brand social and the memefication of everything
making content in an information vacuum boosted by the algorithm
When I started using Twitter pretty actively and making my way around tech Twitter in the summer of 2020, there was one thing I figured out pretty quickly: making edgy funny comments about currently trending events is one way to grow and get more people on the internet to like me. My honest and direct disposition mixed with some sense of humor - both of which made me instant friends and absolutely burned some bridges - made edgy commentary about the current thing come easy to me. It’s always a hit or miss of course, because whether you are typing jokes out or doing an open mic - the crowd commands whether you are killing or bombing, and the illusion that someone has a natural sense of humor that never misses is just the result of hours put into writing, testing, and editing new material.
Just like any crowd, the tech Twitter social crowd which is where I spend most of my time, has its own free passes:
Subtweeting any terrible thing that a guy in tech said, is funny, no matter who he is: a twenty-something-year-old FAANG swe, a founder who cashed out in the early 2000s or a prominent VC.
Making fun of any stereotypical thing that a guy in tech does is also always good: from the books they read to a mattress on the floor. it never gets old because it makes other people feel better about themselves. Bonus points if it’s about men in crypto. And let me tell you - these guys don’t shy away from constantly producing new material to joke about.
Anything about toxic startup culture. From the ‘tech wizard’ job titles to underpaying non-technical employees in exchange for experience and ability to be involved in their mission.
Anything about tech billionaires. They are mythical figures, kind of like the president. You won’t get in trouble for making fun of them (unless you live in Russia).
Observing any kind of trend and making a late in the game unphased comment that sums up the whole current discourse in 280 characters.
Jokes about PM behavior that feeds into their own quirky self-humor.
Literally anything about VCs.
In other words, anything that feeds into people’s self-humor or even takes things a bit too far in the spirit of a social justice clap back is a safe territory. Once you get out of that territory, that’s when you risk becoming the main character of the day.
In February 2021, just about 6 months into making jokes for clout on tech Twitter, I landed a part-time job as a social media manager at an early-stage tech startup. Now, people love to say that managing and growing your personal social account and brand socials is very different, and to some extent - I agree. It’s not even so much about the tone of voice given that brands have been impersonating real people since the second they got on Twitter. That’s how we got the polarizing Wendy’s tweets and “-love, social media manager” sign offs. It’s more about the fact that no matter how you, as a social media manager, feel on any given day, you are going to get online, and you are going to try and be funny, so that you can get enough engagement to feel fine about yourself and your qualifications for the job you have and also claim your place in your company’s org chart.
The strategy behind getting engagement on social media is pretty straight forward: don’t be weird and have fun. When I first started running a brand account I was doing pretty much what I did from my personal account: reply with some harmless jokes to a few relevant tweets a day, and if something is trending - spitball a few jokes. If I got a good one, I’d try to hit send at the right time. Hit or miss - if I find it funny, I am keeping it up. If two hours later, it doesn’t bring me joy, I might delete it. If I didn’t - I’d call it a day and log off. But here is where things get tricky.
When you run a brand account, there are a few things at play. First of all - your manager, or even a few executives will have notifications for the brand account on, so every time you post a tweet, you know the second you hit ‘send’, their phone screen is gonna light up. “What are they going to think when they see it?” is the first barrier that you get over. Usually, this one prevents you from sending risky stuff but if you are any good, you are going to get over this one pretty quickly once you have a few hits because you start thinking that you know what you are doing and it’s on them to trust you. And for some time - you are probably right because you are the one who spends their 9-5 on the online frontlines interacting with your brand’s audience.
But at some point, being constantly online becomes both your vice and virtue. People love talking about the “memefication” of everything, especially tragic events: turning everything from a celebrity court trial to a war in Ukraine into a joking matter. Because my frontal lobe was barely developed in the early 2000s, I can’t really speak on this, but I have a nudge that what we are experiencing right now is just a different take on the early 2000s media and paparazzi culture that drove mainstream celebrities insane. The reason why I don’t feel confident saying it outloud is because I don’t know what’s worse - a news cycle driven by media writers and execs targeted at a handful of people or a meme cycle driven by masses, amplified by the algorithm, and targeting pretty much anyone.
I wasn’t around for early Instagram or Twitter either, but it feels like TikTok has been the best at making people believe that “YOU TOO can be a social media star”. The app makes getting engagement that leads to brand partnerships that pay rates that are unproportional to 9-5 salary rates, send you a bunch of free shit, and invite you to events and parties in exchange for content, look so easy that at this point you are being a fool if you don’t take advantage of it.
