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Cat: Welcome to season two of Social Creatures, a podcast from Sprout Social. My name is Cat and I’m here to explore some of my favourite success stories from the world of social media.

This is a space for anyone and really, nearly anything goes, but what makes an account successful or popular? Honestly, it’s hard to know, but that is exactly what we’re here to find out.

Throughout the series, we’ll talk to the brands behind some of the best accounts that you know, and some that you don’t know yet to explore the way these businesses, organisations, and individuals have achieved their success on social media, and how you can do it too.

Today’s guest is someone that you have no doubt seen before, whether in documentaries, articles, on social, or in the news.

Billy McFarland is the founder of the notorious Fyre Festival, a music festival that for a moment in time was the hottest ticket in the world, but that ultimately, fell from grace when the execution was so bad that it ended up with Billy being convicted of fraud and owing roughly $27 million to his defrauded investors.

But what does he have to do with social? For better or worse, Fyre Festival was an event that built its initial worldwide excitement and buzz entirely on social. It utilised influencers in a way that we’d never seen before with synchronised burnt orange squares and supermodels swimming with pigs in The Bahamas, it looked amazing. And unsurprisingly, the tickets flew off the digital shelves.

But when reality hit, it was also social that documented the downfall of the festival, and ultimately, Billy’s reputation. Having now served his time working on his repayments, and planning Fyre two, Billy is a man who has felt both sides of social from the highest highs to the lowest lows.

He has undoubtedly a unique relationship with social media, and I, for one, cannot wait to hear more about it.

And just to let you all know ahead of time, this episode does include some bad language. It also includes tons of great insights, but if naughty words aren’t your thing, feel free to skip this episode.

Billy, great to have you here. So, excited to chat with you today.

Billy: Cat, what’s going on?

Cat: I mean, a lot. I’ve got a lot to talk to you about. The first thing I just want to ask is that researching for this conversation shows up tons of different narratives of how people see you.

So, there’s people who see you as a villain, there’s people who see you as an entrepreneur who got things wrong. There’s people who see you as maybe just someone who is a bit naive with your plans.

With so many differing opinions existing on the internet, and also bearing in mind, I did hear you say that even if Fyre had gone well, you still would’ve gone to prison, how do you see yourself?

Billy: That is the hardest question, Cat. I truly didn’t care until it was maybe like six months straight where every day someone’s like, “How do you feel when you google yourself, it says the word fraudster.” I’m like, “Well, I really hope I’m not sitting there googling myself and reading it.”

I just didn’t care for the longest time, but I think it’s gotten to the point now where I just don’t know how it’s holding me back. I meet with someone in person, we agree to do some work together, and there’s someone on the board in some far-off room who I don’t know who’s like, “Hmm, sounds good, but we just can’t take that risk.”

So, I do feel like that public perception or public painting does really hurt behind the scenes. And while I like to think I didn’t care, it needs to change soon.

Cat: And I can totally understand that, and I hope you don’t mind me asking that. It’s just interesting because it’s hard to get an idea of who you actually are as a person. So, I’m looking forward to this conversation to learning more about you.

But this is a podcast about social media, and we particularly are interested in people who have had success on social media, and how they achieved it because obviously, there’s millions of people using social media every day to very varying degrees of success.

And in the documentaries about you, and in my experience as someone who saw Fyre come to prominence, social seemed to be the main arm of promotion for Fyre Festival. Was this actually the case? And why did you choose to proceed in this manner?

Billy: So, Fyre came up in the era and the nascent days of influence. And I think we kind of saw an interesting trend where a lot of brands were trying to hop on the influence train by hiring individual talent and they’d hire these agencies and spend so much time trying to figure out who that one person was that represented their brand.

And we took a 180 approach where we’re like, there is no one person that represents Fyre because Fyre is all about bringing different people together. So, what if we have hundreds, and in our case, 400 people all post and promote fire at exactly the same time to go against the grain?

We don’t know who this one brand sponsor is, but we know these 400 people if they were all on a remote island together for four days, would have the time of their lives.

Cat: And can you tell us, I mean the burnt orange tile was amazing, and it immediately shot two PR headlines around the world. Can you tell us a little bit more about the result that you got on social media as well? Like how did you track that?

Billy: So, I really thought it didn’t work. We had our 12 biggest talents on this remote island, and it was like literally just us.

And we put them all around this table. We have a chalkboard or nothing else. Alright guys, here’s what you’re going to post and here’s what you’re going to say. But the idea being if the 12 leaders did it, the other 388 around the world would follow suit.

So, we did it and it worked, and the orange tile was going everywhere, but no tickets are being sold. And I went to bed on the island that night all depressed. It’s like I spent my last penny, plus a couple million dollars more to make this work and no one bought a ticket.

And I was all groggy being woken up early the next morning by someone who worked for me. He’s like, “Billy, Billy, Billy, we’re screwed.” I’m like, “Oh God, what happened?” He’s like, “We sold millions of dollars of tickets, what are we going to do?”

And what happened was the orange tile was meant to kind of create this confusion where you weren’t exactly sure what the brand was, and it took a handful of hours for it to resonate.

And then once the internet figured out it was for this music festival on a remote island, the ticket sales just went crazy. So, interesting to see how being indirect and creating some confusion led to this mad rush of desire to get in and get your tickets.

Cat: I think that’s so interesting because Christopher Nolan has said that before about his movies, that it’s better to have a confused audience than a board audience. And curiosity is just so powerful.

Billy: Interesting.

Cat: And especially coming from 400 of the world’s top influencers. But it’s interesting, you said your colleague was like “Uh-oh, we’re in trouble,” because 95% of the tickets in 48 hours.

Were you expecting that kind of influx, and did you panic a little bit? Because that’s a hell of a lot. What were you thinking with such a rush on the tickets?

Billy: I know I’m going to get destroyed for saying this, but I think the tickets were actually too cheap, and we would’ve been better off making them more expensive and taking our time and having a slower roll. Yeah, we certainly oversold it by making it too cheap and too accessible early on.

But just total wild experience where using startup terms, like we didn’t know if we had product market fit. We didn’t know if this idea of hundreds of adventurous influencers on a remote island in the middle of nowhere would sell to the consumer.

And this is literally our landing page, like this is our test example. And it just went and took a life of its own and created this four-month tsunami of events that became Fyre in the Fyre Festival.

Cat: And why do you think it got so big so fast? I’m curious about the power of influencers, and you said that it was adventurous influencers. So, how did you select these influencers?

I know about Kendall Jenner and everyone like that. Who were the other 400 influencers and how did you select them? Was it just based on their follower size?

Billy: So, what was interesting was that the diversity of the influencers made it really work. We had athletes, music artists, models, comedians, and I think that confusion is what really made the marketing go.

When our average consumer was looking at their Instagram feed and they saw a comedian, a magician, an NFL football player, NBA basketball player and a model who don’t seem to know each other all posting the orange tile, it led you to try to connect the dots, and like you’re here as a fan of these five people and now you’re trying to understand what their connection to each other is.

And when Fyre became that connection point, and Fyre, the brand is all about bringing people together, I think that theme subconsciously really resonated with the consumers.

Cat: What else was live with Fyre at this point? So, the burnt orange tile goes out, it’s got the hashtags and everything in it. Had the very famous swimming with the pigs promotional video, was that all live and was that all active at that point?

Billy: We launched that shortly after the first 12 group posted the orange tiles. So, it all went live at the same time. It took people a few hours to organically discover the video and connect the dots, but we almost kind of created this hidden little treasure hunt where you’re trying to understand why all these people who don’t necessarily know each other are all connected and how they’re connected.

And then once Fyre became the link that connected all these people, that led to the video and now it all kind of made sense. And I think Fyre did a really good job of trying to democratise a private island in an experience that most people want to do.

It’s like on their bucket list in their life, they just don’t know how to go about it. And if we can provide that experience alongside really interesting people, I think that’s a pretty cool value proposition.

Cat: You mentioned that you went to bed that night thinking it had failed and you’re like, “Oh no, I’ve spent my last dollar and some on this.” Do you think this was only successful because you had big budgets or was it the concept that also worked?

I’m also curious, with the influencers, I know there was a promise that they would be able to come to the festival as well, but presumably, they were being paid as well. So, how did you manage to organise all of this?

Billy: Part of the problem was I was absolutely terrible at managing all of the finances. And I think a great way to put it into perspective is one of our big investors who runs one of the largest international banks, he came to the island for a weekend and there, I am sitting there with no money in my account ordering jets and yachts and they’re all just kind of like arriving.

And he goes, “Billy, I work with the biggest banks and companies in the world, and no one has this credit that you have.” And it wasn’t official credit on paper, I didn’t have a good credit score.

It was just the tornado of excitement around Fyre where I was sitting there on a satellite phone from this remote island saying, “Hey, we need four jets, three yachts and four more islands this weekend.”

And people were just so excited to be involved. Things would just show up and the bills would come four months later. So, I kind of created this situation where we were overextending ourselves, which created the hype. Then obviously, when the bills came due, the problem started arising.

Cat: Do you think you got caught up in the hype of it as well?

Billy: I certainly got caught up in the hype and I kept justifying to myself that we are growing so fast both as businesspeople and a brand that whatever we do today is not going to matter tomorrow financially.

If we spend a hundred thousand dollars today and we make a million dollars tomorrow, what’s a hundred thousand dollars? I’m like it worked at that level. But at a certain point, the numbers got so big that logic no longer applied where it became, “Hey, what’s $10 million today?” Like wait, that’s actually real, you can’t keep escalating these levels like we were doing.

And I just didn’t know how to sit back and establish the guardrails where it’s like, “Okay, shit we’ve established a brand here that clearly has a theme and a message that people want to be a part of,” but now, I need to sit back and stop. I just can’t keep ordering things from my satellite phone and going crazy.

Cat: Gosh, that’s so interesting because I can kind of understand that logic as well. And you see that a lot in the tech industry where at the start, you are kind of selling a vision, when a company is young and you’re selling the future state.

And I can see with all of the excitement that was happening around you as well, and with the tickets that sold, it probably felt like it was a sure thing. One thing I’m really interested in, is it’s well accepted that sometimes social media doesn’t actually represent reality.

And so, with one part of the promotion, presumably, it was understood that swimming was supermodels with pigs in The Bahamas wasn’t going to happen, that was never going to be part of the plan.

Billy: I think it was.

Cat: Yeah.

Billy: Yeah. I mean, Fyre started by doing these four-day weekend mini festivals on these islands. It started with 10 people, and I think our biggest one pre-Fyre was 3 or 400 people, and that’s what it was.

It was talent on small aeroplanes, boats, jet skis, swimming pigs, and that was the experience we were trying to democratise. And I think the concept for Fyre just came from this insecurity and need for me to share this experience with everybody.

It’s like, “Wait, I’m on a private island with all these crazy people swimming with pigs and diving with sharks.” I try to tell my friends who are back home in their offices at banks or law firms in New York and like, “Yeah, sure, whatever Billy, cool story bro.” I’m like, “No, no, no, it’s actually real.”

And I think the desire of Fyre Festival was what adventurous 20 or 30 something in New York, grand Miami or LA wouldn’t want a weekend outside of their day-to-day life where they were just free to explore. And that was the plan.

And obviously, it worked a lot better with 300 people than it would’ve with 5,000. But if I was all about this desire to open and share and democratise what I thought were the coolest weekends of my life with as many people as possible.

Cat: Well, I can go right ahead and say I did not think that was the answer you were going to give to that.

Billy: That was the plan.

Cat: I’m kind of stunned because I was going to follow on and say, that I think social media is kind of understood as sometimes not representing reality from an individual basis right up to brands.

I think generally, there’s an acceptance that social media isn’t maybe telling the truth to a T, but that’s completely blown my socks off that you’re like, “No, well actually this was the experience that we wanted to sell.”

Because I was going to ask, do you think people need to draw the line between that? But do you actually were like, “This is the experience that I’m going to give you at this festival?”

Billy: Absolutely. And obviously, the experience gets diluted if there are thousands of people there, and it becomes less intimate than the magic we’d actually created. So, I think what would’ve been better is we should have opened up a Fyre hotel where there was a permanent location for 200 people, and we could do this every weekend.

I think that would’ve been a more reasonable and responsible way to share the same adventure and excitement with the world rather than trying to bring too many people at one time.

Cat: It’s still aspirational though. So, I wonder what’s your take on what constitutes aspirational marketing and when it sets unrealistic expectations?

Billy: Interesting. We were slightly different in that our marketing was the product, like Fyre was about the experience. I think it wasn’t necessarily like a liquor brand or a consumer brand where you might have a top talent or a top athlete promoting a product and you’re buying that product because you think that person is interesting. Fyre itself was this experience and it was simply people doing that experience.

So, we were selling our weekend, we essentially had a camera crew follow us for three weekends and that was the trailer. It wasn’t like we created a shot list and say, “Hey, we’re actually making a commercial.”

It was more like documentary style, “Hey follow us around for three weekends while we go and do crazy adventures in The Bahamas.” And that became the promotional material.

So, I actually think that maybe this is kind of sharing some plans with the future. A hotel would’ve been amazing. Because that is a responsible and scalable way to have 200 people every weekend come and do this experience.

So, I think that when you’re selling a product that’s backed by talent or influencers, you have a different set of responsibility than selling a physical experience, which we were trying to do.

Cat: The reason why we invited you on this podcast is because the promotion for Fyre was just unbelievable. To the extent that you did achieve what so many people want to do, which is creating buzz, you generated money.

You generated excitement, you got PR, and I speak to so many people who are trying to achieve even just one of those things on a daily basis. Do you have a good understanding of what it is that people want?

You mentioned that it was a particular time like a zeitgeist with social media and the power of influence at that time. Or is it that again, you just had these really large budgets and knew how to use them, or maybe it’s a combination of all three. Why do you think you were able to harness social media marketing so effectively at this point in time?

Billy: I think it was the desire of the influencer world to experience life with a hinge of danger. And I think the biggest talent at the time was feeling slightly complacent, where they would get a big brand deal from a consumer product to get paid a million dollars to do 10 posts over a year, and that was kind of it. And there was a yearning for more.

And what really made Fyre work in these small trips that got people excited was we flew them all in a great jet to the main island. But then we boarded these five or six 1960s propeller planes with four to six seats, and we would get up there with crazy pilots and just start doing tricks in the air.

And it was something about the danger where we’re literally not sure if this plane is going to crash or land, and the pilots are all kind of part of the theatrics and kind of wild guys and girls that brought everybody together. And all of a sudden, we land in this remote island, they’re no longer thinking, “Oh this isn’t the four seasons that I was just at last weekend.”

They’re like, “I just defied gravity. I just defied death with this group of people, now we are bonded in a different way.” So, I think it was taking people outside of this digital era and having them push this lifestyle boundaries that they like to think they were doing physically in a way they had never done before.

Cat: So, it’s like you’re bonding through adrenaline almost.

Billy: You need to take someone outside of their day-to-day to really create an experience. Like if you invite 400 of the world’s biggest star system gala, which is super boring and you’re eating regular food and drinking wine around a table, that’s boring because they do that three times a week.

So, we found a way to make it different, and understanding that our target clientele, whether it was a talent posting or the super successful 30-year-old who wanted to buy the highest end package for the festival, they wanted something different and they have access to everything.

And that different was adventure, it was freedom, it was exploration. I think it did a really good job at embodying those themes.

Cat: At the top of this, you said that this happened at a time when influence had a lot of power in social media. Do you think that time has passed now?

Billy: I think we’re in an interesting time now where people are jaded to these well-done promotional videos and well-done talent content. Obviously, we’re seeing it on TikTok where user-generated content just outperforms a lot of the well-produced high-end content.

So, I think it’s in this transition period where brands are starting to realise that the influencers that sold products six or seven years ago are no longer converting. And it’s more about getting a large number of people with more organic feeling content to actually cut through the noise.

Cat: Would you say then it’s about creating communities and working within those communities?

Billy: People want to feel part of something that’s going to fulfil their lives and give them value. So, I completely believe that community-based marketing is more important than influencer marketing.

If Fyre Festival launched from scratch today with the same talent, it wouldn’t work. It would be more about finding communities people want to be a part of and engaging those communities.

Cat: You mentioned how influencers are selling products isn’t converting in the same way that it was however many years ago. And we certainly have seen that there are now some legal requirements where people have to disclose that this is an ad.

Do you think that we’re going to see increased scrutiny and legal restrictions on how we market things on social media via other people?

Billy: I don’t think so because I think that as user-generated content starts becoming these huge drivers of sales for brands, it’s going to be harder and harder to regulate.

And I also believe that regular people who don’t necessarily label themselves as content creators or influencers will earn income through these user-generated content that they’re creating, which essentially makes everybody a walking advertisement at all times.

So, if everybody is doing it and everybody’s a walking ad, I don’t think it becomes necessary to delineate the fact that this content’s an ad versus content isn’t one. At the end of the day, it is all advertising.

Cat: Interesting. How do you use social media now for your upcoming projects? For example, and maybe you want to tell us a little bit, because again, I’ve heard a lot, there’s like Fyre festival, the Broadway Show, there’s an event I believe in the Hamptons next month, there’s talk about redoing the festival again.

I mean, I feel like you might have teased there’s a hotel coming in the future, there’s like a whole pile of things coming. How will social media be a part of the promotion for those, or will it?

Billy: I believe that social media now is all about telling a story and creating turbulence. If I announced today that Drake and Kanye West and Taylor Swift were performing at Fyre Festival and it was being done by this great brand and this great company, I don’t think people would really care because they would know the outcome, and they would know that partner would successfully execute the event.

I think the best way to grow the demand around Fyre is to be a single engine aeroplane flying through the storm where you as a consumer having a front row seat and you have no idea whether I’m going to crash or land.

And whether or not I do you’re going to be safe, but either way it’s going to be interesting, and I want 70% of you to hope that I crash and 30% to hope that I land. And I feel like if I can tell that story, that’s how I’ll create buzz around Fyre too.

Cat: I can’t tell if that was metaphorical or you’re actually being serious.

Billy: I’m being kind of serious too.

Cat: That’s amazing. And it’s interesting you said you want 70% of people to want you to crash and 30% of you want you to land.

And that’s another thing that is super interesting about your story. You bet big on social, you got big on social but unfortunately, it’s almost like it was at both sides of this story.

So, like this huge ascension into success being recognized worldwide, but when it didn’t happen, social media was also right there at the front seat to watch it all sort of unravel.

And as we mentioned at the top of this, start to cast aspersions on your personality and have different opinions. And as someone who I think is clearly ambitious, how has that been to cope with because it’s like social media is your friend and your foe almost.

Billy: It’s tough because I think that I loved the business validation of the large group of supporters that I had six or seven years ago with Fyre. And it’s a little different now where unfortunately, due to my terrible decisions, the smart people who are supporting me just can’t afford to take that public risk. So, a lot of that support is behind the scenes.

So, I think I’m more of like a one man show in the front right now, and that comes with some good but also comes with a lot of bad.

However, I think that the era now will allow for that to succeed more than it would seven years ago where before we kind of needed that group mass effort and now people are so tired of these high-end productions and overt ads, they want to see the turbulence and they want to see the unknown endings where they’re not sure if they’re watching a train wreck or redemption. And I think that becomes really interesting.

Cat: You mentioned again about the high-end productions not being favoured. Is this why you yourself are personally doing quite a lot of Instagram reels and keeping it super in the moment and quite raw sort of everyday footage of you? Is that part of your strategy as well to sort of show people what life is like as Billy McFarland now?

Billy: I think the success of Fyre too is far more interesting if it comes out of nowhere. If things are perfect for the next six weeks and six months and a year, it kind of loses the allure. But if things appear sloppy and then are actually super well done, I think that is a far more intriguing story and outcome.

Cat: Have you always been quite … I mean, you said turbulence, which is quite a recurring theme here with the plans that we’re talking about as well, but you seem to be really wired to sort of buck against the system and be disruptive. Have you always been like that?

Billy: For sure. And I think that starting back when I was 10-years-old learning how to program, I’ve always sort of found technology as a way to find my own adventure and to create my own system and create my own rules, and Island was a physical representation of the early days of programming.

But I think I’ve always kind of been driven by this desire to show to myself what’s possible and what the boundaries actually are.

Cat: And has it been that same mindset that you’ve used to approach, “Okay, I’ve made this very public mistake,” but instead of sort of just sitting with it and letting that define you, you’re almost using it now to, as you say, either crash and burn or have this huge redemption story. Is that all the same sort of headspace?

Billy: So, this is what confuses me the most. It’s like I get so much backlash. I think the number one backlash I get from a person who doesn’t know me online is like, “Hey, why don’t you just stop this,” and in their words, “Go and get a real job.”

And I owe an incredible amount of money, I owe an incredible amount of trust back to those people that supported me. I owe people back to relationships and friendships. And I think the obvious answer is the only honourable path forward is to try to pay it all back.

And that starts with trust. It includes financial paybacks, it includes success. There’s so much to it, but I feel like quitting is just not the way to find pride and fulfilment. And I’d rather go for it and go for it honestly.

And if I fail, honestly that is okay, but that is the better path to take than to go make coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts and say, “Sorry guys, that’s it, I’m out here.” I think that’s more of the cowardly move.

Cat: Yeah, I mean, I’m not an authority on what is ethically right or ethically wrong, but I do agree with you. And I wonder though you have talked before about this drive that you have to build and to push ahead and to succeed.

And I wonder, do you see that as a blessing, or do you see it as something that you need to be aware of sometimes? Because maybe it is also what got you into this situation in the first place?

Billy: For sure. And I think one of my biggest undoings was the inability and the insecurity to ever ask for help or deliver bad news. And that’s a huge flaw when running a business.

Like if you can’t deliver bad news, you’re going to start telling white lies and ultimately, realise in order to avoid the inherent chaos that every business has underneath the scenes. And so, I feel like I need to really be in tune with that.

And I’ve taken the opposite approach now where I’m bluntly transparent, and if someone is backing me or supporting me, it’s like, “Hey guys, this probably is not going to work,” it’s like trying to be super honest and, “Hey, the plane might crash, and I don’t want you guys to think that Fyre too is going to be good job.” It might be a terrible single engine plane crash.

So, we’re trying to be brutally honest and overly transparent in the areas that I lied before, but without kind of losing that creative drive to go and actually make this right. And as soon as I lose that drive, then the dream and the goal of making this up to people becomes impossible.

Cat: These answers, they’re good answers, Billy. No, they are, they’re not the answers I thought I was going to get. What so far in your career has been your proudest moment?

Billy: I did seven months straight in solitary, and I think that was my proudest moment. Just like I’m so wired to be nonstop, whether it’s mentally, physically, I just like to move around and create momentum and just take action, and being physically and mentally confined in the concrete box is just so against all of my good attributes and all of my flaws. So, I think I am most proud for getting through that.

Cat: I mean, I think — again, I’m not a psychologist, but from just a human level that is a sensational amount of time to spend by yourself. What were you thinking about? Were you planning for the future? Were you reflecting on the past or were you just trying to sort of stay present?

Because it’s also an enormously challenging position to be in for a stupendous amount of time. So, I’m just curious. Tell me I’m going too far, if you don’t want to answer that, that’s totally fine.

Billy: No, it’s all good. So, the hardest part of it was I didn’t know when it was going to end. And I think if I’d gone in on the first day and they’re like, “Hey, you know Billy, you’re here for seven months.” Like yes, that would totally suck, but at least you can wrap your head around it.

But it was the opposite for me. It’s like, “Oh we don’t know, you might be here forever.” And when you’re alone and you have no one to sanity check your thoughts, you start thinking the worst and becoming very pessimistic. And I truly thought for a good portion of those seven months that I was going to be in that concrete box for the rest of my life.

So, it was the balance of trying to contain those negative thoughts while still planning for the future. And I just wrote all day long everyday plans for everything I want to build and how I want to do it. So, it’s kind of the balance of planning for the future while trying to quiet down the fears that this really could be it.

Cat: You mentioned balance there, and another thing that I am curious again — obviously, I haven’t met you before, but I get the sense you are a very ambitious person. And your ambition is something that I think is a character trait that goes through every narrative that exists about you online.

And as you mentioned, there’s a lot of people who see in a super negative view, a lot of people across the globe, there’s also people that you really want to win back. You mentioned business relationships and friendships and stuff like this.

So, you’re sort of balancing, I guess, having to cope with the fact that a lot of people who don’t even know you have terrible opinions about you. There’s a lot going on there, and I don’t know if you’re familiar with Robin Dunbar has this concept called Dunbar’s Number, which states that the human brain is only capable of having 150 relationships at any one time.

Billy: Interesting. Okay.

Cat: And I feel like from researching you, even just in your day-to-day life, it’s like so much more than that I would assume. You’ve got so many people who you’re interacting with presumably in any number of different capacities, but when we add the social media perception as well into that, that’s a lot to cope with.

So, how do you balance all of those conflicting sort of, do you care, don’t you care, and sort of stay sane at the end of it?

Billy: I think that’s one of the biggest challenges towards fulfilment. In the Fyre days, I would try to find fulfilment by surrounding myself with as many people as possible. And I always like things to be bigger.

If I was going to dinner, I wanted 40 people with me and not three. If I’m going on a trip, I want 20 people coming with me and not one. And at the end of the day, that was really unfulfilling and I kind of found out, especially through the time in jail, that having a large number of surface level of relationships is terrible. And I think life truly is about 5 to 10 people who you can go deep with for the next 30 or 40 or 50 years.

And that’s the one thing that I’m trying to really improve on this time around, are not surrounding myself with a lot of people because it feels good in the moment, but finding people who I can grow alongside for the rest of my life.

Cat: Nice. What do you think is next for social media?

Billy: I think it’s giving the consumers access to this lifestyle they’ve witnessed for the past 10 years online. And I think we’ve gotten to the point now where it’s like, “Okay, I am tired of watching the Kardashians or this person live this life they can no longer do.”

And while that lifestyle porn was attractive for a number of years, we are kind of becoming desensitised to it, and are more interested in how we can live (this is corny) our best lives and go out and do.

So, I think the future of social media is going to be about giving access to that lifestyle to the average consumer. And whether that’s virtual reality or other technology that democratises it, I think is where the future is going.

Cat: When you’re thinking about future promotions for your future projects, will you be ditching Instagram and moving over to threads? Will you be on TikTok? You’ve mentioned TikTok a few times and I think obviously the user generated content angle is huge.

Have you started to think about how your social media strategy will actually develop in terms of the platforms that you’re using?

Billy: I think it’s going to be more about owning direct relationship with your customers. There is a platform that I use called SuperPhone, which is basically like a texting service.

So, I could directly text with thousands of people at one time, which is pretty interesting. And I own those relationships and those phone numbers, which I think is pretty cool.

So, I’m trying to think beyond the Instagram or Twitter or threads or TikTok of today and just understand how it can have direct access to my consumers, and then eventually how I can build the technology that allows them to live this life they’ve witnessed and have seen from a far online over the past 10 years.

