked” the supposedly unbreakable Kryptonite Evolution 2000 bike lock with nothing more than a disposable ball-point pen. Using the alias – you could say pen name – Unaesthetic – Brennan titled his post: “Your Brand New Bicycle U-Lock Is not Safe!” Little could he have imagined the shock his actions would send through the corporate world.¹

Brennan’s revelation wasn’t exactly new – there had long been plenty of chat in biking circles about the vulnerability of u-locks. Back in 1992 the BBC had written about it but the story failed to get any traction.

What made Brennan’s post so damaging (and so profound in the short but very busy history of social media) was his audience. Within days, bloggers and message board posters were sharing news of the lock hack. One prominent voice was a new tech blog, Engadget. To amplify its message, it created a short video showing readers exactly how to use a ball-point pen to break the lock.

Engadget’s post went “viral,” to use the language of the nascent blogosphere. Attuned to this new social media chatter, The New York Times published its own story about Kryptonite’s product weakness.² In a piece titled “The Pen Is Mightier than the Lock” the newspaper noted how nearly 170,000 people had seen Brennan’s posting in a just a few days, “starting a full-fledged panic”.

By the time millions of other readers had finished reading The New York Times story – including senior executives at Kryptonite – the company knew it had a major problem on its hands. Either it could claim the Engadget video was fake or it could admit its lock wasn’t as secure as the company claimed.

Ultimately Kryptonite would recall locks en masse, costing the company some $10 million. In the process “a 50-year-old lock design was rendered useless” was how Wired magazine summed up Kryptonite’s predicament³ – all because one newspaper reporter and one new tech blogger were reading one bike enthusiast’s online message board.

Other companies hoping that Kryptonite’s problems couldn’t happen to them were soon disappointed as bloggers began to grasp the new consumer clout they possessed when complaining about faulty products and bad customer service.

Just a few months later, on June 21, 2005, Jeff Jarvis, a media journalist and one of the leading lights of the early blogging movement posted this tirade: “Dell lies. Dell sucks. I just got a new Dell laptop and paid a fortune for the four-year, in home service. The machine is a lemon and the service is a lie.” Over the next three days, Jarvis posted on his blog about the hair-tearing experience of dealing with nearly non-existent Dell customer service to try and get his laptop fixed.

As Jarvis complained about his experience first on his blog and then in his weekly Guardian media column, other Dell customers left comments expressing similar frustration with the company. By giving voice to his “Dell Hell” (as Jarvis titled one of his blog posts) he not only exposed the lack of trust many customers felt towards the company but he also became a mainstream and high-profile torchbearer for what media commentators were starting to term “social media” – a democratising online movement where anybody writing a blog had the power to publish their thoughts and opinions, share what they read on other blogs and in the media and to directly connect and network with other bloggers.

As Jarvis vented: “We are in the new era of ‘Seller beware.’ Now, when you screw your customers, your customers can fight back and publish and organize.”⁴

(To make matters worse for Dell, in mid-2006, another new tech blog, Gizmodo, published video footage of a Dell laptop exploding at a conference in Japan. The laptop was powered by a Sony battery and commenters were quick to add their own personal experiences of other Sony battery blow-ups.)

Looking back now, in a social media age where Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube dominate our daily lives so much, it hardly seems possible that, little more than a decade ago, most people didn’t have their own social media voice to hold companies to account. Today all brands and most companies understand they need some presence in social media and that, by doing so, they agree to have a two-way conversation with the public. Platforms like Pinterest and Instagram operate as virtual shop windows for many consumer brands; Facebook offers millions of fans who are amenable to conversational marketing; while, for many consumer-facing companies, Twitter operates as a de facto customer service channel.

But in 2006, the experiences of Kryptonite, Sony and Dell sent shock waves through public relations, corporate communication, marketing and customer service departments – and for one key reason. Over the previous 100 years nearly every major company and brand had sacrificed having an honest and authentic relationship with the people who bought its products in the pursuit of more sales and higher profits.

How advertising created a corporate monster

The communication and creative industries powered the growth of modern corporations through the success of mass marketing.

The first breakthrough in brand advertising came in mid 19th century Paris when a painter, Jules Cheret, transformed the long-established tradition of creating posters to advertise services by producing colour versions featuring attractive half-clothed women.⁵

The powers of persuasion soon took a darker, more cynical turn in the United States through the sales and marketing of patent medicines – particularly through the work of one man, a former preacher called Claude Hopkins. In the early years of the 20th century he was at the forefront of an early “wellness” industry that conjured fake claims of miracle cures to exploit the health fears of the populace. Hopkins’ genius was to turn the local exploits of travelling “snake oil” salesmen into a national business by taking inspiration from the successful mail-order catalogues run by Sears and Montgomery Ward.

