Prince passed away on April 21 of this year.
It was a sad but remarkable day, wasn’t it? Remarkable in the way that the feelings of shock and loss were very nearly universal. People who hadn’t realized how much they enjoyed the Paisley Park sound were suddenly and sadly aware: We were all Prince’s fans, and none of us were ready to see him go.
Prince was an extraordinarily talented performer, who’d wielded outsized influence on pop culture since the early 1980s. This is perhaps why his death felt so much like a watershed, a moment in time, indelibly marked. WWE personality Chyna passed away the day before, and we lost Merle Haggard just a couple weeks earlier. Both events were notably sad, yet neither somehow felt as ground-shifting as Prince’s death. Prince himself would have been unlikely to claim that his life was worth anything more or less than anyone else’s, yet his death was more of a world-wide event, felt by all.
There’s a tendency, maybe even a need, to reach out during such events. Always has been. The difference now is that we have the ability to reach out much more quickly, to a much wider audience. Another consequential development is that businesses, corporations, and brands share that ability, and they tend to exercise it with the same kind of individualized voice as do the rest of us.
Which is generally a positive thing–we’ve examined before the value of vibrant social-media brand presence. It’s fairly straightforward in ordinary times. But in extraordinary circumstances, such as the death of an icon, some brands perform better than others.
Our vigilant friends at Adweek did a roundup of the best and worst brand tributes to Prince; we won’t rehash it here except to say the companies that temporarily purpled their mascots, or tweeted some shaky connection between Prince and their product, did themselves no favors. The ones that emulated the millions of regular people who took to social media simply to share their grief were on the mark.
Brand social-media presence is about selling, sure. If it were only about that, though, we’d replace the retweet link with a “Buy Now” button. The true, overarching goal is to make connections and engage in conversations. People connect with brands in which they detect a relatable human face. This means being entertaining, informative, and approachable on a day to day basis, and being solemnly empathetic when the worst happens.
Look at it this way. If a great tsunami were to wipe out a major city, causing unspeakable loss of life, would you try to slip in there and leverage it for a promotional opportunity? Most of us wouldn’t but don’t be naive, plenty would. Assuming you’re one of the good ones and would never contemplate such a thing, that same sense of social conscience is all you need to guide your social-media presence. The analogy works because every death is a tidal wave for someone.
There aren’t many hard and fast rules in marketing, and the rules that exist are frequently broken. We could tell you that your social-media activity should be something like 70 percent conversational, 30 percent promotional. Maybe that’s the right mix for you, maybe it’s not.
But we’ll stake our reputations on one absolute and irrevocable rule, which we’ll never break and we’ll encourage all others to follow faithfully: Do not market on the back of a tragedy. It’s doesn’t just look bad, it is bad. And the damage it does to your business does not compare to that done to your very humanity.
The C4:
1. It’s been long postulated that tragedies bring out the best and the worst. We can all testify to the truth of this in terms of social media. In the worst of times most of us go online to discuss and console and commiserate. And then there are those other people.
2. Corporate and brand social-media presences are rarely offensive on purpose. Usually, in the worst cases, they’re merely tone deaf. They’re driven to leverage their presence for self-promotion, and they’re liable to do so at the most inappropriate times. People notice this, and their resentment lingers.
3. Promotion has its place and its time. That time is not when people are grieving. At times like those forget about selling, and just be another voice in the conversation. Or stay quiet.
4. This harsh lesson comes our way from a death we still mourn, and really are still trying to process. Rest in peace, Prince. You gave us decades of fantastic music, and we appreciate it, but we know now it wasn’t nearly enough.