Cat: Amazing. Okay, Billy, thank you so much for these questions. It’s rare that I am genuinely surprised by answers, and you’ve really done that today. I’ve really, really enjoyed this conversation, so thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. I think it’s been a fabulous conversation.

Billy: Cat, thank you so much. And before we go, I need to invite you to Fyre Festival too.

Cat: I would love to come. Thank you.

Billy: You’re there. Let’s go. Hell yeah. Thank you. At least you could talk about it good or bad on a podcast after you go.

Cat: Exactly.

Billy: I’ll see you there.

[Music Playing]

Cat: You’ve been listening to Social Creatures with me, Cat Anderson. Many thanks to Billy McFarland for joining me today for what was the final episode of season two. And of course, a big thank you to Sprout Social for making this podcast possible.

If you’ve enjoyed this episode or the season, make sure to let us know on social media at Sprout Social, and we would love it if you would subscribe to hear all of our other episodes wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks very much for listening, and we’ll see you again in season three.

The post Lessons on Fyre: An exclusive interview with Billy McFarland appeared first on Sprout Social.

[Music Playing]

Cat: Welcome to season two of Social Creatures, a podcast from Sprout Social. My name is Cat and I’m here to explore some of my favourite success stories from the world of social media. This is a space for anyone, and really, nearly anything goes.

What makes an account successful or popular? Honestly, it’s hard to know, but that’s exactly what we’re here to find out.

Throughout the series, we’ll talk to the brains behind some of the best accounts that you know and some that you don’t know yet to explore the way that these businesses, organisations, and individuals have achieved their success on social media. And crucially how you can do it too.

Today we are looking at the traditionally complex and somewhat strained relationship between the contemporary art industry and social media. Despite the progressive nature of contemporary arts and what would seem to be the obvious overlap between the two, the initial uptake of social media by leading galleries was hesitant, if not altogether dismissive.

That was until today’s guest burst onto the scene, seeing social media as the opportunity that it is, and as a result, has since gone on to transform the industry and gain global attention.

Unit London is one of the fastest growing galleries and contemporary art platforms in the UK. It was built in 2013 by Joe Kennedy and Jonny Burt, age just 23. And all upon the founding belief that art is for everyone.

With over half a million followers on Instagram, social media has played a pivotal and central role to their success. The pair’s determination from the start was to take advantage of the power and reach of Instagram.

When they started in 2013, they noticed that most museums and art galleries didn’t really take social media seriously as a commercial tool. The ambition with Unit London was always to create a platform for people to celebrate genuine talent in a non-discriminate way.

And social media has been the glue since the beginning. Helping them not only connect with broader audiences, find hidden new talent, but also just to introduce more artists and their art to the world.

Genuine disruption is something that always excites me. And so, I just know this is going to be one of those conversations. I am so thrilled to speak with the co-founder of Unit London Gallery, Joe Kennedy.

Joe, so good to have you on the show today. Delighted to have you. And I guess a really good place to start is just right at the top. So, you and your business partner, Jonny, it’s 2013, and you decide to set up Unit London.

Right from the off, this was something that was a little bit special, got a bit of attention because you were doing things differently. Can you tell us a little bit about what inspired you to set up a gallery at what is kind of, I guess, what would be considered a universally pretty young age to do so and what made you stand out?

Joe: Yeah. 2013, I was 22-years-old and one of my best mates from school was Jonny and I met up in London. I’d just come back from a year in Australia where I was working in an advertising agency, learning a lot about branding and audiences and how to communicate brand messages to people in an effective way.

Was super inspired by everything I’d learned there. And came back and Jonny was actually practising art here in London and we spent that summer basically going to art shows around London.

We’d always gone to shows before and we’d always been practising together as artists and shared our passion for art and various artists with each other. And we would go to shows and kind of analyse the experience. We’d be really excited about going to see the particular artist that was showing, but then we would arrive at the gallery, we would be met with this kind of strange treading on eggshells kind of experience.

We would get dodgy looks from the guys behind the desk because we weren’t necessarily buyers. And we found the experience to be kind of unforthcoming. We kind of felt like we weren’t welcome, or we felt like that experience could be massively improved.

So yeah, it was certainly an unconventional decision. If you’d asked either of us 11 years ago, if we would’ve been running a gallery today, we probably would’ve laughed.

But it’s driven from a passion of ours to support incredible artists to champion creativity and ultimately a frustration with an industry that has created these systems and structures that have prevented a lot of great creativity from being seen by a mass audience.

A lot of what we see in galleries and museums is the same small group of artists who’ve come from a very institutionalised kind of pool of talent through having great access or having the financial means to go to art school or having work that’s commercially viable or even in the most extreme cases, having parents who were art collectors or who were running galleries.

So, we were kind of frustrated with that selection process of how artists can be seen and discovered and then eventually exhibited. So, we decided to go at it ourselves. The gallery started really in a very, very modest way. We found an old charity shop that was in West London that had been empty for six months, and we decided to set up a pop-up show, basically in that space.

Not really knowing what we were doing, having no experience of being in the art world or running a gallery. We had no friends or family or contacts in the art world. So, for us it was like this kind of blissful naivety in a way of what it would take to run a gallery or what the dynamics or the structures or the business models of the industry were.

We just knew that there was a way of doing this better and there was a way of us providing a platform for genuinely talented artists to be seen and be heard and to have a voice.

I would say the voice at the beginning was very, very meek, but over time that voice has kind of amplified and grown and the gallery has now become a relatively established international name in the art world. So, social media has been a very big part of that story and that amplification of our message and our brand.

Cat: I really love that because art shouldn’t have a barrier of wealth or access to it, art is about expression and so I really love that it’s safe to say there was ambition to make it accessible to everyone. And this, as you said is where social media became a really core part of your strategy.

Could you tell us a little bit about how did social media play a part in the growth of what you’ve described as a meek pop-up shop and an old charity shop into what’s now an established gallery on the scene? And maybe particularly Instagram I think is sort of your real channel of choice, wasn’t it?

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. Instagram, I think naturally became the biggest tool for us to kind of develop the brand and the gallery and discover artists and also connect with collectors.

When we started out, we didn’t have any of the traditional means of access to the industry that many people who perhaps were starting a gallery would have. Like we didn’t work in an auction house, we didn’t work in a gallery, we didn’t have family or friends who’d come from the art industry.

So, there was no one that we could really lean on to talk about us in any way. So, and we didn’t also have any resources because I was working a nine to five job to fund that initial first space and we basically had no money to make things happen.

So, social media being a free tool, at least it was at the time, we realised that we could start posting and we could start telling the story of the gallery. And as we developed a following, we started to understand that that online community that we were generating could follow us wherever we went.

So, as the gallery developed, as the months went on, we got kicked out our first space. We would then pretty much walk the streets of Central London looking for empty shops and find a shop that we liked the look of, and we’d approach the landlord and we would kind of almost muscle our way into that space, pop up there for two weeks, then get kicked out again and find somewhere new.

So, it was like the gallery in the early years was very, very nomadic and it was chaotic and stressful, and we had no sense of permanence.

And I think actually we probably found that permanence in many ways through social media because if we were to be kicked out and have to work in a cafe for a couple of weeks, just the two of us with our laptops, no one needed to know. And social could be the glue that could actually like hold our different popups together and allow people to follow our journey.

So, I think Instagram became probably the primary social media platform for us after a while and has now gone on to really redefine the whole art industry. I think the role of Instagram and the introduction of Instagram to the art world at large has probably been the biggest transformational shift that’s happened in the industry since certainly in my lifetime.

But I would say since the introduction or the creation of art fairs, social media has completely turned the industry on its head, and it’s forced galleries and forced the ecosystem into changing, I think for the better.

Cat: It’s so interesting because when you describe how you’ve used social media, it feels like that should be a hand in glove match made in heaven of like galleries displaying art and artists on Instagram in particular, it makes so much sense.

But you’ve just mentioned there that this has actually been a big shift for the art world. Why do you think you were one of the first, if not the first art gallery to really use social media in this way? And how do you think the art world’s attitudes towards social media have changed?

Joe: I think there’s a few reasons. I think primarily, if you look back over the last 20 years the art world has been very insular and closed off and it’s been kind of reserved really for a privileged few. There’s a lot of structures in the art market which we’ve really tried to rally against and challenge over the course of the last 10 years since we started.

And a lot of those barriers that have been created by the market and the ecosystem are to prevent young galleries or startup galleries with no funding to actually develop somehow.

There’s a monopoly there and the big, big galleries have been operating 50, 60, 70 years and they have their very traditional ways of doing things and they’re very happy with those business models.

They almost have a monopoly over the market whereby young galleries can develop a young artist when the artist hits a certain critical mass or a certain point, those big galleries can swoop in with unlimited funds and be able to kind of essentially take the talent and work with that talent.

But I think because those economic models and those industry standards have been set for so long and the people who have running those galleries come from a different generation kind of pre-social, I think there was almost no need for social to be a useful tool for the art world.

And Instagram and social media for us was just a necessity. We had no other option but to lean into social and to use those free tools that we had at our disposal.

And I think, the other thing is that the art world is about subjectivity. Fundamentally, a work of art or an exhibition or an artist isn’t objectively better than the next. It’s all down to one person’s subjective opinion.

So, somebody has to be a tastemaker and the art world for a long time has kind of revelled in this ability to have a one-way conversation with this audience and basically say, look at this artist, look at this show. This is incredible. It’s this, this, this.

And it’s kind of a dictatorial format where they can kind of push out information and push out a narrative and a concept and have that be consumed by their audience. And a lot of the time the audience is invitation only anyway so that people who are already drinking the Kool-Aid at the gallery.

Whereas what social media I think presented for a lot of galleries is this exposure to a public forum and the door being opened to scrutiny into conversation from people who weren’t invited by them, but people who may have just bumbled in off the street.

And so, galleries had to become much more accountable and much more transparent. And I think that’s certainly something that we embraced massively, and we obviously still do as a gallery, but I think those values of accessibility two-way conversation, transparency are all terms which don’t really gel with the traditional operating systems of big art galleries.

So, I think there was both an ideological disconnect between the values of social media and the new social cultural norms of our generation and the ways that galleries have been run for a long time.

And there was maybe a fear to some degree, maybe a deep-seated fear from galleries that, okay, things are changing but we don’t like it. And as soon as we started to kind of build some momentum and build a reputation and people started talking about the gallery.

When we actually started selling stuff and people took note of what we were doing, we were met with a lot of resistance because we were basically positioned as the gallery who were literally to quote newspaper articles like the kids selling art on Instagram was how we were being kind of characterised.

Cat: That’s kind of quite patronising, isn’t it?

Joe: Yeah. To be honest, we were just happy to be in a newspaper at the time. Because at least someone’s talking about us.

And it was interesting because a lot of the journalists who are writing about us, there was a guy from the New York Times who did a profile on this whole thing and they were like fascinated with this idea of social media and Instagram and oh my God, you’re selling art through Instagram.

We were just like, well yeah, because we were just posting content and someone DMs us and then we start a conversation and to us it felt like the most organic and natural thing. We were just talking about the values of our brand; we were talking about our message, and we started to build a following of people who really shared our beliefs and shared maybe our frustrations with the industry.

And they had the same experiences that we did of walking into galleries and feeling like they weren’t allowed to be there, or they weren’t welcome.

We kind of found our tribe, I think, and we built this really kind of devoted, committed audience who believed in what we believed were passionate, like we were about our artists and our message.

We were met with a lot of fascination from the old guard who were like, oh, this is really interesting. But also, brought a lot of scorn and derision at the same time because they were like, well social media is this app for kids to post their breakfast and dance videos and whatever. And it’s no way to promote art. Art is an elevated cultural asset and it should never be exposed to something like social media.

So yeah, that was definitely a big kind of like butting heads in terms of ideologies and belief systems between us and maybe other artists and galleries like us. And then the old guard.

Cat: I have to say in the middle of that answer, I got a jolt of electricity and excitement in my stomach because I feel like I know the word disruptive is bandied around a lot, but truly what you were doing was super disruptive.

And as someone who also has a very keen interest in the art world, but I don’t have exclusive invites to gallery openings and stuff and I have had that experience that you’re describing where you go into a gallery and they’re looking at you like, well, what are you doing here? Sort of.

But also, what you’re talking about, I think you could be maybe the first person I’ve heard in the art world talk about how it is in fact subjective, and that all art should have an audience. And so, this concept of marrying social media with art together just makes so much sense to me.

It is interesting that you got a little bit of derision and scornfulness, shall we say, from the old guard as you’ve described them. But to me that would sort of indicate that you’re doing something right because you have actually ruffled some feathers.

I am curious because obviously you’ve spoken about how you want to promote artists who don’t have the connections or the finance to get into the larger galleries, but did social media help with the consumer access as well?

Because again, you’ve alluded to how the other galleries are very exclusive about who they let in and presumably social media sort of works on both sides of this relationship.

It’s about getting artists who maybe don’t have the platform exposure, but also maybe someone like myself who’s like, I’m interested in art but I can’t maybe afford to go into these other galleries or go to a gallery opening all the time. Was that part of the strategy as well?

Joe: Yeah, I mean it’s interesting because even just the word strategy, strategy is something that we talk about a lot now, but when we started there was no strategy. It just kind of evolved very naturally for us.

But the impact, I think that social horse had really dovetails perfectly with our mission of the gallery. We wanted to essentially create an art world that could allow everybody to access and enjoy great art.

And there’s two sides to that. There’s the artist side where how can people have access to great art if the great artists aren’t being seen and platformed, because our fundamental belief was Jonny and I are both really creative people. There’s no chance we could have made it as professional artists because of the structure of the industry.

We took our work to galleries, we went to shows, we interacted with the industry. It didn’t work. And we knew of all these other artists like Ryan Hewett, one of our leading artists now at the gallery is a great example, we followed him online and was based in Cape Town, self-taught artist, incredible raw talent.

But if we hadn’t gone onto social media and discovered him through that platform, we would still be none the wiser. And our fundamental belief is that great creativity, great artistry can sometimes exist in the most surprising places.

And we wanted to kind of cast the net wide and social media really allowed us to kind of discover these artists who previously would never have had access to the industry.

So, it helped us discover and connect with artists first and foremost. But then also it allowed people who, as you say like yourself, maybe aren’t necessarily comfortable with going to Mayfair and pushing open a big heavy door and exposing themselves to maybe being looked down upon or feeling like inferior because they can’t read this ridiculous over intellectualised press release.

And actually, I think that experience is a huge barrier. Just pushing open that big door and taking the courage maybe even to walk into a Mayfair gallery actually prevents a lot of people from engaging with the industry.

Then you kind of couple that with the design of the spaces that make you feel very vulnerable and exposed. All of these little triggers prevent people from thinking that art is for them.

But the reality is that fundamentally art is the most basic form of communication and creative expression, and everyone understands art. You don’t have to understand it. That’s the beauty of it.

Everything is art, everything is good art, everything is bad art. There’s no right or wrong. And I think what social media has done is it’s allowed people to kind of discover that for themselves in a way.

They can just be on the train flicking through their phone and discover this incredible artist that might have this amazing emotional reaction in them, which then inspires them to DM that artist and start speaking to them. And it can spark this incredible journey of discovery and then education, then ultimately even collecting.

That’s probably one of the biggest, transformational impacts that social media’s had, is it’s allowed new collectors and new artists to enter our industry. And that’s had an amazing effect, not just on the volume and the scale of the art world.

But also, in terms of changing representation and create a more diverse industry where voices like female artists or artists of colour, or even digital artists or artists who aren’t from the western hemisphere to be able to build careers for themselves and participate in the market, which for a long time hadn’t been allowed to happen.

So, I think I actually credit social media for so much of the good change that’s happened in the art industry over the last 10 years. It’s helped us massively and it’s also helped both artists and new collectors who’ve discovered it off their own back.

Cat: I completely love this. This is such a brilliant narrative. I feel like it’s so exciting, it’s so inclusive, it’s embracing of different people. I definitely would push those heavy doors open in Mayfair, but I would be pretending to be someone that I’m not. That’s the thing, I was like, “Would I not do that?”

But yeah, it’s like I wouldn’t be interacting authentically. And it’s so interesting to hear you describe how even the spaces are maybe designed in a way to make you feel vulnerable. That’s kind of crazy when you think about it.

I’m curious though, like we are talking to you now and you’re in a very different position than where you were from those early days. So, you’re bopping about social media is the glue that’s kind of keeping the narrative of Unit London kind of going with your audience. It’s starting to grow.

Was it just a really continual slow growth? What did that journey look like? Where did the growth come from?

Joe: I think there’s a couple of big shifts that happened. Our first permanent space, which is the Mayfair space, we moved in there in 2018 and first six years we’ve been sort of bumming around, opening pop-up spaces and getting kicked out and doing everything in a very fun but very chaotic and just insane way.

And we’d been saving up and saving up and saving up everything for those five years with the hope of one day being able to get a permanent space somewhere. And we got kicked out of our Soho space. We were there on Water Street for like a year and a half.

We really started to develop the reputation of the brand there because in Soho, people from media and TV walk in and we had Jude Law and Bob Geldof and we started to develop this really great client base and these amazing relationships.

And when we got kicked out of there we were like, “Right, okay, enough is enough.” I think we had like 15 spaces in five years. And we were just knackered. And we wanted to also book shows with artists who needed a year to produce an exhibition and it just felt so disingenuous of us to be like, produce a show for us when we didn’t know that we would even have a space in two months, let alone a year’s time.

So, it was really kind of preventing us from doing the serious things that we wanted to do. So yeah, we found the space in Mayfair. It was a bank, and the bank were moving out and it was off market.

And Jonny and I walk in as these two kids, I think we put suits on for the occasion. We walked through the bank and these lot were just looking at us like, who are these kids and why are they walking around our bank? And we looked at it and we were just like; this is way too big. It was too expensive; we couldn’t afford it. It was a complete pipe dream.

So, we got onto the street, and we’re surrounded by all these big intimidating Mayfair buildings, and we just looked at each other and thought, this has to be it. If we want to really make something of the gallery, we have to go for this.

And so, we spent the next couple of months kind of charming and fighting and clawing our way into the landlord’s reckoning. And somehow, we ended up with this gallery at Mayfair, which really kind of elevated everything to the next level.

But we put every single thing that we’d saved up into this gallery. So, it was a huge Hail Mary move. It was like risked everything. If it didn’t work out, we’d basically be back to square one.

We got the space, nothing in our bank accounts and just thought, this is where the hard work starts. And I think from there the gallery just came on leaps and bounds and the international reputation of the gallery developed, our credibility developed wildly.

And of course, the people who were walking in through the front door weren’t just your media types and your TV personalities and whatever. It was people who kind of looked at art in a much more serious way.

So, turned out to be the best decision that we ever made moving into that space. And what I would say also is like 85% of our sales happened online. So, we would sell the paintings to people in Hong Kong and New York and all over the world. People who’d never been to the gallery before physically, people who’d never seen the gallery or seen the artworks in person.

And 15% we would sell from people coming to the shows. But actually, it’s the fact that we had the gallery, the fact that we had the skin in the game that probably gave those collectors the faith and the trust in buying from us and taking that punt with us because they knew that we were something serious.

And naturally social media was really the tool that allowed us to communicate how serious that space was and how serious our message was and how serious we were to our audience. And I think that allowed us to kind of really scale things.

Cat: That growth to Mayfair is unbelievable and congratulations on that. I can’t imagine the nervousness of risking everything into something like that and just sort of being like, this has got to work or we’re in some hot water, so I can only imagine how nerve wracking that was.

But I’m interested now, how do you use social with the gallery in Mayfair that you were talking about, and at the start of this conversation you’re like, we were not like that.

And how do you present yourself as a gallery that is open to everyone to come in? Do you do stuff in your space to make it feel different from those other galleries? How do you still keep that distinction from the old guard?

Joe: It’s a challenge that we talk about every day at the gallery with the team because how can you be continually accessible and what does accessibility look like in an industry which is predicated on the idea of exclusivity? Like how does that work?

And for us it’s always been about broadcasting our artists to the biggest possible audience and our communication style, our language has always been very conversational.

And when you say Unit London, the first thing you say is you phonetically and the you logo is a big part of our brand makeup and a big part of our entire communication strategy. Because we felt the galleries were not really talking to the public, they weren’t talking to you, they weren’t talking to me.

They were talking to their collectors or the people who they wanted to speak to. So, having the gallery in Mayfair, it was us looking at our artists and wanting the best for them.

We knew that in order to really achieve success for our artists, we needed to be there at Mayfair. We needed to be able to connect with the taste makers of the industry and the people who were really influential.

So, a lot of our ambition and our growth in that sense is driven by the responsibility that we have to our artists to develop their work and build their careers and make an impact for them.

But then there is this kind of like antithetical thing which we’ve tussled with for a long time of Mayfair is that snooty elitist space. We’ve combated that in multiple ways. I mean, even just if you walk up to the gallery, we have an automatic sliding door.

So, even if you’re not planning to come in and you’re just going for a stroll past, the door will swing open. And we have extremely friendly staff behind the front desk who always get up when you come in and show you around the gallery.

We maybe just apply kind of different principles to the gallery experience. We know that the physical gallery is no longer just like a sales showroom, maybe like it was 20 years ago. It’s actually a space for creating experiences that people will share.

And I think where lots of galleries have always perhaps missed the mark is we place so much value on the experience of people walking into our gallery, and we don’t discriminate as to whether somebody might be a huge art collector or whether somebody might just be off the street and could have some positive onward impact on talking about our brand or talking about the experience to somebody else.

But as our artists have gone from selling for 200 pounds to 50,000 pounds, obviously a very big jump. We have built other kind of aspects of the gallery, like an editions program where we’re creating prints and limited editions, which are much, much lower value to allow people to still buy something and leave with something from the gallery.

But also, I think just our communication strategy, the fact that we’re open seven days a week, the fact that we’re constantly asking our audience to contribute and participate in our events, in our social channels and conversations.

For us Unit London is putting you at the heart of the experience. And I think that’s something that really kind of differentiates us from lots of other contemporary art galleries.

Cat: It’s so interesting hearing you talk because I feel like everything you’re saying is stitched with intentionality, with inclusivity and also sort of removing the elitism around the art world for both artists and for consumers of art.

But there’s no doubt as well that Unit London feels so absolutely 10 steps ahead of everything else that’s going on. This is such a fast and exciting narrative.

Do you see yourself in that way? Do you see yourself as being a pioneer in the industry or is it just that you are trying to just be intentional and inclusive? Or do two things coexist at once for you, do you think?

Joe: I don’t think we’ve ever seen ourselves as pioneers necessarily, just because we’ve always just done what’s natural to us. And like I say, social media was something that was just available to us and something that we had an affinity with. And then maybe an intuitive understanding of.

It’s kind of turned out that the use of social media has pioneered the industry because it’s allowed brand new artists to come to the fore and get represented by the huge galleries and be showing in museums, it’s allowed brand new collectors to enter the space.

So, it’s radically changed things, but I don’t think we’ve ever seen ourselves as pioneers in that sense. And I don’t think we’ve necessarily pioneered anything.

But for us, conversation is really what we want to try and achieve. And I think lots of galleries have for a long-time kept conversation between themselves or kept conversation between them and their collector base or the people that they want to speak to.

And a lot of the time exhibitions or shows are kind of communicated through the mouthpiece of the gallery and everything is very adopted and carefully curated to fit their narrative.

But for example, we have an artist her name’s Helen Beard, and her work is very bright, bold, colourful, and she paints very sexual paintings. And a lot of the time they’re female bodies and her work and her message is all about as a female artist, taking back ownership of sexual imagery and taking back ownership of body image for women.

And when we post her work on social media, the response that it kicks up is just fascinating because some of the work is quite explicit, some of the imagery is quite explicit. And you have this incredible debate on social media of some people who are just kind of, this isn’t art. How can this be allowed to be shown in a gallery?

Others supporting it and explaining it to other people, even in our comments. And a lot of the time these will go viral and there’s all sorts everywhere from trolling to real kind of evangelism.

But those conversations are exactly what we want to create. And we feel like it’s our role and our job as a gallery to provide the context for artists to be seen, to be validated, to be discussed, to be debated.

That should really be the core function of a gallery, is to stimulate those conversations and drive those conversations. That’s what should be happening online and that’s what should be happening ideally within the galleries as well. We want people to come into the space and be free to express themselves and be free to have an opinion on the work.

They don’t have to like it. No one has to like all the work. For us, if they feel something from the work, then that’s job done.

I think that kind of conversation, that discussion is something that we always try and foster. And going back to kind of how we differentiate ourselves from other galleries, I think in many ways that’s how we build our programming.

We really listen to our audience. We feel a sense of duty and responsibility to make sure that we’re constantly challenging our audience’s expectations and opinions.

We actually want to understand the sentiment, understand the cultural discussions and ideas that are kind of floating around in the community. And then, yeah, that two-way conversation is fundamental to our gallery. It’s what’s probably propelled us and carved out a more unique position for us versus our peers.

Cat: Yeah, that sounds so exciting because I feel like it inverts a lot of what the gallery experience traditionally is where you’re walking around looking at paintings, reading the blurb on the side, which tells you what to think about it.

That’s so fab that you can watch in live time people having maybe a really heated discussion in the comments and as you say, having the people who totally hate it versus the people who totally love it, which is all a reaction, it’s all a response and it is all valid.

I feel like that must be extremely educational for the people in the comments to read. It must be a complete joy for the artists to read and also just extremely useful data points for you as a gallerist to go, “Okay, this is the reaction that this got. This is so interesting. We can actually see the true authentic reactions to the work.”

Because I do wonder, again, as someone who would go into a gallery, I’m not having conversations like that with strangers around a piece. I have not yet been to Unit London and maybe that does actually happen there.

Joe: Have to change that soon.

Cat: Definitely. But I feel like the comments in a social media post actually is such a brilliant place for that where people also maybe sometimes have the anonymity to say, I don’t like this. Which they might not maybe feel like they can do in real life because I think so often it is sort of heralded as being so wonderful and untouchable. So, I think that’s such an exciting application of social.

Joe: Absolutely, yeah.

Cat: You strike me as an ambitious individual. What is next for Unit London? What do you want to continue to do with this? Are you going to expand globally or how is the vision going to develop?

Joe: We do always try and track back to our original mission of the gallery and thinking about how we can increase opportunity for artists, how we can champion creativity in our communities and our audiences, how we can get more people involved in understanding and having access to great art and great artists.

We have had opportunities over the last 10 years to open up spaces internationally, and I’m sure that would happen. I think 10 years ago if you’d asked me what success would look like for the gallery, I would’ve said, yeah, we want to have like a hundred galleries all over the world, in every big city and have this huge workforce and la, la, la.

Actually, I think as we’ve kind of matured somewhat, our goal isn’t actually about scale, it’s much more about impact. And I think we can have impact now in ways which don’t necessarily equate to lots of physical spaces and a huge team.

It could just be creating impact in other ways through initiatives like residency projects, residency programs, grants, prizes. We are looking at partnering up with art schools in the UK to develop scholarships for young artists from non-traditional backgrounds, let’s say, to be able to access art education, social media training courses.