You don’t have to be a social media expert to understand that trending content gets boosted by the algorithm, especially on TikTok. What you get in the end is a bunch of videos rating Met Gala outfits, gasping at Kourtney Kardashian’s wedding in Italy, sharing their encounters with West Elm Caleb, and absolutely destroying Amber Heard’s deposition in court. The more content there is about, let’s say, the Depp-Heard trial, the more ‘okay’ it feels to make fun of Amber and the edgier your content needs to be to stand out in the flood of videos providing commentary on it. What we end up with is people crossing lines into pure misogyny, bullying, and other horrible things in exchange for internet clout.
If you are a social media manager who’s got a couple of hits in the past, you start feeling more and more pressure both internally and externally. First of all, you think you are better than that, but there is a chance that you too can become the victim of the moral vacuum of the algorithm - getting desensitized to what’s ethical and making edgier and edgier jokes until you get called out publicly and become the character of a viral tweet.
I definitely don’t side with people who are terrified of ‘cancel culture’ mostly because a lot of them tend to be bad people doing bad shit and getting rightfully called out. But - I do think that publicly calling out anyone, including brands, in the spirit of some sort of social justice is, in itself a trend, that ties back to that “free pass” discussion above. There are pretty much no downsides and a lot of viral potential of screenshotting anything a brand does online and posting it - most of the time you don’t even need a funny caption for it.
Secondly, if you are making a fool of yourself on your personal account, unless you desperately want attention, you can sit a trend out. If you feel like you can’t, save this one for your therapist. If you are writing tweets and comments for a living, your employer points to whatever KPIs they’ve got and expects consistent output and growth. Whether expecting consistent output and virality from social media is fair is a different story but a lot of times due to lack of communication or your manager’s lack of experience on the front lines of social media, it’s something you have to deal with. So, whenever a new trending discourse comes around, you are going to spitball some jokes on that Notes app. If you got a good one right away, you are lucky - post it and call it a day. But if you don’t - you are going to write some of the cringiest stuff you’ve written in your career trying to reverse engineer other trends or jokes until you either spiral because you start feeling like you are not good at your job or post the best one you’ve got whether you are proud of it or not. If the trend gets big enough for your less online colleagues to notice, you will start getting slack messages saying either “we should tweet something about this” or god forbid - pitching jokes that are several meme cycles too old to be funny.
When some discourse is trending, it feels like everyone is talking about one thing and that can go on anywhere from a day to literal months - believe me, I’ve been managing a tech brand account though the ‘pivoting to web3’ era. If you are a brand manager, it’s hard to see a trend that’s not relatable to your brand go on for a long time and other brands and people ride its wave. So, naturally you are going to start thinking about how you can enter the discourse.
Thirdly, once you get a few hits in a row and experience the dopamine boost that is seeing your post ‘do numbers’, you also start feeling the pressure to never miss. When your job performance is measured by public perception and engagement, nothing gives you more serotonin than seeing a bunch of likes pile up - you can tell your post is gonna be a hit. People at work hit you up with “ohhh this is good”, suddenly they start to understand what you do all day long and ask you questions about your job…you can pretty much log off for the week. I once replied at the right place and the right time from a brand account making a joke about my ex and even though that was probably the cringiest tweet I’ve ever sent in my short career, no matter what I do, I can never live that one down with my coworkers and “how can we replicate this?” talk from the higher ups.
When you feel a weird mix of all these types of pressure is when you start crossing the line over to the land of cringe brand social content that was engineered to be quirky and unhinged but ended up being straight up embarrassing,or content that was created to be edgy but comes off as offensive and problematic.
This is a long way of saying that when I see tweets like the one calling out Duolingo’s TikTok manager, I shake my head in disappointment but I also feel a lot of empathy for someone who has done so well in their job so quickly and has to go through all kinds of internal and external pressure and likely lack of understanding and support. Sure, if you are any good at your job as a social manager, you should know where to draw the line between what you can and cannot day, feel confident enough to sit some trends out, and be smart about how you approach sensitive trends. I can’t tell if a brand can blow it out of the water while always staying in the safe territory but I have a feeling that the ability to talk about sensitive topics in an edgy and refreshing but tasteful way is something that can set you and your brand apart.
The more time I spend on the internet, the scarier it becomes to put myself out there in any form. I am terrified that creating content and forming opinions in the information vacuum boosted by algorithms will make me less and less self-aware until someone on the internet calls me cringe or god forbid - offensive. The more I want people on the internet to like my work, the less risk I take and the more boring and less creative my work becomes. It’s a vicious cycle that takes the fun out of making and sharing shit I like and turns the internet into a boring scroll.
This is such a great article!