Category Archives: Problem Practices

Communication behavior or analysis that is often counter-productive

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Fighting Social Media Storms

Problem Practices, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , ,

As a Wal-Mart executive noted at a recent marketing conference, “the customer is in control,” meaning individuals now have social media power to disrupt a marketing campaign.

The recent uproar about data mining on Facebook and elsewhere can easily leave us with the impression that consumers not only have little privacy, but that they are also pawns in the hands of shrewd marketers. There is truth to these fears.  Online users do have less privacy; and sometimes we are the victims of campaigns that can seem to make us easy marks.  Russian online disinformation is, without doubt, a serious threat to our sovereignty.  But as is true with so many claims about advertising and marketing, we often assume an organization or company has more control than is actually the case.  Like all of us, advertisers have been brought low of internet contagion that sabotages their best efforts.

For example, several years ago the marketing staff managing the beer Bud Light decided to tinker with the labeling. Building on a campaign running in multiple media and using the slogan, “Up for Whatever,” the label on some products was redesigned to include an additional hashtag and bold letter wording that said “The Perfect Beer for Removing ‘No’ From Your Vocabulary for the Night.” Obviously, the campaign was meant to appear relevant and responsive to quips that fly between users of social media. But since beer drinkers are often younger adults, it might have been expected that a social media backlash could result. And it did. Complaints poured in. Anheuser-Busch-InBev was forced to formally apologize, acknowledging heightened sensitivities about unwanted sexual advances abetted by too much alcohol, especially on college campuses. New York Congresswoman Nita Lowey was one of many Americans to express their displeasure on Twitter. She asked followers to write the company “if you agree” that the “Up for Whatever” “campaign should promote responsible—not reckless—drinking.” Her hashtag was #NoMeansNo. In a follow-up e-mail to the New York Times she noted that “We need responsible companies to help us tackle these serious public health and safety problems, not encourage them.” That was enough for an Anheuser representative to admit that “the message missed the mark, and we regret it.”

The Customer is now in control.

To be sure, this was a small moment in the nation’s busy marketing landscape. But it is representative of how quickly a campaign that seeks to tie itself into social media can go off the rails. As a Wal-Mart executive noted at a recent marketing conference, “the customer is in control,” meaning that individuals now have the social media power to disrupt a marketing campaigns that might have once unfolded with no mechanisms for immediate public rejection.

With this view in mind, a couple of short observations:

  • Trump the tweeter may his own worst enemy.  When the  time between a thought and its dissemination is nearly simultaneous, there are bound to be unanticipated and unwanted effects.  His tweets are like firecrackers landing at the feet of revelers.  A few may be delighted; most others are horrified.
  • Strong opinions made anonymously generally deserve their fate of quickly disappearing in the internet maw.
  • The old adage to never argue with an organization that buys ink by the barrel is no longer so accurate.  Quarreling with a media outlet carries fewer risks.
  • All of us want to believe–and most marketing organizations sell the idea–that there are clear pathways to managing public opinion.  But social media contagion can be triggered by nearly anyone from almost any corner of the culture.

 

 

 

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The Agentic Personality

Models, Problem Practices, , , , ,
                                          flickr.com

Milgram’s work is a reminder that too many of us depend on responsibility-avoiding locutions like “I’m just doing my job.”

The recent film Experimenter (2015) dramatizes the work of social psychologist Stanley Milgram, who was interested in the seemingly fixed tendency of humans to shift responsibility for harmful acts up the chain of command.  Milgram is well known for his “shock box” experiments at Yale University in the early 1960s.  In this iconic study volunteer “teachers” were recruited and instructed to ask true/false questions to unseen “learners” in an adjoining room.  Any wrong answer given by the learner was to be followed by electric shocks administered by the teacher.  If the volunteer teachers expressed alarm over the shouts of pain coming from the next room, they were instructed by the white-coated experimenter to proceed.  This was usually followed by a reassurance that the researcher would take responsibility for the entire process. And so over two thirds of his volunteers proceeded to inflict seemingly lethal doses of electricity on the learner.

Of course the learner was not actually hooked up to the shock box.  He was an actor.  But the teachers did not know that, nor did they understand that they were the experimental subjects. Milgram was testing their willingness to carry out instructions issued by a superior, even when the effect of the shocks they were supposedly administering were harmful.

No Institutional Review Board at any university in the United States would ever allow this kind of research today. Volunteers cannot be put in this kind stressful state. But the Milgram studies remain as stark testimony to the willingness of seemingly decent people to comply when credible authorities take responsibility for indefensible actions against others.

Milgram was one is a long line of thinkers and researchers on the origins of German acceptance of the exterminations going on within the Third Reich.  All wondered why otherwise decent people could be so easily induced into lethal compliance.

Agentic personalities may assume no responsibility for the consequences of their actions. 

The short answer is that we seem to regard higher authority as a kind of shelter:  they can be responsible for decisions that they want to enforce. One effect is that questioning the morality of a “job duty” seems to get lost in the comfort of just “doing the work,” “doing what I’m told,” or “respecting the decisions of my bosses.”

Luckily, most encounters with mid-level functionaries do not come with such lethal risks to others.  But we can still imagine the urge to comply that so easily happens within the middle of the chain of command.  And so Milgram’s work is also a cautionary tale of how many individuals spend their working lives dependent on locutions like “I’m just doing my job.”

He calls individuals who find comfort in these caveats “agentic personalities.”  They assume no responsibility for the consequences of their actions.  And so paperwork must be filled out before an emergency room patient who may be bleeding out can be admitted.  An office supervisor insists on a performance review for a person who is about to retire. Or a pre-9/11 trade school registrar never thinks to inquire why a man wants to learn how to fly a commercial airliner, but not land it.  Functionaries in these roles find a degree of psychological shelter in the belief that they are acting in accord with their required job-role.  After all, it’s “the boss” who is really in charge.

But here’s the kicker.  In the Milgram study there was no requirement to comply.  Volunteers could quit if they didn’t like what they had to do. Even so, most stayed to the bitter end.