Because our story is really, we’re so indebted to social media and the tools and the opportunities that it’s afforded us. We want other artists to be able to kind of take the same tack and use it to their advantage.

So yeah, our next project is a residency project, a space where artists can kind of disconnect even from social media and the pressures and the cycle of having to produce work for galleries or collectors, a safe haven where they can go and focus on being creative and making work. That’s our next immediate project and it’s 10 years of the gallery this year, so-

Cat: Wow.

Joe: So, we are currently focusing on a big sort of campaign project and exhibition where we’re taking something like 150 artists and we’re doing a 10-day exhibition in September, where each day we are focusing on a specific artistic discipline and launching a decathlon of events.

We are incredibly ambitious, and we do want ultimately to change the art world and to allow our artists to become generation-defining and reach as many people as physically possible.

We’re constantly looking at how we can adopt new technologies or new ways of communicating to tell our artist stories, basically to the widest possible audience.

Cat: Talking about pioneering new ways of connecting with people. Can you maybe tell me a little bit about your Web3 program that you’ve set up?

Joe: Yeah. So, Web3 is quite a scary term still for a lot of people. And when we started with social media, I mentioned the art world were kind of up in arms and there was this knee jerk reaction to this technology because they thought that it wasn’t serious, and it couldn’t have a place in the art market.

And actually, when NFTs kind of exploded on the scene a couple of years ago, there was a similar reaction from the art world. There was this kind of huge uproar, this is no way to promote art. This is a technology that’s just bad for our industry.

And I just saw all the same things. It was like Groundhog Day of what we were experiencing back in 2013. And the beauty of Web3 and Blockchain is that it allows for artists to be paid royalties automatically on every secondary market sale.

So, when an artist currently is showing at a gallery or sells a work, they generally will sell the work and the commission will be split between the gallery and the artist.

When that collector who owns the work in five years’ time sells the work often for a massively inflated price, oftentimes the artist doesn’t get any payment from that increase in value and from that secondary sale.

But Blockchain actually allows, through a smart contract, it allows the artist to be paid royalties on every single future sale in perpetuity. And I think what that will do is just create a much more equitable system for artists.

And a marketplace that actually becomes a lot more fair and gives much more autonomy to the creators and the artists who are actually responsible for putting the work out into the world. So, that’s what initially attracted us to the space.

And then those crypto cats and crypto frogs and dogs and every other animal in between which kind of basically scared everybody off the industry because people just thought, well, Web3 and NFTs is just this kind of token trading cars and avatars that have no real artistic merit. And 90% of that is totally true. A lot of it was just pump and dump moneymaking schemes.

But there are digital artists who are creating work using Blockchain and using generative art practices, algorithms, artificial intelligence, and other software programs to develop really, really interesting super complex, incredible artwork who are basically now able to make serious money and be kind of validated as artists through this technology.

But we’re getting lumped in with the whole NFT Crypto Bro conversation and we decided to create a Web3 program that could actually identify the small number of artists who were creating fascinating, meaningful, interesting work in the digital space.

And we decided to start representing those artists and giving them an introduction into the contemporary art world, started to introduce their work to collectors, started to contextualise their work in meaningful ways. And that program has developed into something really, really special.

And we now regularly host Web3 based exhibitions at our gallery in London. So, physical exhibitions of digital artworks.

And it’s become a massive part of our programming. We have an entire Web3 team at the gallery who are dedicated to working with those artists and cultivating collectors within that space.

Again, it’s an uphill battle to convince people who are fundamentally ideologically opposed to the idea of Web3 and Crypto, at a top line level they just shut off from the conversation.

But I think, if you find the common denominators between the believers and the non-believers, when you focus on the quality of the work and the artistic merit of the stuff that we’re showing, that’s something that at least people can agree on.

And then if you bake into that, the idea that important historical art and radical artistic movements are always seen as somewhat crazy or stupid at the time they’re introduced. And it’s only through the future lens where we can look back on it and see that actually the people that were pioneering those technologies or pushing these ideas forward may actually have some serious historical relevance.

And I think that’s what will eventually happen with artists in the Web3 space. And I think, as we move into a way more digitally integrated world and our lives are just much more wrapped up in the idea of digital, how are digital artist not going to become more prominent.

And I also think the traditional archetype of an artist is this kind of crazy creative character who’s maybe a bit useless with business or anything rational. And they’re super wacky, whatever.

A lot of these artists in the Web3 space are some of the smartest people that I’ve ever encountered. They’re coders, they’ve written software programs, they teach computer science at big universities and they’re kind of using programming and coding languages in a way that’s actually not goal or product oriented, but in a way that’s open-ended and creative.

And when you actually really kind of pay attention to what they’re doing. It’s genuinely fascinating.

And I think as we kind of develop and as coding also becomes a more kind of constituent part of education and a skillset set that more and more people are up taking, I think it’s only natural to see that that particular form of communication or language, because coding is ultimately a language. I think that language is going to be used in more and more creative ways to create art.

It’s something that we’re really passionate about and really invested in. It comes down fundamentally to the ethos of the gallery, which is, it doesn’t matter who an artist is, where they’re from, what their background is, what their practice consists of. It’s about identifying and championing talent, however that exists. And our job is to then create the context and tell the story of that artist to the most people that we possibly can.

Cat: Joe, your excitement is palpable, and it is contagious. I cannot wait to go and do a massive deep dive on your Instagram, but if anyone else who’s listening wants to do the same, where can they interact with Unit London online? 

Joe: Just unitlondon.com. And then our socials are at Unit London.

Cat: Perfect. Joe, this has been such a joy. I really, really love the work that you’re doing, and this conversation has been so brilliant. So, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today.

Joe: Thanks so much, Cat. Lovely to meet you.

[Music Playing]

Cat: You’ve been listening to Social Creatures with me, Cat Anderson. Many thanks to Joe Kennedy for joining me today. And you can find all the links to Unit London in the description of this episode.

And of course, a special thank you to Sprout Social for making this podcast possible.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to let us know on social at @Sprout Social and subscribe to hear other episodes like this wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks very much for listening, and we’ll see you again in two weeks.Contemporary Art and Social Media: Unit London’s

The post Contemporary Art and Social Media: Unit London appeared first on Sprout Social.

[Music playing]

Cat: Welcome to season two of Social Creatures, a podcast from Sprout Social. My name is Cat, and I’m here to explore some of my favourite success stories from the world of social media.

This is a space for anyone and really, nearly anything goes, but what makes an account successful or popular? Honestly, it’s hard to know, but that is exactly what we’re here to find out.

Throughout the series, we’ll talk to the brands behind some of the best accounts that you know and some that you don’t know yet to explore the way that these businesses, organisations and individuals have achieved their success on social media, and how you can do it as well.

Today, I’m very excited to be joined by a true luminary in the realm of social media strategy and consultation, Matt Navarra.

If you’re remotely connected to the world of social media, Matt’s name is likely a familiar one. With an illustrious career spanning over two decades, Matt has emerged as one of Europe’s most well-known social media consultants.

Having collaborated with some of the world’s most well-renowned brands from the likes of the United Nations, Google, Meta, the BBC (that’s just to name a few), his insights and expertise have propelled him to the forefront of this ever evolving industry.

With a career that’s littered with incredible stories, huge names and career defining highlights, I cannot wait for this conversation today.

Matt, I’m so thrilled you’re here today and as someone who has 20 plus years of industry experience, and you’ve worked with some of the most popular brands and you’re known by name, by the platforms themselves, you are definitely a seasoned social media expert and consultant. Like everybody knows your name.

Can you talk me through your career so far and how you’ve got to the level that you’re at now?

Matt: Summed up, that basically says that I’m old, I think that’s where we’re with things. But yeah, I prefer the terms you used. Thank you for that.

I have done social media for over 20 years now. I started in social media. My first role in social was around 2009. I didn’t start with a career in social. I left uni in 2002, did a degree in business and marketing.

I went to do a job on a grad scheme, which I thought was the beginning of an illustrious career in the world of banking, and I hated every minute of it. No aspect of social media because at that point, it was 2002 and we had maybe MySpace and a few other things or whatever, but it wasn’t anything else.

And then I spent time becoming a teacher, I trained to become a marketing manager in another industry and I did a variety of other roles, and then I went travelling and then I came back and thought I really need to think of something I want to do that I would enjoy.

And so, then I started a job for the UK government as a press and PR comms manager for the intellectual property office in Newport actually.

And it was only then in 2009, I started this role of seeing that there was lots of social media accounts that other places were creating in government, but we didn’t have any, my boss didn’t want me to make any, and I decided just to do it anyway under the desk without anyone kind of knowing.

I was fortunate that it was successful because I had some tie ups where I managed to connect with the BBC Dragons’ Den team, which led to a kind of collaboration that did really well.

I asked for a lot of help from people, I was upsetting bosses still in that role. I think I found the email address of the Director of Digital Communications for the cabinet office who didn’t know me, told them that I was wanting to do more, that I felt I could do more and could be better, and that I admired her successes and would she kind of give me an opportunity to spend time within her team.

And that was, I think, the turning point because from there, I got an opportunity to work in London for the cabinet office, managing the UK civil service account, the cabinet office account. And then later on Downing Street and spending time with the Prime Minister’s social team.

And so, that was kind of like the opening piece. That took me to my first role in social, and I’m happy to kind of dig into where it went from there, if that’s of interest.

Cat: Yeah, I just think that’s so interesting because it’s safe to say you maybe bumped around a little bit beforehand, which I think is something that a lot of people can relate to.

What do you think it was about social media that really seized your attention at that time? I guess, it must have been super exciting because it was so brand new as well.

Matt: Well, yeah, and typically, at that time, government accounts would trail what was going on with private sector, kind of proper brands using social by a good couple of years, and they were much more, as you’d expect, risk-averse and they were not sure about its value to them as an entity in government.

And so, there was a few people and I was probably one of them at the time, that kind of was quite excited at the prospect of what government could do with social media and how it could use it to engage citizens, and how to use it to further the agenda, positive hopefully, agenda of the particular government of the day.

And so, I saw lots of excitement and opportunity, whereas I think a lot of people at that time in government and people in charge, the sort of senior civil servants, were very kind of sceptical, risk-averse and avoidant of it all.

And to me, I was like a lot of other people around 2008, 2009, which was, Facebook was relatively new. Twitter was equally new, 2006, 2007 onwards. And I had my first social media account other than Facebook, was my Twitter account in September of 2008, and I didn’t know what to do with it.

I was thinking, do I post about the fact I’m going to a coffee shop with a friend and take a picture of a croissant, I have no idea what to use Instagram and nothing else for.

But I think the thing that hooked me in particularly with Twitter at the time, which I think was the same across social for me, was I could message or post something on Twitter and then somebody that was famous or I admired who worked as a CEO of a company or as a celebrity in a program I liked, whatever, could be mentioned, they could see that.

I could imagine them being able to see my post and get the mentioned notification, and then possibly replied to me in that direct line of communication with someone like that.

And I had several early experiences with BBC Tech news correspondence. That’s how geeky I am. That was the people that I was interested in connecting with to. I think Rory Cellan-Jones was the first person for those that may have been aware of him, he was BBC’s main tech correspondent at the time.

And I messaged him and said, “You don’t know me. And they say you don’t ask, you don’t get. So, I’m asking, can I spend a day with you following your work?” And that was simple as that. And then he replied in a direct message saying, “Sounds good, come and spend some time with me.” And then I was like that’s amazing.

And so, that was the buzz, that was the hook that kept me in. And then the growing of the Twitter account that I had took place many years later and I wish you I could say it was very strategic and planned, but it kind of was quite organic, and then it snowballed and it went from there.

Cat: I love that you have now mentioned two instances where you’ve really advocated for yourself and at that time, where presumably, as you said, people were not even really too sure about the value of social.

Do you think that confidence helped sort of propel you forward? I mean, I really love that you just sort of asked these people to sort of get access to them.

Matt: I think that that’s probably a personality trait. I’ve always been fairly outgoing and also and somebody who likes to take calculated risks. But I don’t mind doing something that maybe other people wouldn’t feel as confident in doing and accepting that the potential risks to me or the organisation.

I’ve often sought out job roles that have given me opportunities where I don’t have to kind of censor myself too much.

But I do a lot of coaching calls with people now as part of a new thing that I’ve started doing with social media professionals where I’ll do 15-minute coaching calls for free, and there’s always the same questions and the same issues: “My boss doesn’t see the value in social and I’ve got a lot of rules I have to follow and I’m a bit unsure to do this or to do that.”

The head of social and digital at the cabinet office told me on my first day, “Just effing do it, and that’s the only way to get on in government, otherwise you wait for approval and sign off, it’ll be sanitised within an inch of its life.”

But yeah, I will often tweet out saying “I’m in London, do you want to meet up for coffee?” And I’ll meet complete strangers who follow me on Twitter and have coffees with them. I think the ADHD is another part of that, which is a facet of who I am. I think that played a big impact on my career.

Cat: I just love that you’ve taken the social aspect of social media there. Like when you’re talking about going to meet people, you’ve pulled that through into real life, which I think is really, really powerful. I love that you’re going to meet new people.

I just want to touch a little bit more on the work at number 10 before we move on to The Next Web. What was it like there?

So, you’re mentioning here a lot of sort of like ask for forgiveness, not for permission, which I think people who work at social media love, but at the same time, you have also touched on that a lot of people are working with people who don’t see the value, who are restraining them a little bit.

Were you able to sort of do much of that in number 10? Because I would imagine in the world of restricted social media accounts, surely number 10 must be like right up there at the top in terms of what you can and cannot say, and stuff that’s drafted over and over and over, or perhaps you were in early enough so that it wasn’t like that.

What was your experience?

Matt: In terms of kind of the experience with the cabinet office accounts and civil service account, and then 10 Downing Street accounts at that particular time, yeah, it was particularly sanitised and it was several layers of chains of command.

The number 10 press secretary, and then you’d have people that were special advisors to the Prime Minister or to the Conservative Party. And there are different people that run different bits of social when it comes to 10 Downing Street.

So, when you are managing digital within Downing Street, you are not directly managing Rishi Sunak’s account right now, for example, he has his own special advisor who’s very, very good actually at the moment running his individual social accounts.

But in terms of the number 10 account, that’s the number 10 digital team, and then the Conservative Party account, that’s a separate thing. Again, they’re all run by separate different teams, but there is a level of coordination and a hierarchy of who’s say is valued more or is ultimately the final sign off.

It has improved since, I believe. Government is a lot better now at digital and social than it ever was. And I was in Downing Street actually on Monday this week meeting the number 10 Downing Street team working on digital.

And they seem very optimistic. They are doing some really interesting, incredible new things they’re doing all the things that social media managers would want to be doing in that role, which is trying new platforms, thinking about threads versus X, talking about the challenges, the fact that government can’t use TikTok at the moment.

So, they have to think about how are they going to reach younger audiences if they cannot use TikTok. They can use creators and influencers but they can’t directly use it.

And so, they have all the similar challenges and concerns and questions that we all have, but there is an extra layer of sign off that is probably quite correct to have.

When you’re in government, reaching that location to be doing social is kind of for most people in public sector comms can be seen as the top of the tree and it is a great experience. And it’s equal parts frustrating because of the limitations and restrictions.

Like you have question marks over if we tweet something and it has an element to say something to do with international relations, you could damage global international political relations with another country in a tweet.

It sounds dramatic to say that, but those sorts of things are poured over and considered. And remember when I first started, I would say, “Why can’t we tweet about this whimsical, lighthearted, just for fun type piece that makes it feel a bit more authentic?”

Well, yes, but if such and such of an instant happens in the world that is unpredicted and unexpected, and then they go back and look at that tweet and it out of context changes the meaning of things, that kind of lighthearted tweet has significant ramifications for the Prime Minister and the political parties.

So, there is good reasons why there’s checks and balances in that kind of social.

Cat: Yeah, gibbers, I feel like the anxiety of thinking something inside out and back to front because as you say, for the best of people, sometimes people tweet things and then it ages like sour milk as they say. So, when they have such large ramifications, that must’ve been a little nerve-wracking.

But I’m interested Matt, because obviously, that in itself would be an amazing career, but this is just the absolute tip of the iceberg. How did you get from being in number 10 to being this industry-known, like tipster industry known expert, known by the platforms, being invited into the HQ of all of the different social media platforms? How did you propel into that sort of personal profile?

Matt: In terms of like the next stage from there, I connected with the CEO of The Next Web and he knew of me from following my Twitter account and the government stuff I was doing and said, “Do you want to come and have a look, a role in Amsterdam for being a director of social for The Next Web?”

And The Next Web of technology news site, a bit like TechCrunch and The Verge. And it had an event of 3,000 people at the time in 2013 that they run every year for one day.

And I said, “Then what do you want me to do?” “Well, just give us a social media strategy, figure out what we can do to amplify the distribution of our news content and come up with a strategy for our events in Amsterdam.”

So, I took the job on, the two first things I did was one, have a meeting with the CEO and co-founder of the company, and he did the whole don’t ask for permission, kind of ask for forgiveness. And I said, “Well, what are the limits because I’ve come from government here, I can’t do a lot of things in my old role.”

He goes, “Well, put it this way Matt, if you just tweet up to the point where it gets us summons to appear in court for something, that’s the point to stop, that’s your limit. So, just do what you think is best, we trust you.” Which was humorous but also, quite empowering to have that level of control and autonomy.

But in terms of the question around how did I get known out of that, I think it was because a couple of things. I recognized that when I went to events where I did social — because we had an event in New York and an event in Sao Paulo and some other places. I would go with the team, travel with the team to manage social locally for that two weeks.

And before I got to New York (every year, we did the event for three or four years), I would find the companies that were most interesting to me, which were like Wall Street Journal, United Nations, NBC, all these other brands.

And I would find who their Social Media Manager was on LinkedIn that was New York based and senior. I would then email them a message them saying who I was, what I do, and could I come into your place of work and just meet you, it’d be great to have a coffee.

Most of them didn’t know me, some of them did. And I think for about three years on the trot, I went into some of the biggest organisations in the world to chat to them about their social team and what they did.

So, that was one thing I did. The other thing I did was I recognized that people were fascinated by all the bits of information when you open up an app like Facebook and a bubble comes up saying “new feature” and you’re like, “Oh, this is a new thing.”

So, I’d then screenshot it and I’d tweet it out, and say I’ve got this new feature. And people were like, “Oh that’s really cool, how have you got that?” And that snowboarded so that people wanted more of that, so I kept on doing it.

And then I quickly cottoned onto the fact that if I tweeted out screenshots or something, those tweets would be put in articles for BuzzFeed or TechCrunch or whatever.

And I just sat there and thought, “This is easy free marketing, if I just tweet stuff for everyone else and they put it in all these articles and it gets featured all around the world quite quickly, Matt Navarro’s the name, and what I do is going to become quite quickly known” and it did.

And so, when I got to the end of that career junction at The Next Web, and I’d had maybe 15, 20,000 Twitter followers from just doing that, I had one media request to go on the BBC news, which our team didn’t want to do.

So, I said, “Well, I’ll go on BBC News and talk about social if you don’t want.” Once I’d done one of those, then Sky News, CNN and others, their producers would see it because they’re all watching each other and see if it is a good guest they can pull onto their show.

And then once they’ve got you in their little black book of guest potentials, then they tend to keep ringing if you’re doing an alright job. So, those were some of the main things.

And then finally, in the last year before I left The Next Web, I went to a lot of social media conferences like South by Southwest and I went to Web Summit and others, and I would kind of see the same people I always see at those events, but I would kind of corner them over a drink in the evening and say, “I’m leaving The Next Web and this is what I’m thinking of doing. Do you think it’s a good idea?” And I would sound bored off of them as to what to do.

Cat: I wonder if you’re being a little modest there about how you started just to tweet out about the new features.

As your profile grew, did your access to this information grow? Because I know for a fact that you have some absolutely bananas stories. There’s one that when we have spoken before, perhaps you could share the story about when you were in Twitter?

Matt: Yeah.

Cat: This one’s brilliant.

Matt: I think you’re right in the sense that as I did more of those tweets and posted more about that, and I also then started connecting with people that were super cool, good at coding and understanding HTML and JavaScript, and all that sort of stuff that I still don’t have any clue with.

And they helped me uncover details within the code, which is what a lot of people now do that kind of thing. At the time, no one was doing that.

And so, they would give me information about what they were finding in the code, and then I would leak it out and post it. And there was one incident that I remember, a story before I mentioned the Twitter thing, was that I was given through a friend details about Instagram TV, and they managed to capture through their means, the screenshots, the images, all of the specs for IGTV and everything else about the launch.

And so, I just took the information, posted it, thought nothing of it, and then later that day or the next day, it was officially launched but I’d got a day’s jump on them.

So, I met Instagram’s Director of Comms for Europe a couple of years later and I asked her about that incident and she said, “Yeah, did you realise that you absolutely trashed six months of comms planning, campaign, strategy planning around how we were going to do the launch. You leaked it 24 hours before and it completely shot our thing to death.”

So, my relationship with platforms like Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, initially they weren’t really sure, and I still don’t think they really know how to have a working relationship with me because I’m not a journalist.

I’m not a pure creator influencer sort of person. And I’m not just a consultant or speaker at events, I kind of do a bit of everything. So, they never know which one to treat me like.

So, there was an incident when I went to South By and I had an email and it came up and it was from somebody who’s senior at Meta or as it was then, Facebook saying, “Oh, we see that you’re at South By, we’d love to meet you for a drink. Would you like to come to the private Messenger launch event party thing at this bar?” And I was like, “Yeah, that sounds good, I’ll come along to that, that sounds alright.”

So, I was a bit curious as to how they knew I was there. I don’t think I’d tweeted about it, which is a bit sketchy.

So, I got to the front of this party cube and I gave them my name, said, “Matt Navarra.” And he said, “Sorry, Matt Navarra is it? Can you just wait there?” And I was like, “Yeah, sure.”

And then this woman came along, she pulls me up in front of like six people, I still to this day don’t know who they were. And this guy just looked at me and sort of leaned in and just said, “So, who’s telling you this information? Where are you getting it from?”

And I was like, “What?” And I thought, “Do I have to tell him now? Are they going to stick me in a van and like do me in?” I couldn’t tell, I had no sense of reading the tone of his voice, and then he just sort of paused like what felt like forever. And then he just said, “I’m only kidding, I’m only joking.” I was like, “Alright, fine.”

That was kind of like a moment where I kind of reminded myself that they do see what I do and they’re all watching.

But that same year South By was a funny year because about two hours after that meeting of Meta, I had an invite to the private Twitter party. And for those that go to South By, will know that their brands have all these activations and private parties, and Twitter had its own branded Twitter house thing.

And I got there and by this point, I’d had a fairly large amount to drink, I think. And this guy sided up next to me and said, “You are Matt Navarra, aren’t you?” And I was like, “Yeah.”

And he said, “I got some information that you’ll want to know.” And I said, “Yeah, what’s that then?” And he said, “Oh, I know about the edit button, edit tweet button.” Which back in 2017 or 16 the conversation happened wasn’t obviously a thing. And everyone was speculating on will they ever give us an edit tweet button.

And I asked him some questions, he showed me some information on his phone, and I quite quickly was like, “This is legit.” And it showed me some internal mockups of the edit tweet button and some information about what they’ve been working on.

So, I just do what I normally do. I was like sat inside the Twitter party tweeting about a new feature that Twitter didn’t want anyone to know about.

And then I shared it all, and within about five minutes my phone started ringing. And I picked up and it was an American mobile and it said, “Hi, is that Matt Navarra?” I said, “Yeah, it is.” “Are you tweeting about Twitter from the Twitter party? I’m the Head of Comms for Twitter.”

And I was like, “Yeah.” “Where are you?” And I was like, “Somewhere in your party.” And she said, “I think we should have a drink, come and meet me. I’m at the bar at this place.”

So, walked over sheepishly to this woman who was in charge of comms for the team, and she was quite cool about it from what I recall, and shared a drink and then made an agreement that they would give me some information in advance of revealing it publicly if I agreed to not share any more information about the edit tweet button.

The relationship is a tricky one. I go into the platforms offices and chat to the teams or they’ll tell me stuff, and most of them, they will send me all of the press embargoes or they will tell me information, saying, “You might want to know this, if you want to share it with people, that’s your choice.”

Kind of like selectively leaking it left open-ended. That’s not an uncommon event in my inbox.

Cat: It’s really interesting because I feel like when you say these stories where people are summoning you to private tables or the Head of Comms is phoning you, like, “What’s going on Matt?”

That sort of, I don’t know, triggers a little bit of anxiety in me, but you do have good relationships with these platforms and I’m interested, you’ve pretty famously, I feel like it might be one of the first sort of hits about you when we Google you. Twitter took over your account a couple of years ago, and so far as I’m aware, I think that’s the only incident of that really happening.

So, maybe you could tell us how did that happen?

Matt: Yeah, that was another weird one. I seemed to have a career littered with weird, bizarre, twisted stories to do with social.

I can’t remember what year it was, but I think somebody might have died in my family at the time or something was not great at that time. And I decided one of the few occasions where I had step away from Twitter because I was such a frenetic Twitter user, suddenly going dark would’ve been a bit odd.

So, I tweeted saying something like, “I would be stepping away from my account for a short period, things going on in my life, but if anybody wants to make use of my account …”

Again, this is what I’m like. Rather than just saying I’m just not going to use Twitter for a while, I thought well, my account’s got quite a good following, and a charity or a business or somebody who wants more experience managing a larger account could have my account and do something with it, and I would happily give them access to it. I’ve got nothing to hide.

So, I put out a tweet saying that if anyone wants to own it, manage it for a bit, and use it for something useful, sensible, which is not what ended up happening, then do so.

And then I had a DM from the @Twitter account saying, “Is this serious with a link to the tweet?” And I said, “Yeah.” And they replied, said “We’d do it. And I was like, “Alright then.”

So, then there was this nervous moment where I gave over my two factor authentication code in a DM to Twitter so they could log into my account. I should say that I deleted most of, if not all of the sensitive direct messages between me and other platforms, executives at other platforms, celebrities that I’ve been working with on social. All of that stuff had kind of been removed so they couldn’t see it.

And they then for 24 hours or a short period made an announcement on their Twitter account, and then on mine saying they’d taken over it, and they tried to mock what I used to tweet.

So, they would put things out saying, “Breaking news, Instagram is just a home for the best tweets.” There’s some really funny ones that did really well, they did all of that, and I thought that’s quite cool. And people thought it was interesting. I think I added about from memory 8 to 10,000 new followers on that particular few hours they did it.

And then the TechCrunch decided that they thought that this was a data privacy risk and how irresponsible and inappropriate it was for a major tech company to infiltrate another accounts even if permission was granted their DMs without the people that’s sent Matt Navarra’s DMs have been approved. The fact that they’re seeing these messages, but of course, I knew I deleted them.