Both companies used the federally subsidised US Post Office to market their catalogues. Hopkins did the same – sending out more than 400,000 pamphlets advertising nerve tonics for Dr. Shoop’s Restorative. Buoyed by the success of this target marketing, Hopkins next applied his newly honed direct-mail techniques to convince American households that another useless product, Liquozone, could relieve ailments including malaria, anthrax and even cancer.

After a series of newspaper investigations into the dubious claims of the patent medicine industry, the US Congress clamped down on this hucksterism with new regulations requiring “truth in labelling” to avoid misbranding or false claims of cure-alls.

The new regulation prompted the rapid decline of the patent medicine industry, but Hopkins would soon find a new vocation for his hoodwinking skills – marketing products like cigarettes, orange juice and toothpaste as a guru for Chicago’s Lord & Thomas advertising agency.⁶

As Tim Wu writes in his history of media manipulation, The Attention Merchants:

It is easy to ascribe the success of such hokum to the gullibility of another age, until we stop to reflect that the techniques successfully used to sell patent medicine are still routinely used today. The lotions and potions of our times inevitably promise youthfulness, health, or weight loss, thanks to exotic ingredients like antioxidants, amino acids, miracle fruits like the pomegranate and acai berry, extracted ketones, or biofactors.⁷

And he makes clear the smoke and mirrors isn’t restricted just to health and beauty.

As devotees of technology we are, if anything, more susceptible to the supposed degree of difference afforded by some ingenious proprietary innovation, like the “air” in Nike’s sports shoes, triple reverse osmosis in some brands of water, or the gold-plating of audio components.⁸

The arrival of mass production – kickstarted in no small part by Henry Ford’s 1908 Model T – presented many new opportunities for advertising to demonstrate how it could shape the desires of the public, even if Ford insisted, “If you really have a good thing, it will advertise itself.”⁹

The Model T gave hundreds of thousands of Americans their first taste of driving but it also changed the United States’ sense of itself – creating a more outward, modern and materialistic view of life that the marketing world was all too happy to appeal to. The monochrome conformity of the Model T might have worked for the first ever mass-market automobile but not for the second generation of vehicles and car owners.

Having learned from the highly effective propaganda techniques employed by governments in the World War One, advertising and public relations agencies now started manufacturing consent on a mass scale. Agencies like J. Walter Thompson, McCann Erickson, WS Crawford and BBDO transformed what had been a regional ad hoc approach to advertising in a national and, later, international mass attention industry. Marketing campaigns for the new brands being created were unrelenting and advertising in the post-war years became ubiquitous. The advertising industry was also helping reshape the economy. “In the United States the average household went from spending a mere $79 per year on durable goods at the turn of the century to $279 by the 1920s,” Wu notes.¹⁰

Products were marketed based on their scientific validation, their luxury connotations, their ability to cure new health issues (sound familiar?) and also their appeal to either men or women separately. To further hook consumers into the repeat purchases necessary to maintain the new mass production economy, companies invested heavily in creating new brands that the advertising could then manufacture demand for.

Increased prosperity as the United States and European economies recovered from the World War Two gave consumerism a fresh impetus and advertising took full advantage of the new mass media of radio and then television to stoke material desires.

Cars were marketed based on their colours, the allure of whitewall wheels, and additional features like radios, sunroofs and cruise control that demonstrated extra degrees of affluence and consumer know-how. Eating out at new fast-food restaurants like McDonald’s became a visible yet affordable demonstration of post-war posterity. Even a mineral that, at the turn of the 20th century, no-one really knew about would be transformed into the ultimate object of desire thanks to a 1947 advertising campaign: “A Diamond Is Forever.”¹¹

By the early 21st century, then, the corporate world had created a completely dominant mass-market culture engineered to devour the volume of products and services it was producing – all fed by the advertising, marketing and public relations industry. Customers became consumers in the minds of brands. And with millions of them to “reach,” brands had to become experts at creating advertising and public relations campaigns that talked at consumers rather than with them.

The advent of online marketing further exacerbated this disconnect by creating an industry where every digital interaction with an advert or marketing message could, in theory, be measured. By 2006 marketing and online business in general had become very much a numbers game – judged by digital impressions and click-throughs, open rates on direct email campaigns and increasingly tortuous rationalisations about what return on marketing investment actually looked like.

Drunk on data, companies thought they were getting better insight on consumer behaviour than ever before. What they failed to realise was that data means little if you don’t understand the motivations and feelings of the people buying or not buying your prod...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 The social age
• Part 2 The trust factors
• Part 3 The know-how
• Selected bibliography
• Index