So, it caused a little bit of controversy, but I think the attack by TechCrunch was more on Twitter than it was on me. And of course, for people that were geeks and social media managers are like, “This is awesome, this is so fun.” That was another bizarre moment amongst many I’ve got in my time in social.

Cat: Yeah. And I mean, I don’t mean to just keep trying to get all of these bizarre stories out of you, but is it safe to say there’s a little bit of beef between you and Mark Zuckerberg? What’s the story there? Again, what a sentence to say.

Matt: So, over the years, my name must have come up in front of him a few times and I know that because for example, when I was at The Next Web, when they first launched Facebook Live, Mark was doing lots of live in Mark Zuckerberg, and it was people like Andrew Bosworth and the rest of the team talking about Facebook.

And so, in some of those, I would add a comment and my account was verified at the time, so it would rise to the top a bit. And there’s video clips from those lives where Mark Zuckerberg’s saying, “Matt Navarra asking blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

And a couple of times, that’s happened and I think probably a good dozen of times on his posts where I commented on his posts, he’s directly replied and engaged and stuff.

But in terms of one particular incident, I think I was flying to New York to do The Next Web conference, and my sister lives in Canada and she knew I was going to be nearer to where she was in Canada, and we were going to meetup.

And so, just before we took off from London, there was a big story going on about how Facebook had turned the outcome of the elections with Donald Trump and how bad that was, and Facebook’s role in all of that.

And so, I think Mark Zuckerberg would’ve posted something saying that Facebook has not done that and it wasn’t their fault, and some evidence to suggest why it wasn’t all this sort of stuff.

And I commented saying that that was rubbish, and that they do have a responsibility, and that they would’ve had some level of influence over it, and that it’s ridiculous to think that they didn’t or something along those lines.

So, I got to New York and landed, turned on my phone, my phone just like was exploding. It was going nuts. And then my sister rang and she said, “Oh, see that you’re in America already then.” And I said, “Well, just got here.” She said, “Well, I saw you, did you do some TV while you were there? You were on the TV this morning, you really were, here’s a link.”

Cat: Oh my God.

Matt: And then there was this story, I think it was the Breakfast Show in the U.S, saying, “Mark Zuckerberg has said this, but one Facebook user disagreed with Mark Zuckerberg, and he said …”

And they had like this picture of my account and then my thing I’d said, and it said, “But Mark Zuckerberg argued back saying that Matt was wrong because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And it was just a whole thing.

So, yeah, but I don’t think it’s any bad blood because I did a podcast for the Geek Out stuff and we had who is now the number two at Facebook, Andrew Bosworth on and he said to me, “You should pop in if next time you’re in the neighbourhood.”

Cat: Oh wow, that’s such a wild story. That just must have been such a surreal experience hopping off and your sister telling you you’ve been on Breakfast TV.

Matt: Crazy.

Cat: So, Matt, you have mentioned Geek Out, which is obviously a huge part of you and your brand and what you’re known for. But for people who maybe don’t know what Geek Out is, can you tell us a little bit about it?

Matt: So, Geek Out came out of the back of leaving The Next Web, going solo. I had a Facebook group I had planned to create and do something with The Next Web, but it never was used. It was kind of dormant and nothing was going on.

So, I reset the group and created a group called Geek Out. And it was really just a place where I thought I could share news into, people could discuss what’s going on rather than just on Twitter where it felt more like it was me just curating the news without much discussion. I thought this would be a place for people to do that kind of engagement and discussion sort of stuff.

And that now, is like, I think 35,000 members in that free community. But off the back of that, I then thought, “You tweet quite a lot about all this stuff, but it’s hard to kind of keep on top of it all, could you put it all together?”

So, I thought, well, I could do it in newsletter because Everyone was started doing newsletters more about three or four years ago. So, I started doing that and at the same time, I thought, well, I’ll throw the idea out about podcasts.

So, a bit of news, a bit of kind of chatting to people in the industry and a newsletter that summed up, rolled up all of the stuff into one place with no intention of it becoming anything more than a useful learning experience for me, and maybe it would be another way to grow my audits in a little way, but beyond that, that was my only ambition.

But it kind of mushroomed because then I had some DMs come into my accounts, saying, “I just saw your tweet saying you’re going to launch a newsletter. I’m from Khoros, Spredfast (was the company at the time), we’d sponsor your newsletter. How much do you want for sponsorship?”

And then I think Pinterest DMed me and said, “Oh, we’d love to sponsor the podcast, would you be up for doing that?”

And this was early on into becoming a freelance, I had no understanding of what would make a good ad unit in a newsletter. How much should you charge for an ad unit? What should I offer as a bundle for sponsorship and how long should the podcast be, and should it have ads inside the podcast? And what branding would it need?

So, I had no answers to these questions and no experience of doing it. So, I was going into calls with Pinterest and them saying, “We like the idea of doing a podcast with you. You calling it the Social Media Geek Out, but we are not a social media company, so can we call it Matt Navarra’s Geek Out?”

I felt so cringe, I felt so uncomfortable in my own skin with the concept of my name being in the title. They said to me, “First of all, how much do you want to do the podcast, and how many episodes would you do?”

And I was like off microphone to my colleagues saying, “Should we do 6, 45 minutes?” “Well, six episodes, 45 minutes.” And then they’re like, “We’ll offer you £10,000.” And I was like, “Yeah, that works for us, 10,000.”

And then they’re like, “Can we change the name?” I said, “Well, you can change the name but it’ll affect future branding of other stuff.” And they said, “Well, if we offered you more money, would you be willing to kind of change it then?”

And then my morals went completely out the window and I was like, “Okay, I can change the name.” And they’re like, “Well, how much would you want?”

So, I was like, again, “Oh, just a second, sorry, well, how much do we want? How much do we want? 20,000, we want 20,000 for doing the name change.” They said, “Yeah, that’s fine.” I was like, “Oh, we should have asked for more.”

So, that was the extent of my kind of negotiation and my ability to understand what to do. And like the newsletter, I literally looked at 10 or so newsletters, saw whereabouts in the newsletter they were placing ads, and how they’d made them look, dug around to see what sort of price people were charging for a newsletter, and then evolved it over time.

It was all made up as I go along with a little bit of background reading and checking out what others were doing. And then if we weren’t getting people interested or attracting sponsors and things, we would adjust it.

So, now, it’s become this bigger thing. It’s kind of the Matt Navarra speaker consultant sort of person who goes into companies and brands and talks about social.

And then there’s the other bit, which is the kind of Facebook group, the WhatsApp community, the Geek Out newsletter, which is the Ying and the Yang or the Jewel personality of me and Geek Out.

Cat: That’s amazing, and it must have felt risky to go and step out on your own. I feel like anyone who transitions from working within a salaried position to going out as a freelance consultant, that’s always nerve-wracking.

And it’s interesting, I respect your honesty of talking about like trying to navigate the pricing, but what were the biggest challenges that you found for doing that? Obviously, it’s ended up well, but I’m sure it was a bit of a roller-coaster as well.

Matt: Yeah, I think that some of the hardest things from going from a paid salaried role as a social media manager or a head of social or anything else, and going to freelance, I had the same fears as most people who I talk to who are now considering doing that, which is, I’m used to the security blanket of having a regular income, which is the obvious one. And will I get any work? Will people find me, and will I be able to cope with the administration of managing my own business?

I think those tend to be the three big ones and the ones that I was most fearful of. And I was pretty terrified, but I think that I was kind of cornered because the role at The Next Web meant that I had reached the top of the tree in that company, and the salary …

I think at the time, if I’m honest, I was earning at The Next Web, I was their Head of Social and I left on £70,000 at the time in 2017, 2018. And I had shares as well in the company.

So, that was quite scary to leave that, but I was really fortunate in that I’d done the TV bits and I’d done this thing on Twitter and I’d had a few things people have found me for, and met lots of people in industry.

And I’d sounded out lots of people, so when I made the jump, I was really pleasantly surprised to see that there was quite a lot of interest in me doing stuff with these companies and speaking at events and doing more media stuff.

I think the other thing that was challenging, which I know we haven’t really touched upon, but I think that an aspect of why I think I’ve got on well with being a solopreneur on my own, is my ADHD.

I didn’t realise until 2008, 2009, I’d had like six jobs, pissed off every manager, I was going off work with anxiety and mild depression because I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t do certain things and why everyone hated me at work.

And then, process of figuring out it might well be ADHD, adult ADHD and went through the assessment. And so, they always say for people with ADHD, it’s often a decision they make to go as an entrepreneur, but it’s a tricky one because managing a business when your condition is about lack of organisation and focus, you’d think that might be the worst thing.

But if you think of it in a sense of being able to control what work you choose to do and not do, being able to choose how you do your work and where you do your work, then that helps.

And I realised that this is the world that’s far more suitable for someone like me with my particular ADHD setup, and it’s worked out pretty well. Many people with ADHD have it really severe and actually get more of the downsides and less of the benefits, but for me, I feel like I’ve got a lot of the superpowers of ADHD, which it gives you and are unable to manage many of the downsides.

Well, and I think a lot of the companies I work with are very forgiving. I often tell companies now like Google, I’ve worked with in the past and they’ll ask me to do a piece of consultancy work and I’ll say, “Look, I’m not going to produce a shiny strategy document. I will give you the things you want from me, but I’ll do it in multiple in person or recorded Zoom calls, and you can record it, all of it. You can ask me as many questions as you want.”

“But what’s more important is you want what’s in here and should it matter that it’s in a document, which I would find very difficult to put together because of the skill deficit with ADHD.”

And most of the times now, I think I’m lucky because of the place I’ve got to in my career that most companies I work with are like, “Fine by us, we just want information you’ve got and the experience you’ve got. We don’t care if it’s not in a document.” So, that’s quite fortunate.

Cat: That’s amazing and I think society in general seems to be a little bit more open to acknowledging if not downright appreciative of more neurotypical profiles. And certainly I think within social.

I obviously am definitely not a medical expert, but I think you do see a lot of people who actually do have an ADHD diagnosis in the creative industries and in social. Have you noticed that yourself?

Matt: I would say in my professional experience of working in social for 20 years and with someone that has a neurodiversity … with ADHD that some of the, if not most of the best social media managers or professionals I’ve worked with have ended up being people that I’ve later discovered have ADHD.

I think it’s no coincidence that there’s a lot of people that work in social media management roles that have ADHD or similar Neurodiversities. I think the job lends itself to help them exploit the bits that are good about ADHD in many ways, or the things that they can do better than other people because of ADHD in terms of multitasking, jumping from different things, being able to be super passionate about certain aspects of the work, and the frenetic pace that they have to work at in these sorts of roles.

There’s equally parts of the role of working in social that you think are very hard for people with ADHD and that’s true as well, but I think it’d be naive to say that ADHD is a great thing because it’s an absolute nightmare.

But I think employers are generally far more supportive of it, and something that should be celebrated in some ways. And I think that that’s why people who are listening to this who have somebody that they discover might have ADHD and you wanted to recruit them for a social media role, you probably found a gem.

And they should kind of look for some of these talented social media managers because it shouldn’t be a warning signal, it should be a come and get me, really.

Cat: I absolutely love that, thank you so much, Matt, for those answers. And honestly, thank you so much for our talk today. I feel like I could quite genuinely talk to you for hours and hours and hours and that we’ve only scratched the surface.

But I really want to thank you for your taking the time today. So, thank you so much.

Matt: It was a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

[Music playing]

Cat: You’ve been listening to Social Creatures with Me, Cat Anderson. Many thanks to Matt Navarra for joining me today. And if you want to find out more about Geek Out, check out the link in the description of this episode.

And of course, a special thank you to Sprout Social for making this podcast possible.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to let us know on social media at Sprout Social, and don’t forget to subscribe. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll see you again in two weeks.

The post Climbing the Social Media Ranks: Matt Navarra’s Insider Journey appeared first on Sprout Social.

[Music Playing]

Cat: Welcome to season two of Social Creatures, a podcast from Sprout Social. My name’s Cat and I’m here to explore some of my favourite success stories from the world of social media.

Social media is a space for anyone and rarely nearly anything goes, but what makes an account successful or popular? Honestly, it’s hard to know, but that is what we’re here to find out.

Throughout the series, we’ll talk to the brands behind some of the best accounts that you know and a few that you don’t know yet, to explore the way that these businesses, organisations, and individuals have achieved their success on social media and crucially how you can do it too.

The key to success for the majority of industries on social media tends to include being relatable, having an authentic tone of voice and following trends.

But in the world of high fashion brands, it seems the standard industry rules just don’t quite apply to them. Instead, social media seems to act as an extension of how luxury brands position themselves as aspirational and emulate a level of desirability that’s frankly unreachable.

So then, how do these brands approach social media? What are their goals and what makes it so unique?

Today, we’re going to be stepping into the world of high fashion and luxury to explore how these iconic brands continue to rewrite the rules and redefine luxury in the virtual world.

Joining me today is Maxime Bicard, Director of Digital Brand and Social Media at Versace.

Maxime, I’m so thrilled that you’re here today and as a digital communications expert for fashion luxury, I’m so curious what your career has looked like to date. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the people that you’ve worked for and maybe how you fell into this career path?

Maxime: Yeah, of course. So, I was working for a lot of big clients on some exciting projects, working on the first paid campaigns on Facebook, Twitter, Google, like it was really new, very exciting. And one of the clients was Vogue.

So, when they were looking for a social media expert for their marketing team, I moved to Condé Nast where I was working for Vogue, Lamo, GQ, Vanity Fair and AD.

I was approached by Versace to lead their digital brand and social media team, which is basically handling all their social media influencers. But also how the brand is evolving with the new technologies, it’s a great moment for luxury brands because there’s so much happening.

But it’s also so interesting to be in the luxury field and in the digital communication field because a lot of what you see in other industries do not apply in fashion luxury. Like it’s so specific, there’s so much conversation around how do you approach this from a fashion luxury standpoint.

Cat: Yeah, first of all, that resume is breathtaking, what an exciting career. Social media and luxury fashion obviously do go together hand in hand, but it’s sort of an anomaly of an industry because for so many other industries the key to success on social media is to be relatable, authentic. Is sometimes to be a little bit rough around the edges, a little bit raw.

Also, to follow trends and the world of high fashion is just not really any of those things. You define the trends; you are not totally relatable and that’s part of the industry.

So, I’m so curious in your eyes and with your experience, how does the world of high fashion approach social media and what do you do that’s so unique?

Maxime: I completely agree with you. I think that the way other industries have been approaching social media is so different. And as you say, where other brands are being relatable, we don’t manage community, we don’t engage in the same way such like other brands can do.

For luxury brands, social media has been an extension of the way they’ve been communicating for so long, which is through being inspirational. It’s definitely the key word for our brand positioning themselves on those channels.

15, 20 years ago they would shoot a seasonal campaign with the biggest photographer. It would go out in Vogue; it would go out in Harper’s Bazaar, it would go out in Elle.

Nowadays, they just shoot differently because they shoot so many content, but they have the same approach of having these very high expectations. Everything is amazingly beautiful, so controlled.

But the social channels and overall, like the way those brands are communicating, it’s just an extension of that idea of being inspirational. And I think that it reflects in so many ways.

For instance, I think … industry have dedicated, I would say like organic people not trying to sell you something but really understanding the market. All of those people will have a luxury background and they say no, everybody in this industry, they understand how luxury houses are working and they’re really helping the platforms understanding as well what is the goal for luxury houses?

Because we are not trying to be trending on Twitter, we are not trying to have the best cheeky tone of voice, like the best joke, no fashion brand is doing this. What we’re trained to do is to have this very beautifully crafted message that is inspirational, but everything is centred around the branding.

Like what is your brand about and how do you express it on social channels? It shouldn’t be social channels that dictate how you communicate about the brand. It’s like the way round.

And I feel a lot of industries are trying to trend, they are trying to engage with their customers, fashion luxury brands, it’s like a bit the other way round.

Cat: I think that’s so interesting, and you mentioned at the start there as well about how it used to be that in fashion you would be doing shoots that would go into print, so that’s not constant.

And if you’re trying to maintain that level of beauty across social media, I imagine that’s a lot of work because again, if you’re maintaining those standards, you want to keep that level of beauty and perfection and artistry across your grid.

So, let’s say we’re talking about Instagram, you want to keep that level of artistry perfect. That must be a lot of pressure when you’re actually coming to post things. Do fashion houses post every day, what’s your cadence of even posting?

Maxime: Don’t try to work around the algorithm, try to do what’s best for your brand. And I think that a lot of fashion brands have been experimenting, but your content is not going to be more engaging if you post every day.

That was kind of the case a few years ago and I remember when I was at Vuitton, we were posting three times a day because they have the capacity to produce that amount of content, not all brands can do this.

But what we can see definitely is that if you push whatever content you have just in order to say, “Okay, we posted today,” it’s not going to engage in the same ways that having like a thoughtful strategy where you say, “Okay, this is the right message, this is the right product we want to push, this is the right photographer, this is the right type of video.” It works well within the storytelling of what we’re trying to say at the moment.

I think a lot of brands are trying to get out of this mentality of saying, “Okay, we need to post twice a day, we need to post every day,” because if the content is not right, it’s not going to serve you.

And actually, you can see that sometimes brands can post twice a week, but it’s so perfect that who cares. It’s going to engage; people are going to be excited about. And so many of those brands are breaking the rules.

You look at Balenciaga, every season they remove everything and they’re going to post everything at once. Looking at Jacquemus and Jacquemus is doing a bit of personal, he’s doing brand stuff, he’s doing a bit of everything and it’s a huge moment whenever he’s posting because it’s unexpected. Everybody in this industry is talking about it.

So, the important part is really the branding to be at the centre for your strategy. If you are starting from, “Okay, I need to post twice a day,” you’re going to fail. There’s no way around it.

I don’t know if it’s across other industries but in fashion luxury for sure, we are moving away from this.

Cat: And I think that makes perfect sense because otherwise as you say, the brand message will get diluted and what is most important is getting that consistency.

I wonder as well with a lot of online fashion on social media, a lot of what they’re bringing in is direct to consumer purchasing and like e-commerce, obviously only a tiny proportion of your audience are actually going to be able to afford to buy your clothes.

So, I’m curious, what are the success metrics that you would typically find if you were in Louis Vuitton or you’re in Versace, are you looking to build audience? Are you looking just to get the tick of approval from the CEO or Donatella? What is it that you are working towards? What are your goals?

Maxime: It’s such a complex topic because it’s a mix of so many different parameters. Because when you work in that field, you work in there as a scrutiny of a creative director, someone that is involved in every creative direction for the brand.

Even though you are creative first industry, you still have business goals, and you have metrics. But metrics is tricky because if you are looking at engagements and reach or followers, it’s kind of a vanity metric.

Of course, it does represent brand power. The biggest brands have the biggest amount of followers. So, like Vuitton, Gucci, Chanel, Versace, Prada, Dior but engagement or reach are not representing fully the power of your brand message.

So, we are looking actually at a lot of metrics and usually our reporting is integrating all of those. We are trying to mix some fully organic metrics like reach, impressions, engagements, communities with some listening metrics as well, like how much people are talking about the brands, all the online conversations, paid metrics of course, we are also linking it to the e-commerce.

So, even though we’re very inspirational, we’re still trying to sell products, even though brands might have from 30 to 50 million followers, and we know that all of them are consumers.

But if you are having a good clickthrough rate for your advertising, if you’re having a good conversion, it’s still channels that can bring revenues.

But at the same time, we knew that desirability was not often linked to engagement. Because the way we wanted to present the brand was a bit more elevated, a bit less accessible.

So, it’s a balance between so many different parameters and definitely it’s so different from e-commerce brands. Like what you are providing is brand image and you’re building up desirability. So, inspirational content, that’s it. But it’s very up to measure.

Cat: I think it’s just so fun that the fashion industry is almost resisting everything else everyone else is doing by saying, “No, this is not how we do things. This is what we’re going to do and we’re going to stick to our guns.” And it’s working and that feels appropriate.

But I’m wondering with the stretch of your career, have you seen how fashion has evolved with its use of social media?

Because the first thing that springs to my mind is I think it was last year when Francis Bourgeois was an ambassador for Gucci and I just couldn’t believe my eyes that this was happening, that this really cute little trainspotter from England.

Maxime: Love him.

Cat: I love him, I thought that was so fun and it was such an interesting campaign, where they were really digging into social media to get influencers. Yeah, I’d love to hear your take on that. How do you think that it’s evolved?

Maxime: So, this is more on the influencer side, and I think this example is quite important because it shows like a trend also in the ways that fashion luxury brands are approaching authentic creators rather than typical influencers.

Like the way it’s been structured over the last 10 years, is brands would only approach, I don’t know like 5% of what we call influencers that were really dedicated to fashion luxury.

So, they would be working with the same 100 people that we all know and follow and it’s really hard for other talents to get in touch. So, the barrier of entry is very strong and fashion brands are not so interested in numbers.

They wouldn’t go for somebody that has 5 million if this person is also doing advertising for toothbrush or like crypto, it’s a no go. And even the slightest collaboration with a fast fashion brand, it’s over. You’re never working with fashion luxury ever again.

So, you had this pool of people that were either coming from luxury or new — very well and that were able to create beautiful content and it’s been working really well for like the last 10 years honestly.

But over the last few years there’s been a change and I think that a lot of brands are also trying to leverage a new generation of content creators that we can basically call like YouTubers and TikTokers and that are more passion driven.

And Francis Bourgeois is a good example and there are many others of people that have created a community around their passion, and they haven’t tried specifically to push any deal around this.

It’s really organic and we can see those kinds of profiles starting to attend fashion shows, working with a few brands, it’s still a lot of the original influencers but you can see space for people coming from the gaming industry or just people that have new communities.

Mostly I would say like Gen Z, it’s the best way today I think to approach them. People who just have been creative and that have been able to express it online in an interesting, unique way.

Cat: I think it’s really fun to be honest, like from a consumer perspective because again, Francis is such a great example of somebody who just captured everybody’s hearts with his raw enthusiasm and passion.

And I personally think as a brand ambassador, having someone like that who is quite wholesome but really appealing is much nicer than maybe some of just the classic celebrities. And I understand the appeal of classic celebrities as well.

As you said, I think Gen Z are opening up to that conversation a little bit more and making space for different types of passion and where it can be seen and different types of aspiration. I just love him though; I think he’s just so magical.

Maxime: But also, I believe that it works really well for Gucci. When he was working with Gucci, I don’t know if he’s working with them again, but at the time the creative director was Alessandro Michele who has this playfulness.

He’s a bit cheeky, he’s also a bit of at the top. He’s very passionate about a lot of things. Would that work for Dolce & Gabbana? I don’t think so. It’s not like in the brand DNA to do those kinds of collaborations.

Dolce & Gabbana did Kim Kardashian and for many reasons, people were kind of surprised by this. But at the same time in terms of brand image, it works, it’s what people are expecting from this brand.

And Francis worked for Gucci because it makes sense with like the brand DNA and at the end of the day it’s coming back to this. Like last year for Spring-Summer 23 fashion show, Versace had Paris Hilton to close the show.

At the time, the brand DNA and the brand image were aligning quite well with Paris Hilton, and everybody was very excited. Understand your brand DNA and then everything is kind of easy and organic.

If you are like a very traditional brand with quiet luxury, if you are like Zegna, Brunello Cucinelli, are you going to work with like 19-years-old that do gaming on Twitch? Would your consumer understand this? Would you get a new audience that would be interested in quiet luxury? I’m not sure. So, they’re not doing it.

Gucci is a good example because they’ve been also very innovative. They worked with Roblox, I think they worked with animal crafting, if I’m not wrong.

But once your marketing team and your digital team understand really well your brand DNA and is able to build a strong digital platform, everything is kind of obvious in the way you’re going to construct your different messages and the people you work with and the way you create content, it all comes down to brand.

Cat: You mentioned quiet luxury there, which I think is something I’ve been hearing everywhere now. And I think there’s been a bit of a cultural shift from maximalism when it comes to high fashion to quiet luxury. I do think some of that might be down to succession.

Maxime: Definitely.

Cat: Yeah, right.

Maxime: 200%.

Cat: The fashion of succession just completely influenced everybody, and everyone was like, “No, no, no money talks and wealth whispers,” so it’s all about quiet luxury.

And I wonder when you keep talking about the brand values, say you’re a Gucci, you’re a Versace, do you use social media to see, okay people are really crazy for quiet luxury now and maybe we’ve been more associated with maximalism and does the brand voice adapt with that?

Also, as well, we’re moving into a time of socioeconomic difficulty for a lot of people. So, being really ostentatious with fashion, is that something that fashion houses take on board or do you just weather the storm and stay true to your brand voice through it?

Maxime: Of course, you’re going to monitor these kinds of trends and how it impacts the consumers and the consumption of goods. A lot of brands are thinking about quiet luxury, how to approach this.

But I believe that if you are a maximalist brand and really, it’s part of your DNA, nobody is going to go to Moschino to get a quiet luxury brand instead of Loro Piana, or like Hermes, it doesn’t make any sense.

Your DNA is so strong, it’s so identifiable that you can’t lie to your consumer about who you are because they know.

Whenever people within the marketing team are working on their strategy, of course they have some sort of short-term thinking, like how do we address these new trends and how do we address as consumer?

But at the end of the day, nobody is going to come to your brand for the wrong reasons. If you want a really nice suit, you’re going to go to Zegna and if you want some really grey beautiful sweater, you’re going to go to Loro Piana, but you’re not going to go to other brands because this is not the core business.

And right now, there’s a big trend on quiet luxury and the brands that are benefiting from it are not the ones that are trying to emulate this, they’re the ones that wear quiet luxury from the start that have been doing quiet luxury for sometimes now. 

Cat: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I was thinking as well about … you’re probably going to hate me for saying this, but that very famous scene in The Devil Wears Prada. When there’s that scene between Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway and Meryl Streep says, “Okay, we basically chose that jumper that you’re wearing.”

Do you see that at all with trends on social media? Because I know fashion often is the trendsetter. Are there things that you can see on social media where it’s maybe like a very diluted version of something that the fashion houses have started?

Maxime: I think now it’s a mix of both. I believe that of course fashion houses are starting certain trends and you can see some trends coming from runway shows where okay, there is this silhouette and it’s really going to define the next few years.

But now the cycle of trend is so crazy and also, it’s so diluted and I think it’s quite amplified by the platforms like TikTok where you actually have so many communities and so many ways to approach fashion that it’s also informing in a way what fashion brands are going to do next. So, it’s a bit of an exchange of ideas.

But nowadays everybody is a niche of something, especially as a new generation. And you can see this being reflected in all of those communities where people are obsessed with recurrence or people are really into archive fashion.

And I think it’s going to push the brands at being more unique and have higher value for the consumers because now they know the history of the brands, they know what they’ve been proposing, and they also know fashion really well. So, they have to be more innovative, they have to be stronger in the creative proposal.

Cat: From the position where fashion is absolutely an art form, and we’ve already talked about the curation of what you’re posting, and you said yourself it’s highly controlled. It makes me curious how does the world of high fashion and luxury fashion within social media use video?

Obviously, it’s a lot harder to control that, but video is obviously hot, hot, hot in the world of social media. So, I feel like I often just think of still images. So, I’m curious how much video plays into your strategy.

Maxime: This has been such a push from platforms to move to videos, like brands to adapt as well. They still stick to images being kind of the central points of their communications because the idea of print, even though a lot of brands are moving away from advertising in magazines is so strong.

Like you have superstar photographers, you don’t have yet superstar videographers in terms of content creation. So, video I think is just as controlled as any other type of content that is coming out, but depending on the platform you can do different things.

I think the main challenge for brands now is obviously TikTok. Because what people are expecting is so new and different in the way it’s filmed. Then brands have been struggling a bit and for a while, they’ve been just pushing campaign videos, or they’ve been pushing like a bit of behind the scene.

A lot of brands now are experimenting in the ways they create videos on TikTok. And Versace has been pushing a lot of content from fashion shows around top models and it’s performing really well because what are people excited about for Versace?

Well, who’s working the shows and other brands have been doing stuff around craftmanship. It really depends about what type of brand you are, but there’s been most certainly a big shift towards video over the last three, four years.

Cat: I guess I have one final question for you and hopefully just a nice easy one. It’s like taking your favourite child, but what is the most favourite campaign that you’ve worked on in your wonderful and illustrious career? I’m so curious because I bet you’ve worked on some amazing ones.

Maxime: Wow, okay, you got to let me think for a second. I mean, this has been like so many amazing moments. It’s really hard to pick one. And also, I’m not specifically thinking in terms of campaign more really in terms of moments.

One of my favourite moments from fashion shows was the fashion show Versace did in Los Angeles in March. It was a crazy amount of work, but the result was stunning.

And all of the guests that we had were so amazed by the seat setting, by the collection, it made sense being a brand that is celebrity centric, being just two days before the Oscars.

So, everything was aligned. I had people texting me right after the end of the show and saying it was just amazing.

Cat: Wow.

Maxime: Yeah, so it’s been many beautiful moments.

Cat: So, Maxime, before we finish up our discussion today, in this season of Social Creatures, we are sourcing questions from the industry for some of our guests. And we have one today for you.

So, this question is coming in from Abi Errey, who is head of Creative at Hometown Creative.

Abi: Hey Maxime, it’s Abi Errey here from Hometown Creative. So, my question is about showing behind the scenes of the business. You often find that with smaller businesses or perhaps less luxury brands, there’s a lot of behind the scenes that you can show on social media and obviously that seems to be quite popular content at the moment.

Do you have any tips for sharing that sort of content or even your thoughts on whether you should share it at all as a luxury brand?

Maxime: Hi Abi, thank you so much for the question. Behind the scene content is definitely on the rise also with luxury brands. The way it’s currently being approached is not only having a social media manager shooting content on an iPhone.

But just like any other type of content, having proper photographers, videographers, shooting interesting images and videos with the same type of expectation we would have for any other type of content.

So, it’s usually more up and coming names. Our directors within the brands are going to scout those names and partner with them to produce some nice content around fashion shows, around campaigns. And it’s definitely a growing trend I would say.

Cat: This has been such a pleasure to dip my toe, my baby toe into the beautiful cornucopia that is your world. I have really enjoyed this conversation. I’m so envious, I can barely speak.

And I’ve learned so much. Thank you so much Maxime for taking the time to talk to us today, I really appreciate it.

Maxime: Loved it. I love this industry and I’ve been working there for a while now and I’m not tired at all about it.

[Music Playing]

Cat: You’ve been listening to Social Creatures with me, Cat Anderson. Many thanks to Maxime for joining me today and a special thank you as ever to Sprout Social for making this podcast possible.

If you’ve enjoyed this episode, make sure to let us know on social media at Sprout Social and subscribe to hear other episodes like this wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks again for listening and we’ll see you in two weeks.

The post The Digital Runway: Social Media Marketing in Luxury Fashion appeared first on Sprout Social.

Cat: Welcome to season two of Social Creatures, a podcast from Sprout Social. I’m Cat and I’m here to explore some of my favourite success stories from the world of social media.

This is a space for anyone and really, nearly anything goes. But what makes an account successful or popular? Honestly, it’s hard to know, but that’s exactly what we’re here to find out.

Throughout the series, we’ll talk to the brands behind some of the best accounts you know, and some that you don’t know yet, to explore the way these businesses, organisations, and individuals have achieved their success on social media, and crucially, how you can do it too.

If I’ve learned anything from this podcast, it’s that success on social comes in all shape and sizes, but whatever your goals are on social, you need to get people’s attention.

And wow, to say that today’s guest have done that is an understatement. I am, of course, talking about Ryanair.

With a relentless focus on cost-effective operations and a customer-centric approach, Ryanair has established itself as a true success story in the aviation industry.

Today, we’re going to delve into Ryanair’s disruptive marketing strategies, their unique messaging, and how their clever utilisation of social media and digital marketing has further contributed to their overall huge success.

Joining me today, is the brilliant Michael Corcoran, Head of Social & Creative Content at Ryanair. And just to let you all know ahead of time, this episode does include some bad language.

It also includes tons of great insights, but if naughty words aren’t your thing, feel free to skip this episode.

Michael, it is so great to have you on the show today, and I can’t wait to get stuck into this because Ryanair, holy moly, your social media presence is absolutely enormous.

You are known for having a savage tone of voice, which basically, demonstrates your wicked sense of humour and a tonality that is frankly just chef’s kiss. Everybody loves it.

But one thing that is really, really obvious about your social media presence is that it feels incredibly intentional. And in terms of your social media matching your brand, it feels very much like Cinderella’s foot on the Glass Slipper.

So, I was wondering, could you tell me a little bit about how you landed on this particular social media strategy?

Michael: People think it’s something that has been generated within say, the last two years since we kind of took a shift in strategy, and kind of supercharged our social media channels. Now, most of that was a mix of conditioning and luck.

But for many who are familiar with Ryanair of the past, the tone has been there for a very, very long time. Like when we moved to the low-cost model — we live and breathe low-cost as a business, that doesn’t mean we’re cheap; we’re efficient, and every pound or Euro all counts.

So, we took a very strong route to PR-led marketing in the early days of Ryanair, and that was driven by the back of our CEO, and everything was about low-cost, high-return reach, and the only way we could really stand out was being disruptive.

Kind of added to that as well beyond the tone, but there’s a disruption in our DNA, and like we disrupted aviation when we came to the market. When you flew British Airways, Aer Lingus, the big national flag carrier in the early eighties, it’d cost you an arm and a leg just to go on a holiday.

We democratised travel for everyone, and we disrupted the industry, and the rest is history for us and for others, and what we’ve done in the market. So, we were given a licence to do that, and we were almost allowed to go back to our roots and speak and behave in a way that we’ve done for a very long time.

Now, the team did that even before I was here. It was present, but it was probably mixed with a couple of other styles of corporate social media marketing that we took a decision and became disciplined in not doing certain things.

And when it comes to strategy, strategies are about sacrifice sometimes, and it’s about doing something but also, not doing things at the same time. And look, I think a lot of what we’ve done has been born off good timing and luck at the same time of certain platforms too, especially the emergence of TikTok.

When TikTok arrived and started to become popular, COVID hit. Our industry was decimated. We had social media teams before my time who were here that had no destinations to talk about because you couldn’t go there.

So, TikTok arrived, they found a way for it to be of relevance to us. They test, they learned. They didn’t land on it straight away, but it became this comfort blanket for the world that we really tapped into.

We started to identify patterns around the type of tone and the type of content people were looking for on the internet, now and probably all the time that really corporate brands have broke for many, many years.

Like people go to the internet to be entertained and to get away from all the chaos that’s in the world. And that was certainly on TikTok, driven by Gen Z and Gen Z culture, and the ability to project how they’re feeling good and bad on those platforms, and almost lean in on dark humour, dramatising the things that are happening in the world, and joking about it in a dark way to make it okay and for them, to process it.

And we took a lot of learning from that. We took a lot of learning then from what we’ve done in the past, and we started to match it together and bring it across all our channels. And yeah, it’s had impact.

Look, you’re very complimentary on the success of what we’ve done, and I think we’re trying to be as humble as we can in what’s happened, but there are many people who get it, and there are many people who don’t get it and dislike it, and that’s okay too because we’re not here to please everybody.

We are a polarising brand, and we’re starting to learn more and more about that certainly in social and hopefully, beyond our creative, that that’s actually a superpower we have in our marketing tool that can take us many, many places.

Cat: I don’t think there’s very many people who have not encountered Ryanair on social media, but just in case there are, I’d love to hear in your words what would be the adjectives that you would use to describe your tonality?

Michael: We are self-deprecating and irreverent when it comes to some of the cues we have in our tone of voice. We are not afraid to make fun of ourselves in the process.

And we’ve identified social has been this place where people have used Ryanair as a joke and we’ve become this meme for years of when people fly, and you ask, “Who do you fly with?” And they go “Ryanair.”

And you hear a tot or an eye roll and it’s just like that’s the instant reaction, and there’s always jokes about flying with us. So, rather than kind of moving away from it, we lean in on the joke and we’ve started to not take ourselves too seriously, and that’s okay.

Because we’re really confident in what we provide when it comes to value and reach and connectivity. And there’s just certain things we don’t do other airlines do because it’s not necessary. We’re a low-cost budget airline.

So, self-deprecation is a huge part of it. Being disruptive, playful, provocative, we know is going to grab attention for good and for bad. So, that’s another component that goes into it. And the last piece then is irreverence.

So, to be relevant to topics that’s happening in the world, you need to have a view and opinion on it, and we aren’t afraid to do that. But what we try and do is then we try and link it directly or indirectly back to something about what we do. And then that gives us somewhat, permission to be talking in that space at that moment in time.

Now, there are other cues we’re developing — now, that’s purely social tones, but like if I was to give you the tone of voice answer; our three kind of anchors, we are clear and concise. We don’t labour on words, we come straight to the point. We try and communicate as quickly and as directly as we can.

We’re honest and direct. We’re not afraid to say the things that we should say or do about us and about what’s happening in the world, and we’re playful and we’re self-deprecating.

They’re the main anchors if I was to give you the document of what our tone of voice is.

Cat: Well, I think it’s really clear that you are authentic to the brand, and this is something that, again, I always say that when I say “authentic” in a conversation about social media, a colloquium goes off somewhere because it’s so overused.

But truly, you really are authentic to the brand, and I feel like hearing you talk about how you saw how people were talking about your brand and instead of trying to resist against it, leaned into it and have some fun with it, it really brings the audience along with you.

And I think it’s something that a lot of brands try to do but fail. They might have a very sarcastic tone of voice online, but the real-life experience doesn’t really line up. Whereas, I feel like it is pretty consistent; you know who you are, and it is reflected.

Do you think that this ethos is shared within the company? Is this how the whole company as an entity operates?

Michael: It’s a difficult one. Like when it comes to not taking ourselves too seriously about what we do, yeah, that’s inherent. But we are a serious operation and a serious machine.

We’re putting 3,000 flights in the air per day. Our on-time performance (I’m drinking the Kool-Aid here now, so you’re getting a bit of the spiel) and how we operate in every inch of what we do is obsessed about in this business.

But we are a brand that try to be something that we are, we want to represent who we are and what we do, and that’s getting you from point A to point B for the lowest price possible as close to on time as possible. And everything we do lives and breathes here.

Marketing might have got a little bit lost along the way because again, like all brands, they use social in a way that they thought was right, that was trying to be this fake, filtered, natured brand on the platforms that just doesn’t cut through.

That was influenced a lot by the influencer era within Instagram, but also, us brands, and we all have to take the blame for breaking social media, and that normally happens on most social media channels that we always fuck things up.

And not many can do what we do and behave in our way because they’re afraid to do it. But also, they don’t believe in their products so much that they have to shape things around it to make it better than what it is.

Our product is unbreakable in this business, that it’s been done and set up in such a way, and the operation is so smart that even if we don’t do anything on social media, even if we don’t do anything on marketing, this business is so confident that they’ll reach 300 million passengers by 2033, with the objectives and the plans they’re going to put in place. And I wouldn’t doubt them for a second that they won’t reach that.

Cat: So, that’s really interesting. I just want to jump on one thing that you said there that even without the social media, you think the model is strong, we’re going to hit that anyway. What does social media contribute? Why is social media such a big part of Ryanair, then?

Michael: There’s still the timeless truths of marketing. You still have to have top of mind awareness to drive some sort of consideration.

Now, we’re lucky in a sense that no matter when you search for flights, whether it’s aggregator sites or Google search or wherever you go, we’re going to be probably present because normally, they’re filtered by cost and value, and we are going to naturally appear. So, that’s not a concern for us.

But it’s just finding other ways to reinforce being top of mind. And that’s the big part, and it’s why earned media is so important too because it generates even more top of mind awareness.

We do have some other challenges within the brand or business that we know social is starting to solve right now, based on the insights that we’re provided, and we’re even learning that and spreading it across our wider channels.

When it comes to perception about flying low cost, people’s expectations are far too high and we’re trying to identify what has influenced that, but we can’t. And they think they will get premium experiences for a low-cost ticket and a low-cost price, and there seems to be a disconnect there.

And what we’re seeing, most of the pain points are coming from the millennial generation, it’s crazy. It’s people like me, the privileged generation who grew through the boom times expect first class experience on the flight that cost you the price of a can of Coke and a packet of crisps, and it’s just like, “What are you thinking? What is your expectation here?”

And we have a job to shift that perception and that expectation, and social has become a really smart channel to do that. And it’s smart for a number of reasons because it’s a very good playground for us to be playful, entertaining, self-deprecating, live and breathe the brand who we are.

Underneath that angle of leaning with entertainment, we can then start to ladder messages whether it’s reactive indirectly or indirectly baking a message in from low costs, no frills, to actually points around the operation that are first-world problems that people will normally come and complain about on the internet that we can actually start to counter on.

And the last piece of the puzzle then, which I find the most fascinating, it’s probably the one people don’t know enough about, and that’s having a huge influence and we’re trying to find ways to measure it, is that when we go live with content across any of our channels now compared to two years ago, the sentiment within the community has completely changed because of those first world complaints and genuine complaints, and they’re the ones we have to fix.

But when people come in with first world problems underneath something that we might have been quite witty and self-deprecating over that normally people would consider a pain point, but it’s just really a step in the process that you need to understand and be okay with to fly at low-cost.

That we have people who are coming to fight our corner in the community sections. Not just because they’re entertained by the content, because they get Ryanair, and they get the low-cost model.

And we’re seeing advocates being on at it and fighting our corner because we as a brand and as a corporate identity, trying to convince people that we’re not the bad guys all the time, we offer really good things and we’re trying to convince you of something.

There’s a trust gap we still need to go on a journey of fixing properly. But the vast majority of people who fly with us get from A to B as close on time as possible for low price and they never have a problem.

But the difference is, and I’m going to use this analogy, and I’m stealing it from the great Roy Keen, is when your postman delivers letters to your door, you do not open up that door every day, give him a high five, a fist pump or a hog and say “You smashed it buddy. You are nailing it all the fucking time.”

We are like the postman. When we do our job, we do our job really, really well, hail, rain, or shine, and people don’t need to go sing our praise. But what the content is starting to do now, is grabbing their attention or entertaining them. It’s relatable to their experiences but also aviation and travel.

And then when they briefly see the comment sections, we’re triggering them to go, “I’ve never had an issue with Ryanair, I’ve flown with them for the last 15 years. They get me from A to B for a little as possible. Yeah, sometimes there might be a bit of friction, but I’m okay with that. I get what I pay for.”

And we’re starting to see these people actually fight our corner and convince the people who are normally on the fence about us change their mind. And that to me, is a huge lever of why social is playing an important role beyond talkability, reach, and the things that we don’t necessarily need right now, because the business does its work anyway.

Cat: Yeah, that’s amazing because it’s one thing for you to be trying to convince people and bridge that trust gap as you say, to say, “Look, it’s low cost, what did you expect?”

But if you’ve got customers saying that, telling these people to wind their neck-ins for want of a better phrase, and be like, “Look, this is what it is.” A really popular example of that I think is the one where people are complaining that they get a window seat and there’s no window just with the configuration of the plane.

And you have responded so well to that just being like, “Yeah, but this is Ryanair, you’re by where the window would be, that’s just the plane.” But there’s been a whole pile of things like that. I just love that you’ve built a community of advocates now as well.

Michael: It’s an interesting time though for community as well, because we’re nervous, we’re building something that is quite big and strong. But any platform from what we can see with the scary Elon Musk could go to pot overnight. And once it goes to pot, we say goodbye to all that community.

And that’s a big challenge for everyone going forward, but is there a way that if you can build Fandom or whatever kind of fluff word for community you want to use, how can you own that community and bring them with you wherever you go.

And I know Instagram are looking at ways to try and identify that. I think with new threads and other channels, whether you can start to get connections to the community. I know Twitter are, if you subscribe to a follower on Twitter that you can now get access to their email.

Like social is evolving so much that what we’re doing now is great, but it’s going to change with gen alphas and their dark messaging and their smaller communities like Discord and it’s going to be a big, big concern.

Cat: Yeah, but I mean I think at the same time, what I always really like about social media marketing is that every time you do any sort of marketing, you’re having an interaction with a potential customer and you’re building that little connection, whether that’s neurological synapses that are sparked up because something is really funny.

And with social media, unlike many, many other types of media, you get to do this multiple times a day, as many times a day as you see is fit.

So, you have multiple interactions with these people which can help build, as you say, a much stronger community. And because your marketing is based very much in humorous content, I understand your concern, but I would feel quite confident that people would go and find you.

So, say something happens in a platform, TikTok has gone in the morning, I don’t think that’s going to happen. But if for whatever reason, that happens, I would be so confident that people would be seeking out Ryanair on whatever other platform there is, simply because from where I’m sitting and the conversations that I have with people, people love what you’re doing, to the extent that people are now trying to emulate it, and not really that successfully as well.

So, I’d actually love to ask you about the copycat syndrome because I feel like lots of people are trying to do what you’re doing now, what’s your thought on that? Is it the most sincere form of flattery or is it a pain in the neck?

Michael: We try not to think about it out there because again, look, there’s enough eyeballs and enough space for everyone to have their moment in the sun.

What concerns me as a social media professional is, they’re just doing it for reach. Is there really any sort of strategy behind the purpose of it? Of course, the objective of social is to get reach but to be a brash, sassy social brand as everyone kind of refers to it, that concerns me that they’re probably doing short-term success but maybe long-term pain for the brand they’re representing.

And even the type of communication or the things they talk about — like when we try to be, I guess topical on things that are happening, we do our best to bring it back to us directly or indirectly every time; how we think about product, services, policies.

I know it sounds like boring things, but we try to make it work in the context of what’s happening in the world. For others, they’re just doing it for the sake and that scares me. And they think that that’s a route to success.

I contradict myself sometimes on this, that the objective on social in most cases is reach. And if anybody says it’s other, they’re talking to their nose. And I’m speaking specifically on organic social. Organic content is about driving reach.

Yes, it can deliver it, but I have concern that tonally and what you’re trying to do for your brand long-term, it may have much, much impact. And at a certain point, you’re going to have to re-look at what is it doing for the brand itself.

And like I’m trying to think about a couple of brands and I could name and I normally do, and I’m not sure whether I should.

Cat: I want to encourage you to be mischievous, but obviously, only say what you want to say.

Michael: Look, I’ll give you a couple of examples. Like Domino’s are kind of almost in that space and they’re very playful as a brand, but do they need to be pushing the way they are in certain topics and speaking a certain way on social?

I don’t know if it’s needed. They may be forcing it a little too much. They don’t need to force it because they’ve got millions and millions of budget in marketing that is reaching many people. So, they’re going to be mentally available already.

Their creative has always been playful and entertaining, and it lives to their brand very, very well. So, is it a necessity for them on social to do that or are they just hiring people in because they’re working with similar brands that do that and they’re just trying to emulate it for reach, and just to have these noteworthy points within reports or talk about it within the business? That concerns me for a brand like Domino’s.

They of course, can still be playful. They can of course, do very clever things, but talking about topics in the way they’re doing it, concerns me.

In short, there are certain brands this will and could work for. There is a playground to be playful and to be self-deprecating, and I’d love to see more brands do it; but to do and repeat things that we are doing in the ways that we are doing it, I would advise people to really think about the long-term impact that’s going to have for your brand or business.

We do it for a certain reasons. It ladders back up to our strategy, which is fairly robust with true insights and problems and opportunities that we try to solve. And tonally, we’ve always been like this, this is nothing new.

Whereas, many other brands, this is something new, but it could influence how people perceive your brand long-term, which may be great, maybe not.

Cat: I will say that you are in a fortunate position where Ryanair really is prioritising social, and I think a lot of people maybe work in companies where they don’t understand truly the impact of social or don’t put enough effort into developing a strategy.

But then will turn to their social media teams and say, “Hey, can you make this go viral? Like why are we not going viral? Why are we not as big as … like who’s big? Ryanair’s big, make us like Ryanair.”

And so, I would wonder if some of it comes from that sort of headspace. Because the thing is as well, you are getting — one of my favourite articles that came out last year was the Washington Post wrote an article about … I know that you know this article, entitled, Europe’s Largest Airline Is a Troll in Social Media and It’s Working For Them.

And I remember putting a LinkedIn post up and I said that reading your social media is like going to the front row of a comedy show where you’re like, “I cannot wait for this, but I also don’t want to be picked on because I know that nothing is off limits.”

And of course, people want to replicate that. So, I can totally understand your concern about have they really strategized this through, because if not, it’s just going to fall like a house of cards. But it is a little bit flattering.

Just on the comedy thing, I wanted to ask what is off limits? Because I’ve seen you talk about Netflix shows, I’ve seen you kind of make fun of customers, stuff that other brands just don’t go near.

I still think you’re top of the game at it. So, we don’t have to go into obvious things that would be off the table, but what do you say to your social team to say like, “Hey, mmm, maybe we skip that one?”

Michael: Again, we don’t have to talk about the obvious ones. Things we avoid is safety. Anything that’s connected with safety or topics around safety or things that are happening in the world that would link back to safety, we avoid for good and for bad.

As an airline, our safety record is the best in the world, but we don’t want to brag about it nor do we want to bring it into any sort of negative disrepute. There were certain things around being direct and we’re learning a lot as well.

We have made mistakes in some of the things we’ve done sometimes but what we’re so lucky about is we test in the real world. So, there are certain things and topics we know which we don’t have to discuss, are the line, but we try and get close to the line as possible.

What I do is an exercise when people start in this team and when I built the team about a year and a half ago, we created a space called the Cutting Room Floor.

So, the Cutting Room Floor, when you come in and start here, rather than telling you a list of things that you can’t do and put up creative blockers immediately, the Cutting Room Floor is a safe space for them to drop any sort of idea, any sort of topic, to get their creative juices going; get comfortable with the tone and get comfortable with talking about topics that are happening in the world.

In some cases, what goes in there will never see light of day. Some cases, we can actually work it back to the point where it’s workable on the internet, and it’s a good space for people to just get a feel for how far they can push it and we can make judgement calls.

Then sometimes, depending on the type of topic, once it’s not an obvious element that bullies or discriminates, we try things. We’re not afraid to because we have the licence and we’re not afraid to make the mistakes either.

Because if you don’t try, you’ll never know, and I hope that I wasn’t going to use this, but I will — I’m obsessed with Kobe Bryant, and there’s a saying he has called “Boos don’t block dunks.”

So, we’re okay with taking some of the negativity and people who don’t like some of our work in order to make shots, and sometimes those shots don’t go. But if we don’t make the shot in the first place, it’ll never happen.

And like there’s plenty of examples of the content we’ve done that if we didn’t make it because we were concerned, it never would’ve had the reach or impact that got there.

So, I’m trying to give you shape on it, but there’s very little things that are off the table. But there’s very specific ways to mitigate the risk on certain topics. So, we don’t go into space of discrimination, bullying, targeted things.

And there has been times where we have made the slight mistake when mitigating it to still lean in on the topic as closely as we can, but do it in a way that avoids repercussions for the person or the group of people we could be making the joke of.

What I try and communicate with the team as well and specifically environments like Twitter, that when you put something out there — so like I call this the anatomy of a tweet. In the anatomy of a tweet, you’ll put out your tweet. You’ll have people who will like it and people who won’t. And that’s purely on the context of the tweet.

It’s the topic, the information. People will like it, great; we’ll get reach, we’ll get engagement, and there’s people who won’t, and they’ll voice their views on it, and we’re okay with that. And it’s okay if people don’t like sometimes the things we put out.

But then you’ve got people who will take it out of context, and those people who take it out of context is what supercharges the unnecessary negativity sometimes on the back of some of the things you deliver.

There’s people who just genuinely don’t like your brand for some reason, who will just no matter what you put out there, will try and find a way to bring it back to their problem.

You’ll have people who will then just take it out of context for no reason and troll because they’re trolls. And then you’ll have people who are influenced by other people on the internet, and what they say or do.

And when you’ve got influential people who then don’t like a topic, their people will then fight that corner too because people they admire have a disagreement or a different view on it, and they’ll all back that. We see that all the time.

I try and explain the anatomy of a tweet for people to compartmentalise when we put something out there that it’s okay. The team go through it a lot. They’re humans at the end of the day. They’re on a journey of being stronger emotionally when it comes to working in a professional environment.

But social is a tough space to work in where you are seeing and living and breathing every response people pass to your content all the time. And that can put people off, pushing the boundaries and finding that line, especially in our space where we can go that line.

And by explaining this and getting them better, compartmentalising the risks and understanding the environment, and people will like it or people will take it out of context and you need to be comfortable with that. If you can get comfortable day by day, week by week, it means that we’ll creatively push the line more and more.

Cat: I have to say, not just as a marketer, but as someone who considers themselves a creative person, that concept of the Cutting Room Floor signs such a delicious environment to work in, where you can work with other people to find your footing within the company, but also, as you said, to workshop things, to imbue a sense of play into it.

And it’s so rare that something like that exists. You do hear stories where an employee has posted X, Y, or Z. You do hear people getting in trouble, but presumably, you’re quite well safeguarded then against that and actually, are looking out for your social media team to, as you say, with the anatomy of a tweet, to be like, “Hey, we’re baking in the fact that not everyone is going to love this.” So, your staff are quite well protected.

Michael: Yeah. Like again, and we’re all humans and even myself, I’ll feel bad sometimes if something doesn’t go right, and we all have emotions. But my job is to lead out the team and protect them, and to empower them to do their best, and that’s for good and for bad.

So, we do have safe spaces to be creative and I do my best to support them and understand how the environment works so they’re not feeling heavy when things are out there. They’re on a journey of getting better, but we have a social media policy.

Yes, we take certain risks on certain things, but we’re supportive with our legal team knowing that we’re okay with taking this risk and if something does backfire, that we’ll deal with it. We all know what we’re trying to do here in Ryanair when it comes to our social. We all know the strategy, we all know the tone.

Sometimes we’ll all question it. We even get nervous ourselves sometimes on whether it’s having an impact. But we’re starting to see, and I guess as other people come into the business from external with their own views on it, either as an employee or as a support, we’re seeing the articles people are writing about it for good.

Like there’s not as many negative ones per se, but concerning ones, people will be, “Is this right long-term?” But the majority are articulating why it’s working, their interpretation of it. And that’s reinforcing what we’re doing time after time. So, it’s making us more comfortable with the approach we’ve taken.

Now, we will iterate. Where we’ve got to right now is at a stage of we know this system and this recipe works, but we’re almost now at a saturation point on the internet where we’re now known, like our vision is to be the most talked about brand on social media. Our director feels we’ve kind of hit that mark already.

Cat: Nice.

Michael: I think there’s plenty of more room to grow, but it means that we don’t have to probably force ourselves as much.

We just have to be more calculated on the opportunities that will get us our success because we were high volume, high frequency for a long period of time and there may be a stage where some of the angles and some of the comedy may get worn out.

That people will get tired of the same joke or the same style, that we need to find a way to invigorate that. And we’re working now strategically on how we do that on social, but not being on social to create it, to be that next level, so we can be more calculated on the trending moments that will give us the greatest success because we can make more informed decisions now of what we think will hit or not.

Now, that’s partly reliant on how the algorithm changes on the internet. Like early this year, Twitter had a bit of a mix and we saw a lot of decrease in reaching opportunities because it started to mess with what we were doing.

However, the flip side was, Instagram has completely come to life for us. We were on average maybe 2 million impressions a week on Instagram. We’re now averaging 11 million impressions.

We’ve grown to hopefully 1.1 million followers in the next week or two. We broke the million a couple of weeks ago. The introduction may be of threads, this new Twitter competitor platform where all of our followers will have an opportunity to actually plug straight in.

And if they already know what we do on Twitter and we start moving into this environment, this may supercharge us even more. And that’s basically even more growth.

So, we do create a safe space. We do know what we’re trying to do. Are we going to get it right all the time? No, but we’re not afraid to try. And I have to put the confidence in the team to have the ability to do that.

We can always mitigate, if you get an idea to a place if needed; we can always decide not to do it, and we can always decide to put it live. And if it doesn’t work, learn from it because the next time, we’ll do better.

Cat: So, this is a little bit random, but I did stand-up comedy for five years and a lot of the process that you are describing is exactly the same with standup comedy, which is like having the confidence, which is a big part of it, just to go out and try stuff out.

And every single large comedian will say the same. They’ll have their big shows like live at the Apollo and stuff like that. But before they get to that level, they have workshopped for years, go into like small clubs, trying jokes out, iterating on them, like having a bit of a cutting room floor situation similar to yourself.

I wonder, have you ever done comedy? Has anyone in your team, have you hired comedians?

Michael: Not hired comedians per se, but there was just some naturally witty people from the internet that I identified as people who could do it. And then we kind of build from there.

I probably fancy myself as a wannabe comedian maybe, and that’s where I’ve studied and learned a lot from how you learn from doing things publicly, but it’s an ambition I’ve always had.

Like just subjectivity kills me. And I’ve been guilty of it for so long myself for a long period even like how polished and perfect I would’ve loved content to be for many, many years.

Like I came to Ryanair, and I literally ripped up 10 to 12 years of experience, and turned it on its edge to do the complete opposite I was advising people to do for years.

But even in that space, subjectivity boils my blood. And the only way to remove subjectivity from things is by letting the audience decide. And a lot of studying, a lot of learnings I would’ve done to figure out, especially when you look at a TikTok, because TikTok is a platform and others are learning that followers is not the success of reach or growth in the platforms.

And it’s said to be true probably everywhere. Even Twitter is an environment that you could learn from that as well. That if it’s good enough and it gets engagement, it will carry beyond your following. And the only way you’re going to know whether that’s going to work or not is how people are receptive to your creative. So, when in doubt, test and learn.

Now, the thing is creativity by committee, layers and layers of sign off and approval ends up killing the idea before it even has a chance. It dilutes it before it goes live. But also, if people are concerned that they’re going to get a bad backlash, they’re never going to figure out how social works.

And that’s the beauty and that’s the privilege that we have here, is that we have the licence to try things and get them wrong in a public domain, and learn from it. And it’s probably why we’ve been able to accelerate on channels like TikTok and on Twitter so fast.

It’s why on Instagram, we’ve probably been able to iterate how we use video meme and static meme and stories in an effective way to grow from where we were two years ago to where we are now.

I would love to say I studied the art of comedy and I’ve studied the likes of the Edinburgh Festival, and how people got their chance to be at Edinburgh, and the small gigs, the comedy clubs, the materials they had to submit even at Edinburgh itself, and how you’ve got to start at the very small pokey places before you can get the headlines. I’d love to say that was it, but it’s probably the same-same but different.

Cat: Yeah. Sincerely, Michael, I think it is same-same but different because the creative process sounds very, very similar. And given that your desired outcome is to make people laugh a lot of the time, when it’s to display humour, I think if you wanted to pivot into a different career, that one could be there for you.

Michael: Well, we have got requests to actually do a gig at Edinburgh Festival.

Cat: Really?

Michael: Not officially, but people, again, I love the way you’ve talked about this. But people on the internet have always referenced, “You guys should do something. I’d love to see you do a roasting sketch at Edinburgh Festival.” And I was like, “That’s a great activation. Maybe we should.”

But again, concern for me, is protecting the identity of the team so they don’t get trolled in their personal lives because they’re not full-time comedians. They’re not ready to take on that responsibility for good or for bad. But maybe we could costume it up and find ways to do it.

But again, like a lot of my inspiration I think has also come from comically platforms, like you might not be familiar with it Emma — Emma, by the way is the producer, she’s not meant to be here, and I made a big, big mistake.

But anyway, let’s keep it in for comedy purposes — is Waterford Whispers news in Ireland, but similar in the UK, you’ve got The Mash Report, and I love how they deliver creatively, topical, relevant pieces of newsworthy information, and brilliant one-liners.

And that’s really, really powerful when it comes to using platforms like Twitter because you’ve got to be succinct, direct, and everybody needs to try and get it for it to work.

And maybe I was inspired by them, but again, there’re influences in my life that has probably directed, how I’ve probably put shape on the work that we do.

Cat: If you do that Edinburgh activation, please let me know because I think that would be amazing because actually, when you mentioned the art of roasting, I think that’s an area of comedy that can be so spectacularly executed but also, in equal measure so terribly executed.

Where people don’t really understand that there is an art to essentially, taking the Mickey out of someone without just flat out insulting them. And I do think that Ryanair are towing that balance very well.

But I want to ask, you must have a few favourites. What are some of your most favourite things that you’ve done on social?

Michael: I think my favourites are probably not the ones that are the highest-reaching, it’s the ones that always give me a giggle. Like we’ve done some really crazy stuff and people can see them, so I don’t need to brag about that.

I think one of my most favourite is there was a guy who came on to Twitter, his name was Ryan Mini, and he had an issue about a bag that wasn’t even with our airline, and he was asking a question about getting either a new bag or getting compensation or something, I can’t remember the reason.

But it was just a play on his name. And we literally responded, “Only if you’re Ryan Nosy.” I love my dad jokes and it was just a play on his name, and flipping at that in such quick wit just sets me off every time. Where it’s like there’s loads of brash, provocative things that we’ve done that are crazy, but from a reactive, that’s one that gives me a giggle.

But what I’m proud of is actually, it’s not the reactive, it’s the always on that we do. So, we, up until now, have been split into two groups. We’ve got reactive in community that does what it says in the team, does all the newsworthy stuff that half of their time week to week is spent nailing that.

The other is always onward. We try to build a foundation because if reactive falls off the edge overnight, we’ve got nothing underneath it. And we were averagely reaching about 5 million people collectively with our content from week to week. But we had nothing there that was still as equally entertaining, still as equally as engaging.

But landing the more kind of first-world problem messages repeatedly, creatively with repetition. And by building that, we took that from essentially, on average, 5 million per week to now, where we’re averaging about 25, 26 million per week.

But that’s the key to unlocking the perception change. And the important part of how we got there was reactive sends these big shoots of reactive success. These spikes, we get to reach millions and millions of people with tweets and TikToks and pieces like that, where it gives us a window of opportunity to re-engage with them because they’ve engaged with that piece of content.

If we try and be like say take the other brands, they’ll have those moments, but then they’ll start publishing loads of corporate vanilla branded content afterwards that people won’t engage with, and you lose that potential of actually building the audience, building the community, building reach time after time.

With us, that always on content equally matches the tone and style of what we do in reactive. When we hit those spikes of reach, we have a short window, we probably get a chance to see one or two pieces of our content displayed on their feed, at a period of time afterwards for them to engage to go, “You like this content, will you like more of my content?”

If you don’t engage with it, algorithm tells me, no, you’re going to go off. If you engage it, it means that okay, we’re going to serve you lots of Ryanair content time after time now for you to engage with. And that’s the beauty of the tactics to our strategy and how we built our team to deliver on it.

That when we shoot with a big piece, we hit with the right hook every time with the reactive and then we keep jabbing away with our always on. So, every time we have a spike, our foundation grew and grew and grew. That’s something I’m extremely proud of.

But the most important thing I’m proud of and what gets me buzzing is developing a strategy that we had the ability to execute. Building a team that then was right for the strategy, which I know that many brands can’t do because they have these typical structures, they don’t even have a strategy in place, let’s be honest.

And they have these typical social media managers, social media executive working in a studio, delivering all this average work. Whereas, if they go back to thinking about a really strong strategy, building the team that’s right for it — and I had the ability to find the right people, the right balance of creativity, chaos, and organisation to actually deliver on our ambition and do it right.

What I’m most proud of is actually finding those people, getting them to the level they are to the point now, where I can now actually hand the keys over. I have somebody who’s leading out that social team that I can now walk away and let her take it forward, and it’s going to evolve and change.

And I can direct from a distance as her support, but now, she’s going to define it, put shape on it, and take it forward. And I’m incredibly proud of that because I can walk out here whenever and say that I was able to do what I was asked to do and regardless of the big reach, set it up in a way that it had the best opportunity to work. And that’s what gets me going beyond all the ideas, beyond all the creative.

Cat: Honestly, I’m actually really envious because you sound like a great manager of creatives, and they are few and far between, and the success speaks for itself.

Michael: I’m learning, we’re all learning.

Cat: Yeah, I think you’re being a little bit modest as well, but it sounds like you’ve got an excellent team there. But I am really impressed with the practices that you’ve set up to support your team to help grow them.

I think for anything creative, as you’ve said multiple times, having a sense of playfulness and experimentation is just key. So, you should be proud of yourself too.

Michael: Of course, of course. But look, one thing I’ll always say as well is like, it sounds like we’re living in this ideal world of everything is working perfectly, and I just want to make sure that people who are listening know that it’s not.

We all have our problems, the politics of business, we all have our challenges. We’re just lucky that some of the levers that we have give us a bit more shape and licence to do things. So, it’s not perfect and we’re always learning, but the beauty is, we’re allowed to learn, and we’re allowed to move it forward.

When I come onto shows or podcasts like this — I’m doing speaker events at the moment, and I’m doing them in a way not to less go up and brag about the great work that we do, you can see that on the internet. What I want to start encouraging people is to start thinking more strategically.

Start finding ways to get better stakeholder buy-in, start building teams that are right for the strategy you’ll eventually get to, and try and be brave and convince your business to test and learn and remove subjectivity of what you’re doing.

Because anyone who says what they’re doing on social media and say this is the right thing to do, is talking absolute bullshit. It’s not black and white at the moment, it’s 15 years in existence. People are still trying to figure out TV and traditional media and still think it’s not being done in the right way.

And I’m keen that that’s my job, not just in Ryanair, but to our, I guess, profession (I even hate saying that), working in social media, the job that we get to do, that it’s not lifting blocks of concrete or not cutting timber or not doing anything heavy lifting, that we’re lucky to do.

I just want to make sure that we get more respect and we put more respect into it to not just follow things that look like they’re working, actually think about what you’re doing first.

Cat: And I can’t say how much I appreciate you saying that because that was the premise for this entire podcast, which is that there’s so much stuff out there that’ll say you just do X, Y, and Z, and you’re going to go viral overnight on social media, and it’s just not the case.

It’s always an up and down, bumpy path of learnings and success and failure. So, I really appreciate your candour in saying that as well, because for many people, it looks like you’re at the top in many categories you are. But it’s good to hear that it’s totally normal and part of the journey to have a few bumps along the way.

Michael: Yeah, of course.

Cat: So, just before we finish up, Michael, in this season of Social Creatures, we are sourcing questions from the industry for some of our guests, and we have one for you today from social media consultant, Matt Navarra.

Matt: Hey Michael, Matt Navarra here. I love what you and the social team at Ryanair do. As much as some people can’t stand it, I think it’s genius and I can see exactly why you do what you do and how you do it.

I think it’d be interesting to hear from you a bit about the legal processes sign off, how does that work with some of the tweets and posts that you make? And is there a line that you draw which you will not cross in terms of content for Ryanair’s accounts?

And what is that line? And have you ever crossed it and made a mistake, and had to remove any content because you’ve realised it’s a step too far?

Michael: Great question by Matt. We have an agreed policy in place with our legal team and our senior people about what we do and don’t do. And look, I won’t labour on that, we could be here talking for days.

But once we play within that policy, the line of approval is with me as head of and our social media lead. Social is a very grey area and we know that a lot of brands take risks on and play on the line, but our legal team is there to guide us rather than stop us or be a barrier to delivering on our strategy.

Yeah, there has been one or two moments that we have got it wrong, but got it wrong in how people took it out of context and probably not doing enough due diligence on the background story to some tweets.

And there’s certain learnings we’ve done where we’ve maybe tagged somebody in it that we shouldn’t, which means that they get notified of all the interactions that are happening. And whilst it’s a joke and they are a public figure, there’s things that we learn when we deliver those types of content that we no longer do.

If we talk about something in the public domain or about somebody who is well-known, we’re not directly going towards them or tagging them in a way that gets traction and might make the situation worse than what it is.

So, there are things we’re a lot more careful on. Look, it’s a very long list of learning some mistakes that we’ve had. There’s been plenty of content that has been taken down, some of it because it’s wrong, and in most cases, because it just didn’t perform.

Like we have a rule where we take content down if it doesn’t hit a certain threshold reach, we just remove it. Is that silly? Losing lots of reach potential in our reporting and our figures? Yes. But we just want to make sure that whatever hits, hits a threshold performance and we move on from there.

I hope that answers it.

Cat: Well, look, Michael, thank you so much. I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed this conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us, and I’m looking forward to seeing what’s next for Ryanair.

Michael: So am I, because we need to figure it out.

Cat: Love that.

[Music Playing]

You’ve been listening to Social Creatures with me, Cat Anderson. Many thanks to Michael for joining me today, and you can find all of the links to all of Ryanair’s socials in the description of this episode.

And of course, a special thank you to Sprout Social for making this podcast possible. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, make sure to let us know on social at Sprout Social, and subscribe to hear other episodes like this wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks very much for listening, and we’ll see you again in two weeks.

The post Disruptive, playful, successful: Ryanair’s social media marketing appeared first on Sprout Social.

[Music Playing]

Cat: Welcome to season two of Social Creatures, a podcast from Sprout Social. I’m Cat and I’m here to explore some of my favourite success stories from the world of social media.

This is a space for anyone and really, nearly anything goes, but what makes an account successful or popular? Honestly, it’s hard to know, but that’s exactly what we’re here to find out.

Throughout this series, we’ll be talking to the brands behind some of the best accounts that you know, and some that you don’t know yet to explore the way that these businesses, organisations, and individuals have achieved their success in social media, and crucially, how you can do it too.

In a world where social media trends change in the blink of an eye, brands often find themselves chasing after the attention of their customers. The rapid pace of the cultural landscape begs the question: how can a small team captivate the minds of millions?

Innocent has mastered the art of staying culturally relevant with a humorous tone of voice that’s been at the heart of everything that they do.

In a competitive health foods market, they have been leading the way since 1998, making drinks that are tasty, healthy, and convenient. They have a clear mission to keep people healthy and to leave them better than they find them.

In this episode, we’ll delve into the secrets behind their triumphs, and explore how small, yet mighty teams can conquer the ever-evolving world of social media all while staying one step ahead of the curve.

Joining me today is Marcus Dean, the Social Media Manager of Innocent Drinks.

Marcus, so if I had a penny for every time that someone told me that Innocent was their favourite brand on social media and in terms of social media strategy, I would be a rich woman and that is not a word of a lie.

However, there are apparently some people who might not know who Innocent are and what you do. Just at the top of the episode, you can tell those per unfortunate people who haven’t encountered you before, who are you?

Marcus: Yeah, of course, I’m Marcus. I’m the Social Media Manager for Innocent Drinks like you said, we’re a fruit juice and smoothies brand based in the UK originally, and we’re now a European company who basically want to be Europe’s favourite little drinks company.

We are known for having very nice drinks, very natural, we never add sugar, all that stuff, but we also have a completely separate following, which I’d love to convert to customers (but at the moment, it’s quite hard) who know us just for social media.

So, we’ve been sort of one of the OG (and yes, I did just say OG) omnipotent brands probably since like Twitter began like the start of 2010s and things like that. We’ve been known as a brand who can literally talk about anything. Two weeks ago, I live tweeted Eurovision and I got paid to do that and it was great.

So, we’re quite well-known long before me. I’ve been here for two years as Social Media Manager for the UK, but long before me, we were a brand who were very fun, and people want to be like.

Like you said, I used to work at an agency and the amount of people that came to me and said, “How do we be innocent?” And I’m like, “It’s quite hard.”

Cat: Well, hopefully, we can get into that in today’s episode. But you mentioned there that you’ve got a separate following on social media, now that’s absolutely bananas, and you are really considered as a brand that’s really nailed its tone of voice online. Could you tell us a little bit about what makes you so unique in terms of your tone of voice?

Marcus: Yeah, for sure. I think it starts with the company. They are kind of separate (the company versus how we are on social), but they’re two sides of the same coin. And you can have the best social media manager in the world, but if the thing they’re writing about or the companies within doesn’t quite compute, you are just pushing a boulder up a hill, and it’s really hard.

So, it all comes from the company, and it’s started with three friends, and our tone of voice for the company — not social because our tone of voice was created back in the early 2000s before social media was a thing.

So, we got known for what people now call like wackaging, so like wacky packaging or we’d write jokes on our bottles, and we’d do little things that nobody else was doing. So, everything came from that.

So, our tone of voice started in the early days of printing onto our bottles on plastic: “Stop looking at my bottom” on the bottom of drinks. And literally, from that, everything has just been so much easier.

So, us online, fun’s one word, chaotic’s another word, quirky’s another word, we just call it innocent. And the way we were able to do that was the founders and a man called Dan Jermaine who was their like best friend who had no actual background or history in marketing, he was just the funniest guy they knew.

They hired him to write tone of voice and like brand guidelines, whatever they were known as back then. And they just said they wanted to have a product that sounded like a real person. They wanted to have a product that sounded like a mate down the pub.

And essentially, that’s what our tone of voice has been ever since. If we write anything for social or an advert, does it sound like it could come out of someone’s mouth that you know. And if it does, you’ve done the right thing, if it doesn’t, scrap it, back to the drawing board.

And that’s where it all comes from. It all comes from a strong company tone of voice, and then on social we’re able to take a couple more risks. The thing I like to say is, “Bend, not break.”

So, those tone of voice are there and like all social media managers and social teams should pay attention to brand guidelines and they should pay attention to tone of voice, but there’s always going to be a couple of times where you bend them.

And that’s sort of what Innocent was emboldened and allowed to do from the early days, was yes, we have a strict tone of voice, and it needs to sound a certain way, but take a risk. That’s okay.

Cat: Wackaging, that’s one I haven’t heard before and I both love and hate that word, but I think it actually describes that because not to age myself, I do remember reading Innocent bottles and thinking this is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen on anything that you would just buy in the corner shop. And it was quite groundbreaking at the time.

And it’s interesting you’re saying about how the founders hired their mate essentially, who was really funny because that really was … I think it’s done a lot more commonly now, but you sort of laid the groundwork for that I think at Innocent.

And I was going to ask then about evolution over time, and so I love what you’re talking there about “bend not break,” and I think there’s probably social media managers listening to this who’ve had a flame of mischief lit up inside them hearing that because I totally agree with you-

Marcus: Permission.

Cat: Yeah, permission to bend not break. And do you think your final form of your tone of voice you have it, or is it something that you see internally is still evolving?

Marcus: That’s a really good question. It probably is always evolving slightly, especially when you get new channels and new ways of talking. So, like TikTok, if we took that early 2000s tone of voice that we put on our packaging, that’s not going to work on TikTok. So, you have to continually evolve and move with it.

I’m not saying that like Innocent are going to suddenly, in our captions, refer to everybody as gym rats and sort of start saying, “It’s giving.” But we will indulge in certain things, we’ll do it in our own way.

So, I think the answer is both. It’s like your core principles stay the same, but the way they like manifest or show themselves are different, and that comes through channels, but also it should come from a just looking around and sort of saying is this still the right way to do things?

So, stuff like Eurovision, and we also live tweet Bake Off every year. That stuff we’ve done for ages, and it sort of gets to a point we’re like, “Are we just doing this just because we’ve always done it?”

And then we look at it, and we look at the numbers and we look at the reaction and we’re like, “No, okay, people do still want it.” Like we do still need to do that every year. Like every year we do need to look ago, was there a massive dip? Was there a less of an appetite for the things we normally do?

And if there is, that’s when you should change. But like stuff like TikTok does that for you, which I think is really good.

Cat: It’s interesting to hear that mindset and to tie together a few other parts of our conversation.

You mentioned that you’re the OG of this sort of tone of voice on social media, and also that for the guts of 20 plus years, people have been citing Innocent as, “They’re who we want to sound like, we love them.”

And in an industry that’s moving as quickly as social media, an industry that’s defined by trends and flavours of the month, that is no mean feat to have stayed at the top spot for so long.

Why do you think Innocent has been so successful at this? Because it really has been … it’s not even like these are the grandfathers who have earned their spot and therefore, demand respect. It’s like you are still firm favourites after all this time.

Marcus: I think it’s a freshening probably. So, the way things were done back in the day were right for that time. And then as they moved on to the next social media … like there’s been so many great social teams and social media managers at Innocent long before me, that’s not me calling myself great. That’s me calling them great and just saying I am in the job now. Sorry, I just want to make that clear.

But I think a lot of that comes with, it’s choosing the right people for the moment. Our recruitment process is really long. So, I just hired somebody to join our social team, which is like the first time we’ve had an executive and a manager at the same time for like six years.

So, this has been amazing, and it’s just finding the right people with the right energy to come in and continue it because if we still had our original person behind our tone of voice and original Social Media Manager, it probably wouldn’t have stayed as fresh. Things do need updating constantly, I think.

And I think recruitment helps, so we always make sure we pick the right people, and it takes ages. I got turned down for a role at Innocent before becoming … (I know hard to believe).

But before becoming Social Media Manager, I applied for copywriter maybe two years earlier, and I got through to second stage, there’s three stages. I didn’t quite make it to the final, but I just sort of used that, and I was like, “Okay, it wasn’t right.” I went away, got more way better experience on more similar brands, and then came back.

And that sort of process of me thinking “Oh, I’m perfect for Innocent.” A lot of people probably do because they see, “Oh, that’s funny, witty marketing.” That’s what I do.

So, everybody goes, “Oh, I want to work there, I want to do that.” And that’s what I thought, and it didn’t quite work. But by the time I came back, I was so much better for the job and ready for it.

So, I think that’s one thing is the recruitment really helps, and then it’s just the culture. Like it’s so fun to come into this office. I think I told you before we started recording, this room’s called “Peas” there’s some peas behind me. It’s little things like that.

Cat: Do you think it’s that culture then that allows you to bring your full self to work and to not be hyper corporate? Has that helped the social media strategy? Because another thing you mentioned there is how you did the Wes Anderson trend of life at the office.

And that’s something that Innocent’s been always really good at. Before, maybe other brands were showing that sort of peak behind the curtain and hinting who the people were that they were working with.

I feel like Innocent has always been able to show that there’s the products and the people, and do you think it’s your work culture that sort of helped that to flourish?

Marcus: Definitely. I think in the early days when social media platforms for brands became a thing, they just took risks and because there was such an early blueprint for success, it’s never gone back to that.

Like our social strategy is we have pillars like everyone else, but ours is just weighted very differently, so we’re like 40% what we call like branded random. We don’t have to talk about products and there’s no pressure to. And then you got 30% products and 30% force for good which is what we call CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) stuff.

So, we have that in place, that is there. But also, we’re just allowed to do what we want, and nobody interferes because we can point to how it’s been a success. But it a hundred percent comes from people coming in being able to be themselves and take risks.

Cat: I think again, there’s probably lots of people listening to this who are probably equally inspired and envious because I do still think there are a lot of companies that don’t really know what to do with their social teams really, and they don’t know how to correctly get a social media strategy in place, and so they don’t make the investments into, as you say, recruiting the right people or giving them the right tools, and then expecting to get the same results as Innocent.

And I can just say as a creative, I love what you guys are doing because I feel like you’ve created an environment where creatives can flourish and we’re seeing these fabulous results.

So, one thing that we did touch on though is obviously, Innocent is at the pinnacle. Recruitment is a big part of getting the right team in place and there are lots of people who want to work for you. There also are a lot of people who want to sound like you, and we’ve kind of touched on this, that there are a lot of copycats out there.

If imitation is the greatest form of flattery, people always say that, but I don’t necessarily think it’s true. How do you feel about the copycats out there?

Marcus: I completely get it. I worked at an agency before Innocent, and people would come to me and say “We want to be like Innocent.” So, what is the first thing you do? Well firstly, I tell them is, “It’s not that easy mate.”

The thing that people would say that they want to be like Innocent in witty, funny social media copy. But to be like Innocent, Innocent are like that everywhere. Innocent are like you come to our office, our office is completely branded in our tone of voice.

When we release a statement about a serious topic that’s affecting the world or we’ve got some like factory problems or whatever, we write that in tone of voice, and that’s the thing that most brands don’t do.

And so, as many as there are copycats, there’s more and more similar but nobody quite does it like us, in that we are like this all the time. It’s complete consistency. So, like if we post out an apology, that apology is in tone of voice. When we write alt text, that alt text is in tone of voice.

So, the copycats I get, it’s a compliment. So, that’s nice. It makes it harder, don’t get me wrong. It makes it harder to get cut through because if everybody’s funny, no one is.

But no, I don’t see it as a negative. I do see it as a compliment, and there’s loads of great brands doing amazing things, and there’s room for all of us. It’s a big table, pull up a chair, it’s nice.

Cat: I think that’s definitely the right attitude. I think it’s good for people to be inspired by other brands, but I think there’s a difference between being inspired and just completely lifting the identity of another brand.

And the reason why it doesn’t work is because it isn’t authentic to them. Do you know what I mean? And it’s such a fine difference.

Marcus: Definitely. No, I completely agree on that. You get even more granular, and you have like actual complete content thieves as well, that’s quite fun.

So, like we post it twice a year about the clocks going back and forward, and it was something that somebody again, previous social media manager came up with about how to change it on different devices.

So, like your oven, you need a masters in engineering, sundial move one house to the left. It’s like a classic, we post it every year, and everybody steals it, and nobody gives credit.

Earlier this year, I just did a whole tweet thread about all the people that have stolen it from us over the years, and just called them out.

Quite aggressive. Not a million percent the most Innocent thing we’ve ever done, but it was just one of those things that has just been commandeered on the internet with like memes and gifts and stuff like that.

It can be a kind of a free for all, so we were just sort of like if you want to get like proper technical, this is IP that we came up with years ago, and it has just taken on its own life, so we were just like let’s try and claim it back a bit.

So, with stuff like that, that’s where it actually does annoy me. I feel like Michael Jordan in the last dance, that’s where it gets personal.

But I think what you said is completely right, Cat. It’s like as soon as you copy it — not verbatim, but you copy that vibe, that tone of voice and you talk to people in a way that is too similar, people will just see through it so quickly.

So, I think you’re right. Inspiration, great. Actual being a complete copy or rip off, it will only get you so far. Find your own voice.

Cat: I do think that humans have a sixth sense for-

Marcus: Bullshit.

Cat: I was going to say inauthenticity, but same thing.

I have a question just you mentioned there about you have some stalwarts of your content calendar if you will, where you know it’s coming up, we’re going to do the Bake Off, we’re going to do Eurovision, we’re going to do the clocks going back or forward.

This is something that I think is kind of interesting for people because again, I think there’s this pervasive notion that you have to come up with fresh content all the time every day, and that is a lot of pressure for people.

Could you tell us a bit about how you put together your content calendar? Like how much of that is going to be about product, how much of that is going to be stuff that you know works and you can keep using? How much of that is … was it 40% allocation of random? And how do you pick that random? Like that’s quite a lot of spinning plates actually.

Marcus: I’m the Social Media Manager for the UK, and I’m the one who comes up with proactive content ideas. But to feed into the bigger calendar, that’s impossible with one person. So, that’s where you need to rely on other people in the marketing team.

So, we have brand managers. A brand manager being somebody who’s responsible for one of our product lines. So, super smoothies and smoothies is one, kids is another, juice is another.

So, all of those, they have their targets for the year. They tell me we’re going to have this new product here, we’re going to have promo of something here. Promos aren’t very us but like they can tell me in August it’s going to be on offer.

So, if we just up the content, I’m not going to mention the price, I’m not going to mention, “Go to this shop now” because that’s not very us, but I can increase the amount of content I do there.

So, brand managers, they help with the product stuff. So, I am not a salesperson, I’m not into direct marketing. I’ve done it, I’m not a big fan. So, I rely on them for the USPs they need me to get across the times, the dates, and stuff like that.

So, that makes up 30% for us. 30% is what we call force for good. So, how we come up with that is what is important to us as a company. And again, that is something much bigger than me.

So, I have monthly meetings with our people team. So, the people team who come up with policies who make sure our culture and everything in Innocent is good. So, they tell me things like we had the fertility friendly new policy that we brought into play this year.

I did a post on that on Instagram. It was our most successful force for good post ever on Instagram. It got like 10,000 likes, all organic, and it just sort of like took off because it was completely the right thing to tell our audience about.

Like the interest just overline like perfectly (overlapped aligned, I created a new word there). And so, that helps. So, like just rely on the people. So, I have the people team.

And we have these things called affinity groups here where each minority or protected characteristic has their own groups. We have a fairness and gender one, we have one for racial diversity.

We’ve got like about five or six of these, and they all have a group and I have a meeting with them every month and I say, “Look, what are we missing on our social media that we need to post about? What is it if you didn’t work here, you would like to see a brand talk about?”

So, that’s where those come from. Calendar hooks, it seems obvious, like we call them banana days here because there’s a day for everything. And we actually did post on Banana Day this year because it was too funny not to but, like rather than the earnest way of doing that of, “Oh it’s a world Banana Day, so grab a banana and come on down.” We make jokes about the fact that it’s Banana Day.

But yes, we have that; calendar hooks help. And then when it comes into the branded random, you’re right, sometimes that can be a bit overwhelming like what do we know to post?

So, a lot of that can come from historic, what has gone well in the past because yes, they do have to be new ideas, but they don’t have to be new subject matter. Like humans are creatures a habit.

We love talking about the weather, we love talking about how busy it was on the bus. It doesn’t have to be groundbreaking, it just has to be presented in a new way.

I draw from things before I was Social Media Manager here. And then I love coming into the office because that gives me probably 90% of my ideas, because if I’m sat around the office and I hear three separate people or three separate groups say the same thing, I’m like okay, well, that’s obviously relatable so I’m going to post about that.

And we’re talking about what makes our tone of voice special. I think the number one thing I put above all is relatable. Being funny is good, being nice is good, but being culturally relevant to the people that follow you is the be all and end all for me.

Sometimes, we do it amazingly, and it really pays off. Sometimes we don’t do it so well. It’s just about learning from it and moving, I guess.

Cat: That’s so interesting because if you think about your customer base, everybody drinks smoothies. Everyone probably in the UK has drunk a smoothie. Am I wrong?

Marcus: People who follow us on social, I would say, I’m not entirely sure. If you think about customers and things like that, fine. But because a social post has the potential of blowing up and reaching people that don’t follow you and even the ones that do follow us — the amount of comments we get saying, “I just follow you for social media, I’ve never had a smoothie in my life.”

Like it’s kind of wild. Like that’s why other people in more classic marketing positions are like, “When do we turn these into sales?”

No, but it’s like the thing of Innocent is, the idea is when you go to a shop and you see a smoothie and then you see Innocent, our social media strategy is all basically down to when you see those two, they’re the same price, they’ve got the same ingredients, whatever it is. We want you to think of this funny post you saw on social and buy that one.

If they’re all the same, why would you not buy the one that has made you laugh or made you feel something? So, that is what our strategy is all down to.

Cat: No, I completely agree. And I was going to say my former point was just when technically in theory anybody can go and pick up a smoothie, you kind of don’t have any nuances of people that you’re marketing to. So, relatability does make total sense there and it’s like let’s go really broad.

But I was going to ask about that, because you are a completely offline product and so, I think in a lot of businesses, a real struggle that the social team will have is how does that convert to business?

But I love what you’re saying there, because I firmly believe that like you have a more of an emotional connection to Innocent because you are funny; because you make people laugh, because you make them smile.

But is that a conversation that has come up — presumably that’s come up internally before because there’s clearly such a focus on social and the tie through and the pull through to sales. Is it entirely impossible or is there any way that you can see trends?

Marcus: We definitely see it. Yes, we aren’t online, you can’t buy through us directly, and that is definitely something that will come, we’ve been talking about it.

But we have really great relationships with our customers, customers being the supermarkets we work with, and they tell us at a certain time, there’s a spike here, there’s a spike there.

Obviously, it’s not guaranteed, it’s not a science to say, “Oh this was definitely down to this one post.” But if we have like a genuine campaign for a new drink, we always do it a couple of weeks, maybe a month or two after it’s in the initial launch because then we can actually track it separately. Because if we do it at the same time, it might just be, “Oh it was new.” So, that’s one thing we do.

But our KPI as a social team, to get very business jargony, is reach. As much as I love people hitting the like button and sharing and comments and things like that, the thing I get judged on is reach, and in a company where we don’t have that direct sale that we can like click the link in our bio and buy 10 smoothies right now — where we don’t have that reach is the only close enough number that we can say does a similar thing because we can guarantee our stuff has been seen by this many people. And when that’s a product post that many people have seen our product.

So, that is the closest we get to it in an analog offline as you called it, product world. And for me, that’s enough. For the rest of the business, that might change. But for me, I think that’s ideal. You just want people to see your stuff and have you in their mind, and when you do come to the shop, go, “Oh yeah, they’re good, I like them.”

Cat: I mean, it’s pure brand awareness, and I think oftentimes, marketing teams are put under pressure because brand awareness is just by definition, it’s going to be harder to pull through to that conversion, whatever it might be. But it is super important, and it does play a huge role.

So, that makes perfect sense to me, and it’s so interesting to hear you say that reach is the metric that you really like hang upon because I’ve never had that answer before, so it’s really interesting.

I do want to talk about one of your campaigns which I think has sort of sat at the intersection of both social and offline. And that’s the Big Knit campaign, which has been a huge campaign of Innocent’s. Can you tell us a little bit about how long has it been going on and what does it entail?

Marcus: Yes, it’s been 20 years now since the very first Big Knit (I know). It was started in 2003 just to make us all feel really old.

So, it started from a guy who used to work here, he was called new Adam because there was already an old Adam. He came in, worked in marketing for a few years, and he was really close to his nan, and he used to go around to his nan’s house and knit with her, and really liked it and enjoyed it.

And it was right around the time where quite similar to now, actually, it’s weird how culture and the life, nothing really changes, it’s all pretty cyclical. There was a cost-of-living crisis, the energy bills were going up, and he was hearing from his nan but then also his nan’s friends, that they just couldn’t afford to put the heating on.

And he just couldn’t get his head around, how does that happen in London? How does that happen in the capital of one of the biggest economies in the world? And from there, just said, surely there must be something we can do around it.

So, this was before we had this lovely giant office in West London which we call Fruit Towers. There was a few of them in a room in Fruit Towers version one and they said “Well, let’s try something.”

So, they enlisted a local knitting group, they got them to knit a thousand hats to put on the top of our smoothie bottles, and they put them in independent smaller retailers around West London and compared them to talking about tracking and KPIs and stuff. And they compared them with the ones they didn’t put them on, and the sales increase was like 500% more.

And from there, grew it, got a partner in, I think first it was age concern, and for the last like 10 years, it may be more. It’s been Age UK. And so, we used to do it every year, and then COVID came along and it sort of threw a spanner in the works. We finally did it again this year, the first time since 2019.

And 25p of every drink that we sell that has a hat on it goes towards Age UK. And yeah, it’s been 20 years, this year we did like a 20-year commemorative event where we rented out a hall in Nottingham and we built the world’s biggest knitted hat, the UK’s biggest knitted hat, I should say, qualifier. And it was amazing.

And we invited knitters, we invited drinkers, and everybody just had the best day. And it’s raised, I think this year alone, we maybe got more than 1.3 million hats we received this year, like the most we’ve ever received in a calendar year. And we’ve raised multiple, multiple millions of pounds for Age UK in the 20 years.

Cat: Oh my God, the origin of that story is so lovely. Oh, my goodness, I don’t know if it’s possible for me to like Innocent any more than I possibly do. I knew the Big Knit campaign was cute, but I didn’t know that’s where it came from. That’s so lovely.

You really do take the corporate social responsibility piece seriously, and it’s nice then that that’s also getting a good reaction. You said that you didn’t just bring the knitters, you brought the drinkers along to those events as well. It’s so wholesome.

Marcus: So wholesome. We had one, her name’s Amy, and she was great and like her story just stuck with me at this event.

She used to knit with her nan, I think she called her Mima and she’s like, “Me and my Mima, we just like used to knit all the time.” And she passed away a couple of years ago. And she started a charity in her name because that’s what she used to do, just like crochet knit blankets.

And she has been raising money for them ever since by like knitting and doing other stuff. She came along to the event and said it was like the Innocent Big Knit hats that got her into knitting with her nan, and had such a great time at the event.

She got a tattoo of an Innocent bottle with a hat on it and the date of … I can’t remember the exact date, she’ll remember because it’d be on her skin. But it was in January this year, and she’s got that tattooed now on her.

She’s just like one of the many people who go out of their way to tell us how much that campaign means to them and how it sort of like bonded them with their grandparents or sort of helped them. I’ve relied on Age UK for this, and that campaign really brought me into it.

So, its just the best thing we’ve ever done as a company I think hands down.

Cat: Oh, my goodness, that’s just about the loveliest story ever. And what an honour to be tattooed on somebody’s skin, that’s pretty big.

Marcus: We’ve got at least nine tattoos of our logos on people’s skin, but there might be more. That’s the only ones we know about.

Cat: Oh wow. So, if anyone’s listening who’s got a tattoo, they should get in touch with Fruit Towers. Two more questions for you.

One is, what advice would you give to other brands who don’t necessarily have an online product, but they want to build an exciting online presence?

Marcus: I think wanting to build an online presence shouldn’t be the goal, it should be the way to the goal. So, for Innocent, it was always that we wanted to as a company, leave people better than we found them.

That’s our whole premise as a company, and that’s through our products which are only filled with fruit, veg, and healthy stuff. And it’s through our social media presence where we just want to make people smile.

So, I would say first is setting that target. What do you want? If it’s something as general as making people happier, that’s great. And then from there, your social strategy can start to take place because you know what type of content you need, you know what type of audience you need to reach.

So, that’s the first part, but outside of that is I guess figure out where your audience is, find out how to talk to them first. The direct sales thing, yes, there might be certain people within your company and within your business that are like completely hung up on that.

But what I say is, and you can see this through lots of companies now, so like Monzo who are a bank, they have such a dedicated social media following and do really great content. And they do that because they talk about something that we all know and it’s money. They talk about it in a way that nobody else does, so that’s nice. But the way they reach people is completely unique to them.

So, it’s just finding that way of talking to the right people first, and then the rest of it will fall into place. I think the reach thing for me … I’m interested to hear, like you said that you’ve never heard that as like the main KPI for people before, but I think for me it just makes so much sense because you can just really track that in a company where you can’t track sales, that’s the closest way you can do it.

So, reach shouldn’t be the be all end all just to get numbers because what type of numbers are you getting and also, what are they seeing? We have so many brands now who aren’t talking as a brand, they’re talking as admin, they’re talking as a person. I’m here on the admin shift, “I can’t believe they let the social media intern post this.” You get a lot of brands like that.

I think reach is so important, but what are they seeing? So, that’s why I sort the tone of voice thing and that should always come first. There’s always a balance.

Cat: No, I totally agree, and I think the reason why I think reach is sometimes overlooked is for precisely that reason. Because reach alone, you can go viral by dipping your toe into a trend that has got nothing to do with your business, but people will love it. They’ll be like, “Yeah, hilarious.” But it doesn’t really do anything to further your presence in the market as a brand.

Reach is often sort of described as being a bit more of a vanity metric because it can be very inflated numbers and you’re like, “Well, what does this actually really mean?” Which is why then I think people think about, “Oh, well, we want to see engagement, we want to see likes.”

But again, it’s interesting because I think there’s also a reason why these algorithms are always changing, and changing what is most valuable. I believe that sharing things is like super, super, super. Like that’s top dog, that’s what you really want. Saving things is also really popular. Like if you can get someone to save something, especially on TikTok, unbelievable.

I completely understand what you’re saying with reach, it’s just you are definitely the first person who said that. But it makes perfect sense and especially in the context of when you don’t have an e-commerce product to go along with it. It’s the best way to show this is how far and wide our marketing is going.

And if we go back to your previous answer where there’s two smoothies on a shelf, both costing the same, you’re going to pick the one that you’re like, “Well, they’re hilarious.” So, it makes sense.

Marcus: It’s interesting though because like I guess that is what marketing used to be as well though, and it still is in a lot of places, is you pay for a double page spread in a magazine and all people, they were seeing it. There’s no guarantee in an upturn in sales or whatever, it’s just people claiming.

It’s like, “Oh, well, we saw an upturn in sales here, and that was the same time we did this advert.” So, obviously, it’s that, social media’s the same.

Cat: Well, except I will say social media, I think’s got a little bit more accuracy because once upon a time, a million years ago, I did work in a traditional advertising agency and everything above the line where it’s billboards, radio, television, I was really astounded at how licking your finger, putting it up into the wind, how vague the metrics were about how many people would see this, how many people heard this.

It really was not accurate at all, and at least, with social media, you can be confirmed that the accuracy is going to be a lot more on the nose of what you want, at least in the ballpark. So, I think that’s definitely a step forward.

I have one final question for you, which I’m really, really curious about your response.

Given that you have tried to get into Innocent earlier and in your career, you got in, yes. You now are the social media boss, you’ve got a team, which is the first time that that’s ever happened.

This gilded position, the love you have for your job is absolutely palpable, and I love it. So, it begs the question, what is your favourite part of your job?

Marcus: So, that is very tough. It’s taking on a traditional presenting brief. So, whether that’s a product post or whatever, and doing it our way. So, a best recent example of this is our dairy free range.

Sadly, RIP, no longer with us. Most brands and I’ve worked on other brands where this has happened; if it goes you bury it. But we as a business care so much about what our drinkers think and say and their buying behaviours and habits.

So, we were noticing, we were getting so many people saying, “Where is it? Where is it? It’s the only thing I drink, it’s the only thing I drink.” And we were like, okay, we need to get ahead of this.

So, we made some content around our dairy free drinks going to Heaven, and we’ve got a product graveyard up on the fifth floor. We’d never shown it to anyone. So, we were like this is the perfect time to present it.

So, on Instagram we made a video of giving them little wings and they flew up to the graveyard. On Twitter and Facebook, we just did it as a classic photo post where we said utterly disappointing news, and we announced that it was no longer going to exist. Why wouldn’t it exist? Obviously because of sales, everything comes down to sales.

So, in the copy, we made the joke of thanks to all five of you who bought it, we really appreciate you. And I would never be able to get away with that in any other company.

And that is my favourite thing, is I can approach a brief that I’ve had a hundred times before for like 5 or 10 different brands, but the only place I can do it exactly how I do it, is at Innocent. So, I think that is the perfect example.

You get to be your best form and I’ve never worked anywhere that’s let me do that. And if I’m honest, I think I’ve been spoilt now. So, if I ever leave, I’m either going for like mega millions or I’m going for complete control because I’ve clearly been turned into a tyrant. And I can’t accept anything else anymore. So, there you go.

Cat: Well, Marcus, thank you so much. I hope that you never leave Innocent, but if you do, I will definitely be keeping an eye out on what mad adventures are ahead of you. Thank you so much for this interview. I have really enjoyed every second of it. And yes, I love Innocent more than I did before, which I didn’t think was going to be possible. Thank you so much.

[Music Playing]

Marcus: That’s another KPI, tick. Thank you very much for having me. Cheers.

Cat: You’ve been listening to Social Creatures, with me, Cat Anderson. Many thanks to Marcus for joining me today.

You can find all the links to all of the Innocent socials in the description of this episode, and of course, a special thank you to Sprout Social for making this podcast possible.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to let us know on social at Sprout Social or subscribe to hear other episodes just like this wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks very much for listening, and we’ll see you again in two weeks.

The post Emotional marketing with Innocent: Balancing humour, purpose and profit appeared first on Sprout Social.

[Music Playing]

Cat: Welcome to season two of Social Creatures, a podcast from Sprout Social. I’m Cat, and I’m here to explore some of my favourite success stories from the world of social media.

This is a space for anyone, and really, nearly anything goes, but what makes an account successful or popular? Honestly, it’s hard to know, but that is what we’re here to find out.

Throughout the series, we’ll talk to the brands behind some of the best accounts that you know, and maybe some that you don’t know yet to explore the way that these businesses, organisations, and individuals have achieved their success in social media, and how you can do it too.

Period products are one of the biggest markets in the world, but for some reason, whenever that time of the month comes, most people seem to never have any products at hand.

Plus, most of the traditional marketing around period products centre on just getting on with it, that periods are an inconvenience rather than an uncomfortable and often painful part of many people’s lives.

This is why today’s guest, Riley, has such a refreshing take. Combining a health and wellness approach with direct consumer social media marketing, they’ve taken the world of period products by storm with a simple message of, why should your period be a pain.

Joining me today from Riley, is co-founder, Fiona Parfrey.

Fiona, I cannot tell you how much I’ve been looking forward to this conversation today because of all of the guests we’ve had on Social Creatures, I might have been a fan of them, I might have known of them, but this is the first conversation I think we’ve had where I am a full-blown customer.

And not only that, I’m a customer from your social media presence, which is I think is going to make this really fun.

So, I’m so excited to have you on. So, thank you for coming on today.

Fiona: Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here too, and thank you so much for being a customer of Riley.

Cat: Let’s just maybe go right back to the beginning here. So, when we think about how people market periods, it’s kind of always been done in the same sort of way. It’s a market that’s very controlled by a few big major players, so it sort of feels like a market that’s maybe quite hard to break into.

But it’s always sort of marketed like go skateboarding or go like bungee jumping and stuff in a pair of white trousers. Whereas Riley, really broke onto the scene with something completely different, and as it turns out, something that really has resonated with people.

Can you tell us a little bit about what your style was and what your sort of strategy behind your marketing was?

Fiona: Yeah, really good question, Cat. I think you are dead right, this market has been dominated by a few key players, definitely ripe for disruption. We are on a mission to take the mystery out of female health.

Myself and two other co-founders and so three female co-founders, we were all personally frustrated about how little we were taught about our own bodies, and what we wanted to do was create a trusted community focused around breaking down the stigma associated with female health topics.

So, when we come to marketing it and when we were discussing I suppose, our brand positioning, it was very important to us that we provided informative, fact-based content, and that we speak to our community in a way that’s relatable, that’s honest, it can be easily digested so that our communities start to feel comfortable enough to get involved in the conversation, to ask questions.

Periods have been traditionally marketed is get out there and dawn your tennis whites and let’s go smash out a game. And like we just know as women that’s not realistic. Periods aren’t always the most fun experience.

For some, they’re better than others. But we just wanted to have a really honest, no-bull shit approach in how we marketed this product because we get it, and as founders, we are part of our target market, and we didn’t want to make unrealistic promises to our consumers like other brands may have in the past.

We know that consumers are smarter than that, and we wanted to be more progressive in how we marketed Riley.

Cat: Oh, I have so many questions off the back of even just that first answer. So, I think what you’re saying there about consumers being smarter and being more savvy again, as that consumer who stopped like on my massive doom scrolling on Instagram or whatever it was …

Your campaign did make me stop. Which I can say I’m usually a bit of a savage when it comes to adverts on social media because I just almost don’t want to see them. Like kind of like everyone, you have to work hard to make people stop scrolling.

But I stopped scrolling because I think your transparency is really interesting because I think like right off the bat, what we saw was, okay, we’re going to show you our product versus another product. We’re going to show you a few different things that are different, and we can get more into that in a little bit.

But what I also thought was really interesting is that this transparency really permeates through the entire experience. So, everything that you put out on social media, frankly it feels like I’m talking to you Fiona, it feels like I’m talking to you and the two other founders.

Because even on your packaging, there’s stuff about how you were just three girls around a table, having a glass of wine trying to put the worlds to rights. So, you get that real sense of a trusted community which is so important then when it comes to your health.

Was that something that you intentionally were trying to do, being that sort of vulnerable because it’s so interesting on a professional product.

Fiona: Yeah, that’s interesting. I think transparency for us as business owners and co-founders was part of the values that we wanted to have in our business from the get-go. And so, that’s true to everything.

So, that is with our supply chain, how our products are manufactured, how we deliver them to our customer, but also, transparency in terms of the marketing messages that we put out there and the different types of content that we put out in social media.

On top of that, another layer of transparency is us being really open and honest on we are a new startup, a new business trying to disrupt this space, and how we navigate through that, and really bringing our community along that journey with us.

And so, yeah, I think that’s a huge part of it. Like we definitely have an idea of kind of polished look and feel of how we want to present everything. But at the same time, it’s pairing that with being ourselves and being honest with our community, and us as co-founders, and we’re a very small team.

There’s only six of us, so all of us being open to jumping on stories and making TikToks and putting ourselves out there as part of the marketing tool for this startup, which definitely is something that sets us apart from the kind of mainstream competitors in our space that aren’t founder-led brands.

We started doing it at the very beginning because there was just the three of us and we had no choice in the matter, just to do everything on social media ourselves, but we saw was really resonating with people.

And so, I think it’s fair to say in this day and age, most consumers, like people buy off people, they want to trust who’s behind the businesses that they buy from. And so, we’re really trying to lean into that and give them a face to the name and be part of the journey with us, I suppose.

Cat: And it’s interesting you say that it really resonated, and like boy did it. We were just saying you were sharing on LinkedIn there last week about a growth of 12x in your first year. How much of that do you think was dying to your presence on social?

Fiona: Ooh, that’s a really good question. I think to understand, we have two revenue channels in our business.

One is direct consumer e-commerce, very social-driven. And the other then is the B2B side of our business. So, we work with a lot of enterprise clients to supply their bathrooms with period products just like they would supply it with toilet paper because we believe fundamentally, it’s a basic human right.

And so, although you would think that the corporate side of our business is very different, a lot of those early clients that we got actually discovered us on social media, and right now, then for our D2C customers, most people discover us from Instagram and TikTok, and then also word of mouth recommendations and in the press.

So, I think yeah, social has been a fundamental driver in growing our business from where we were in 2021 after launching to 12x year on year last year. And we value the importance of social media and understand what it can do for us in terms of ultimately, creating conversions but like generating awareness around a brand, and then nurturing our followers to help them understand why they should be choosing Riley, and then ultimately, convert them.

So, it’s a huge part of our business being social-led and as a content-driven brand that’s really customer-centric. It’s a great avenue to get our content out there and to communicate with our target market.

Cat: Again, as one of those customers, I can’t help but agree. I totally agree because I’m interested actually to talk about some of the differentiators that Riley has over some of the other competitors because as we mentioned at the top of this, there are a lot of other really huge companies that absolutely dominate the female health and the period business.

However, what I thought was very interesting about Riley is that you very much saw what your differentiators between them and yourselves were, and really double down on those.

Maybe you could tell our listeners a little bit like what are some of the differentiators that makes Riley a little bit different, and therefore, scroll-stopping on social would you say?

Fiona: The whole idea for Riley came about as a subscription idea because we were sick of running out of period products when we needed them.

It came really simply like there was so many products that we get. Like I get my razors on subscription, my deodorant, we get our groceries, even toilet paper, so why not period products. And it just seemed like it was a little bit overlooked.

And the conversation actually came about really naturally one night; myself and Aine and Lauren, my friends (now my wonderful co-founders) were hanging out and Aine got her period, but we didn’t have any products, we checked our handbags, nothing.

And so, it just sparked this conversation like wondering why this commodity that we need every month isn’t delivered to our doors. And when we did some market research, we found that 95% of women have run out of period products when they need them. So, this was a real common problem, like it wasn’t just us.

So, it became clear to us that having the convenience of a delivery service was a no-brainer. But then when we did a deeper dive into mainstream products that we’d been using our whole lives since we were young teenagers, we discovered that they are manufactured with a whole host of very unnecessary ingredients that contain chemicals like bleach and pesticides and rayons.

And it’s just like for us, we just felt compelled to do something about that. There’s up to 24 hormone disrupting chemicals found in mainstream period products, and that was the shocking … yeah, scary.

Cat: It’s so terrifying.

Fiona: I know. Like first of all, why is this happening? Like when you look into it, it’s essentially because it’s a cheaper form of manufacturing and the big conglomerates can make more profit.

Like we as women who want to protect our bodies and we’re really conscious of everything that we put into our bodies that we eat. Like we’re also putting period products in our bodies, so surely, there’s a better way of doing this.

So, not only is it a subscription service, but we also manufacture our products with much healthier ingredients in that we only use 100% organic cotton. There’s no added chemicals during our manufacturing process.

Even down to like the glue on mainstream period products, oftentimes tampons have the string is glued in, but we actually like weave ours in very cleverly during manufacturing so there’s no glue added.

And so, our whole ethos is creating products that are better for our bodies and also, better for our planet, and then delivering them in a really convenient way to our customers.

In terms of how you get that to be a scroll stopping Instagram post or ad, they’re really good questions, and I suppose it’s something that we’re constantly testing and learning and trying to figure out. And the messaging around the healthier options for us is definitely what I think most consumers are paying attention to right now.

And then I suppose on top of that, our whole vision for Riley is to be a lifelong female health brand, and we don’t just want to stop a period care. And so, the fact that we’re focused on really high-quality educational content around different female health topics that people are genuinely interested in and want to learn more about is an added value that a lot of different brands aren’t providing.

So, I suppose balancing the mix between those different types of content to really get people’s attention.

Cat: Yeah, I think all of those things were elements that completely just made it like a no-brainer for me to become a customer because the subscription model for periods, why was that not done before?

That seems like such a gap in the market, because it seems so obvious is something that you will need every four to six weeks. And also, like I love how environmentally friendly and high focused everything, right down to the mailer that the products arrive in, is all compostable and like you can recycle it and that’s very, very intentional as well.

But I think for me, it was the element which showed … I always think with any kind of marketing, there’s like aspirational marketing, like you could be this or you can do this action and it will improve this situation. And then there’s the marketing which shows you the stuff which is on fire right now.

And for me, when I saw your ads and saw “Oh, there’s a whole pile of things in something I’m already using that I didn’t know about.” Like I didn’t know that there was bleach in tampons, I didn’t know that there were things that were dysregulating my hormones.

And it came as such a shock that I just thought like, oh my God, that is not very well known. Again, you mentioned that we’re not really taught about our bodies, but I don’t really feel like that’s disclosed particularly well. I don’t think women necessarily know that.

So, whenever I saw that, it was like wow, that for me, was a thing that was on fire this moment and I thought wow … like as soon as I saw that, I didn’t use any of the other big-name products ever again, actually, because I was like wow, that’s absolutely terrifying. So, for me, that was your scroll stopper because I think people just don’t know how terrifying that is.

Fiona: Completely, I suppose, because we’re not legally obliged to share what’s in these products, and then that comes back to the whole transparency piece for us. It’s a question of why not, we’re putting them in our bodies, so surely, we have the right to know what they’re made of.

So, yeah, I think it’s just, yeah, definitely being transparent about that. And also, I think listening to the customer and engaging, especially with our early adopters was such a key piece of the puzzle for us because if we’re talking about the planet, there is amazing reusable options out there on the market like period underwear and menstrual cups.

We are a single-use product which obviously, there is better alternatives for the planet. That being said, we identified a gap in the market from speaking to people, whereby there was this huge cohort of customers who wanted an eco-friendly, sustainable and healthier option but weren’t quite willing to make the lifestyle shift into a cup or pants that that might entail.

And so, bridging that gap and providing them with a sustainable alternative to the products they’ve always been used to using every month, nothing has changed — but giving them ones that are manufactured in a better way and delivered in a better way was really what we wanted to do.

And it’s a work in progress. We’re constantly trying to improve our offering and look at other ways of serving our customers. The main thing is just getting started, getting it out there, building up the community on social media, and being agile enough to make changes as, and when we need to.

Cat: Speaking of social media again for a second, how did you go about it? Had you had experience with social media before? How did you find your community? How did you go about making the content? Spill your secrets.

Fiona: Really good question. Yeah, so the answer is yes, I had experience in social media before. I’d worked in digital advertising, I’d also worked in the startup world running the organic channels as well.

I had a previous business to this that I was running alone. So, all of the social media was done by myself at the time. Like they were big learning curves for me. So, when we were launching Riley, what we did was actually, we started by creating a community prior to even launching the business to the market.

So, we started putting out content on Instagram actually predominantly because TikTok wasn’t so much of a big thing back then, around like female health content that we knew was engaging and interesting.

And from that, we started generating a small following; not massive, but small — enough to gather email addresses. And so, when we launched the business then we could market to these people straightaway and generate sales from the get-go.

And what we really needed from that was the feedback from early adopters. And so, that was a real strategic decision to make sure that we could use social media to get really, really early customers and then engage with them.

And that’s something that hasn’t really changed as we’ve grown. Again, it’s been about us putting out really high-quality content that will add value to people’s lives, but with that engaging with our community as we’re growing our communities. And so, we really do use social media as a tool for that.

So, we make a point in answering every single comment left on our social media platforms, answering every single DM because it’s essentially a customer service tool for us, but also creating polls and stories where we ask people questions to get their feedback on what we currently have, but also to figure out what they would like to see from us going forward.

I like definitely did have experience in social media prior to Riley but it’s constantly changing, so it’s just one of those things that you need to always have like an eye and ear to the ground and be constantly watching and tweaking strategies as the platforms change.

Cat: I love that because I think it could be so overlooked sometimes. Sometimes social media can just be used for broadcast, but I think as you said, it absolutely is a channel for customer service.

We did a report last year, our index report that showed British and Irish consumers will choose public channels on social media and DMs as the top two channels they will use in order to reach out to brands when they have customer service requests.

Fiona: Yeah, we get more people sending us DMs, like customers sending us DMs on Instagram for customer service queries than we do toward dedicated customer service email. So, definitely, yeah, 100% that’s the case for us.

Cat: Yeah, and it’s funny though because I think it’s still not something that every single brand has figured out because I do that as well. And so, if I have a query, I will first of all go to social media, and it’s amazing the brands who get it and will reply within whatever amount of time.

And then there’s some that is just radio silence, and you look at their Twitter feed or whatever and you’re like wow, it’s just one way.

I wanted to ask you as well, education is a big part of the brand as well, and you share a lot of reproductive and sexual health information, and I wondered how has that built into the core values of the company and how has social media helped you with that? Also, I’m curious has that been a learning curve for you as an individual as well?

Fiona: Yeah, absolutely. I think I probably answered a lot of this already, so I don’t want to repeat myself, but definitely creating informative content is part of our brand identity and is really at the core of our mission.

Because we felt again as the co-founding team that we were disappointed and frustrated that we hadn’t been provided and equipped with this information when we were growing up.

And so, we really, really want to be part of changing that and we’re so passionate about it. I think there’s so much power and knowledge. Unfortunately, female health is a massively underserved and overlooked area since the dawn of time, really there’s so many scary statistics.

Like there’s a four to one male to female ratio in drug treatment studies. We’ve been looked at as small men in a lot of studies for the last few hundreds of years. So, I think that’s a huge amount of issues, especially misdiagnosis or long diagnosis of female health issues such as PCOS is massively misdiagnosed, endometriosis takes seven years to diagnose on average in Ireland.

So, it’s just crazy, but there’s so much to be done. We are not medical professionals by any means. And so, yes, we’re definitely on our own discovery journey with this, but we’re really strict with ourselves on only providing factual content from legitimate sources, and hopefully, in the future, partnering with the right people to continue bringing really well-documented facts to people.

I suppose we’re only scratching the surface. Like we’re delighted to see the impacts that our content is having on people already. We get so much feedback on, “Thank you so much for shedding a light on this, I’ve been dealing with this privately for so many years.” Or like period pain for example, like severe period pain is not normal.

Like if you are having severe period pain, go and see a doctor. And so, so many people don’t even know little things like this. So, it’s great to see like our community as well getting involved and sharing their own personal stories too and advice which I think it’s a testament to the brand that we’re building and our community feel comfortable enough to be vulnerable with us, and come along this kind of discovery path with us.

And yeah, I think even for me personally, like I’ve learned so much since we started Riley and I’m so excited to bring that to younger generations who really feel like they have the right to know this information.

I really love that you’ve talked about the community sharing with you as well because I do think we kind of do keep this side of our lives kind of private except if you’re at around a table with a glass of wine and you might moan.

And then I have had that experience where you moan to a girlfriend, and then they say, “Oh I’ve had the same thing.” So, it’s so lovely that you’ve kind of replicated this really small scale intimate but important conversation that women, if they’re lucky, get to have with their girlfriends.

But you’ve created a community where people feel like they can have those conversations, I think that’s really important. So, like well done. I think that’s seriously amazing work.

Ant it kind of made me think as well when you were talking about the popularity influencers; how have you used influencers with Riley?

Fiona: We’ve actually been very lucky in that there’s a lot of like fantastic influencers that have organically become customers of ours, and have shared our brand online without us even asking, which is-

Cat: Oh my God, the dream.

Fiona: Yeah, very like very kind of them. Like one that comes to mind is Trisha’s transformation who’s huge on Instagram. We’ve never met her, she’s a customer of ours, and she’s posted us on social so many times, and she’s just being sound, wants to support this female-led startup. So, that’s been amazing.

As a small startup with very limited budgets, we’ve not been able to invest heavily in influencer partnerships to date, but we do see the value of building authentic partnerships with the right people.

So, to start that, we’ve worked with a lot of micro influencers and gifted them with product, those that have reached out to us, but also, we’ve actively contacted people as well. And so, we’ve just gifted them with products as a way of creating content, ongoing content creation in different styles and it’s really helped with brand awareness.

And I think definitely, hopefully, in the near future, we’d like to do some paid partnerships with influencers and test that out as a marketing activation. But for us, I think choosing the right person that really aligns with our brand values and believes in what we’re doing is going to be an incredibly important aspect of that.

As well just to caveat that with everything that we do from a marketing activation perspective is a test and learn process before we do any sort of heavy investment into the space, and then just AB testing until we find the right sort of fit.

So, if influencer marketing works well for us as a trial, hopefully, then it might become more of our longer-term paid strategy.

Cat: Okay, that makes perfect sense. And it’s interesting you mentioned there about AB testing and experimenting with things, which is something that has come up time and time again on this podcast as almost like the secret to social media.

I think you can never really rest on your laurels, and as you mentioned earlier, it’s always changing, so you always need to be trying new things. Is that something that you approach each quarter with? Like what’s your approach towards AB testing and experimentation?

Fiona: Good question because you might even find the sweet spot and something that’s performing really well but it won’t last forever because it is always changing, and so it’s a constant that we look at.

We’ve set out our marketing plans for the year and broken that down into quarter, and then by month and all of that. But we are also very aware that it’s a rapidly changing environment, not just in social media but in e-commerce as a whole, and paired with things that we can’t control like economic climate, and everything like that. We need to be constantly reviewing our strategy.

And so, I think that’s again like a small kind of thing. Well, actually, I wouldn’t say it’s small. It’s actually a major differentiator that we have against our competitors or the large mainstream competitors because we can move really quickly and we can adapt really quickly as a small team, and listening to customers and engaging with customers is at the core of what we are, and who we are.

But it’s also quite easy for us. There’s no red tape, like we can get on social media, and we love doing that as founders, just jumping on social media, and like actually having a conversation with our community.

And yeah, just was the reviewing of what’s working and what’s not working is something that will be ongoing.

Cat: Such a great story ,and I’m so glad that I’m even a tiny, tiny, tiny part of it because even just hearing you talk about it, like seeing all of these huge advantages that you have over these massive, massive conglomerates basically, like it’s so great to think that there is space in this world for people to make the right choices, do the right things, and then have some like extra trump cards in their back pocket.

As you said, you can be that much more agile with how you switch plans, and as founders, you can jump on. I love it, I love it so much. I’m sorry I told you I wasn’t going to be too much of a fan girl, but I’ve failed.

Fiona: No, it’s amazing. And do you know what, it’s like this is the other thing as well, is like we meet our customers all of the time. We speak to them on social media, but we also meet them at events that we do, like wellness festivals and things like that, and like just randomly as well. Like we’re starting to get to the point where we have people randomly stopping us and saying it to us, which is incredible.

And we as co-founders of the business, no matter how big we get, we never want to lose that. And I think social media will be the tool that we will have to lean on and leverage as we grow to really make sure that we’re staying in touch with our customers. So, yeah, thank you Cat, for your support. Honestly, it means the world.

Cat: Now, well, like I feel like saying thank you for opening my eyes to something that was going on in my life and I didn’t realise. Like I am a very happy customer and I promise this isn’t like a sponsored episode or anything. It’s all very genuine.

My final question is what’s next for Riley? I mean, the world’s sort of your oyster, eh? Like I’m so curious what you’ve got planned.

Fiona: Yeah, great question. We’ve got lots of plans, we’ve big ideas. So, I think I had mentioned like our vision is to be a lifelong female health brand, and so there’s so many other areas of female health that we think need to be improved.

So, you start off as a young teenager with menstruation and there’s so many different touchpoints up until menopause when everything again, changes in your body from sexual health, fertility, giving birth, like so much for us to look at.

What we really want to do is we’re very focused on researching the next vertical that we can move into that makes sense for our community. We’re definitely still focused on expanding out our period care range, which you probably see we’re like launching new products every couple of weeks at this stage, which is fantastic.

But then moving into the next space that makes the most sense for us and the space that our community wants to see. And then as well as that, we really want to take this small Irish startup to the four corners of the world.

So, we’ve got global plans for Riley, we’re only a small team of six right now, but we’re actively hiring and once we get more amazing people on board, we’re very confident that we can achieve all of the very ambitious things that we want to achieve.

Cat: That’s so exciting, Fiona. And honestly, I cannot wait to see what’s in store for the future of Riley.

So, Fiona, in this season of Social Creatures, we are sourcing questions from the industry from some of our guests, and we have one today for you. This question is from Anu Hautalampi who is the Global Social Media Lead for United Nations Women.

Anu: Hi Fiona, it’s Anu Hautalampi here. I’m the Global Social Media Lead for UN Women. I wanted to hear your thoughts on how to build an empowering community for women and girls through social media. Do you have any tips for us?

Fiona: Hi Anu, so nice to hear from you. Thanks for reaching out and love all of the work that you’re doing. It’s a really good question: how to build an empowering community for women and girls on social media.

So, the first thing I would say is make sure to give everyone a voice. So, that’s everyone in your community, all of your followers and people that engage with you online.

And the way I would do that is to have a conversation with them. If they leave you a comment, make sure to reply to it, ask them questions. If they reach out to you on DMs, make sure to get back to them and use polls on Instagram stories, and make sure that you’re engaging with everyone so that they can have their say in everything, and have that ongoing two-way conversation.

The other thing I would say is when it comes to your content, just make sure to keep your community in mind with everything that you do. So, they should be at the forefront when you’re planning out your content and figuring out how does this benefit the community.

If you’re not sure what that looks like, just ask them, ask for their feedback, jump on stories, put up a post, ask your community what they want to see, and what kind of content if they want you to put out there. That’d probably be my top two tips, Anu, and I really hope that helps.

Cat: Well, I could not wish you any better wishes. I will be on the sidelines doing a full choreographed cheerleading routine because I just think you guys are so great. If anybody wants to learn more about Riley, how can they do so?

Fiona: Weareriley.com is our website and then on social media, it’s we.are.riley across Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook, and come and say hello. We are very friendly and yeah, definitely we love to chat with people. So, I would love if you could follow along and yeah, get involved.

[Music Playing]

Cat: You’ve been listening to Social Creatures with me, Cat Anderson. Many thanks to Fiona for joining me today. And you can find all the links to her socials in the description of this episode.

And of course, a thank you to Sprout Social for making this podcast possible. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to let us know on social media at Sprout Social, and subscribe to hear other episodes like this wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks very much for listening, and we’ll see you in two weeks.

The post Building social community through customer-centric marketing with Riley appeared first on Sprout Social.

[Music Playing]

Cat: Welcome to season two of Social Creatures, a podcast from Sprout Social. I’m Cat, and I’m here to explore some of my favourite success stories from the world of social media.

This is a space for anyone, and really, nearly anything goes, but what makes an account successful or popular? Honestly, it’s hard to know, but that’s what we’re here to find out.

Throughout the series, we’ll talk to the brands behind some of the best accounts that you know, and some that you don’t know yet to explore the way that businesses, organisations, and individuals have achieved their success in social media and crucially, how you can do it too.

With social media moving so fast, it seems that every day there are new trends to follow and new strategies to employ to capture the fleeting attention of users, and especially for brands with small teams and big ideas.

With the cultural landscape moving so quickly, how on earth can a small team capture the minds of millions. South by Southwest is a brand that has been on the cutting-edge of cool for almost four decades.

Beginning as a music and culture festival in 1987, it’s grown to be an all-encompassing event that covers the future of everything, including music, technology, business, and culture.

And it’s South by Southwest’s small social media team that has kept them on the forefront of cool in digital age, translating their history as a cultural curator onto social media.

To discuss how small but mighty teams can conquer the world of social media and stay ahead of the curve, I’m joined today by South by Southwest’s Social Media Manager, Carina Torres to tell us more.

So, Carina, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got involved with South by Southwest?

Carina: Yeah, I started at South by Southwest as an intern back in 2016, at the time I attended college at UT, Austin. So, that’s how, basically I heard about it since I am from South Texas, a border town with Mexico.

So, I had never heard of this event at all, I was like, “This is huge, it’s so many things happening at once.” So, yeah, I was like, “I really want to be a part of this.” And at the time, I did the red-carpet press organisation and they asked me to come back for the next two years.

And I was more into the radio marketing side of it, which doesn’t exist now but still dealing with social media and blogs and helping out with any content on site. And then I left Austin after college and got into I guess tech, marketing, cybersecurity, social media.

And I quickly learned it wasn’t for me at the time, I mean after South By, having celebrities and seeing musicians and it’s just a lot of adrenaline, and that was what I was looking for again.

So, I wanted to go back to Austin, and I saw there was a position open with the brand-new marketing team at South By, and I reached out and got the job. So, I was really excited to go back in 2019, work more with the communications team. Then it’s March 6th and it’s 2020 and we get cancelled, so it’s a pretty big deal.

I was really excited to do this event as a full-time staff, and we had really great stuff, we had a really great team. So, we deal with that, and then it’s 2021 and we have our first online event ever.

And that was a big shift on the marketing side too. It was like, “How are we going to show the world what’s happening in a digital landscape?” And I mean, it was successful for sure, for it being never been done before.

And then in 2022, we had our first hybrid event, and that was also successful too, but different, everything was new. Even if you’ve been there for 10 years, for 20 years, it was all kind of new.

And we just had our 2023 event, and I just got this role of social media manager last summer. So, everything’s been pretty new, but it’s been great so far.

Cat: Wow, I mean, what a journey. To be fair, I think social media managers are probably amongst some of the best placed people to deal with change.

But that’s a lot of change that you went through from being cancelled to being digital, to being hybrid, like figuring out each one of those must have been totally crazy.

Carina: 100%, and I think you can stay with the same strategy and some things that worked, but you have to try new things, take risks and find out where your audience is while we’re all online in a different scope now.

Cat: And can I just ask … I want to ask this cheesy question right at the top. We’re referring to it as South By, and is it super lame if I say South by Southwest? Is it like we say South By?

Carina: No, we should say South by Southwest. Yeah, it’s a tongue twister for sure, but yeah, we can totally say South by Southwest.

Cat: No, no, no, I like it. I was like, “Oh, I’ve got the inside scoop here, I’m going to be in with the cool kids.” But I actually was thinking you mentioned it at the top of your answer there. It’s obviously an event that encompasses so much stuff.

And perhaps actually for someone, I actually think as well, there’s a good chance there are people who are listening who have heard of South by Southwest but haven’t been — maybe don’t know the full scope of the event. So, maybe you could, I mean, try to capture what is South by Southwest all about?

Carina: Yeah, South by Southwest is so many things, and I think to every person it’s different, because there’s just … I mean, you may go for all of it, but it’s a conference, it’s a music festival, it’s a film, and TV festival.

We have a comedy festival, we have a bunch of exhibitions, we have a creative industry’s exhibitions where companies from all over the world can come show what they’re working on, their products.

We have flat stock where artists can come and share their art and it’s open to the public. We even have free community concerts where you can come and listen to showcasing artists whether you have a badge or not.

We have a pitch competition, there’s innovation awards, community service awards, yeah there’s so much to work with. There’s so many audiences we’re reaching from mass audiences to niche audiences, so it’s a lot to take in.

Cat: From a social perspective then, you’re working with — I mean, a common problem that you might hear from movie brands is that they’re like, “Oh, what are we going to post about?” This is presumably not a problem that you ever have.

Carina: Yeah, there’s all the content, there’s so much content to work with for sure. I think it’s the struggle maybe is like, “Okay, well, who are we going to speak to? Who is where? Are we reaching the right audiences on this platform? Who are we missing? What are we missing of all the content? Is it being distributed equally?”

So, there is still challenges for sure, but yeah, I think it’s awesome that we have so much to work with.

Cat: And you do have a history of the curation of what’s cool, like if you’re at South — South by Southwest is inherently cool. And so, I wonder with all of this abundance of content and your reputation as well, how do you factor social media into that?

How important is your social media strategy for perpetrating that and for keeping a finger on the zeitgeist of what people are into? Like it must be quite a lot of pressure.

Carina: Yeah, I mean, I want to take it back to 2006, South by Southwest helped launch Twitter, which was a really big deal at the time. And just thinking about how much change has happened since then not only on Twitter but all platforms, it’s wild.

And I think it just goes to show that South By has always been willing to take risks when it comes to new social platforms or new social features. We obviously, have a prominent social media presence, and it does take up a big chunk of our content strategy as a whole.

And even on site, it’s like social is it for marketing for us? And yeah, we want to share everything that happens, we want to share the upcoming tech trends, we want to share the new films or TV series, we want to share new upcoming artists, et cetera. And we want to share that with our digital community. We want to reach all the new and niche audiences that we can communicate to.

And I think even today, talking about how we keep up with social media today, like everybody’s doing video, that’s how you are achieving discovery on social media.

Everyone’s trying to make their platform like TikTok and everyone’s prioritising video. You’re going to get a higher ranking, more people are going to see your content if you’re doing videos, so I hate to say it, but we have to please the algorithms.

And I always remind my team, it’s like, “Okay, this is cool, but let’s think about what is the algorithm going to favour?” And I think something that our team does well, and our leadership does well, is we become more adaptable.

We get more creative with whatever content we’re creating and shift our strategy to — especially since like we were saying, going from normal event to digital to hybrid, to again, normal, but still some digital, we always have to be adaptable.

Cat: I cannot ask this question, when you’re saying, thinking of the algorithm, do you have any inside tips that you could share? Like what is the content that you believe the algorithm is going to favour?

Carina: Vertical video for sure.

Cat: Yeah okay.

Carina: I don’t know, we’ve been trying to A/B test too, working with our video team, kind of like what works for us, and I think every account is different. Like truly the algorithm is the algorithm, but also like, “What is your audience engaging with?” And it’ll say what the algorithm is showing too.

So, I think just being aware, but also vertical video is key right now for sure, for anyone. And I mean, you see that across the board with any brands, like that’s what it is now.

Cat: I think it’s really interesting when you’re talking about capturing this content. To me from the outside perspective, it seems like you’re covering off the holy trinity of stuff that you want to do online.

So, you’ve got your brand awareness, you’re known for being cool, you’re known for having this amazing curation of stuff happening at this event. So, you’re sharing that for brand.

It’s lead gen as well, because you’re going to be sharing this with people who’ll be like, “Oh my goodness, I have got to go to the next one.” So, presumably, you’re also helping drive next year’s ticket sales.

And then of course, you mentioned … and I would like to dig into this a little bit as well, community, which I think is sometimes from a brand perspective, a little bit forgotten but social media was created for community. And so, I really loved to hear that that’s a big part of your focus.

Can you tell us a little bit more about what you do for and with your community online, and how do you look after it and nurture it?

Carina: I feel like that’s still something we’re trying to perfect but it’s interacting with our participants when we can. Like they’re so excited to come and we’re so excited to have them. So, showing them some love, attendees having trouble with registration or just, there’s so many places to go.

So, just making sure like when someone’s DMing us and has a question or they’re lost, making sure that we’re being attentive and saying like, “We can send you to the right place, have no fear.”

And yeah, I feel like also, Austin too, has changed so much in these past years, but still trying to say like, “This is our home, we love our locals, we love our austinites, we love our communities. Showing love and support to locals and restaurants is all we can do.”

Cat: And I think it actually kind of segues quite neatly into the next question. So, we’re talking about change, you mentioned you joined in 2019. Cool, great, what a wonderful time to be alive and what is the thing …

Carina: What does the future hold?

Cat: Who knows, we have no idea. Roll on 365 days and holy mackerel, stuff has changed; you mentioned obviously that you were cancelled, 2020 is cancelled, 2021 is online only, 2022’s hybrid.

Can you even begin to tell us how social supported that? Because I cannot imagine — well, I know that so many businesses and events in particular had to lean so heavily on their social teams in this time, and I’m wondering, was it the same for South by Southwest?

Carina: I think so. I think there will always be a lean on social regardless. I mean, it was a bit hard because we didn’t have as much content to work with leading up to 2021, kind of still using stuff we had in 2019, and then even then, 2021 happening. But you still don’t have all the cool stuff that happened in the moment in real life. So, you’re just trying to use these Zoom meetings for sharing conferences.

Artists did a really cool thing where they … kind of like in their own space performed and that was really cool to share and having films streamed too and sharing that. But it was definitely hard because we just didn’t have the content at the time.

And once 2022 came around, it was like, okay, yes, we have so much content to work with now, we’re so excited. And I mean even in that era, we weren’t on TikTok, and I feel like that’s at least where audiences were going towards. And then fast-forward, one to two years later, everyone’s like, “We need to be on TikTok, we need to reach these audiences.”

And same, I mean for 2022 especially, I was like, “It’s our first in-person event since 2019, we need to be on here. We don’t have an audience right now, I don’t know who we’re going to reach, but there are people on there going to South By or following South By, so let’s give them what they want.”

And I am grateful for my team for trusting me with that because we have had some small success on there since and kind of get a feel for what works best. Especially for on site, I feel like where we pick up the most momentum across all social and we’re still growing our audience on there.

Our content is still 100% organic on there, which is really interesting. And I think there’s so much potential for us to grow on there, and I’m excited to reach niche audiences on there and have people discover us in a way that they haven’t on other platforms.

Cat: That’s such a good point because TikTok is so great for discovery, I think maybe more than other platforms where you have to seek people out to follow them, you can kind of stumble upon stuff that’s brand new and exciting.

We talked about how South by Southwest; I really want to call it South By because I just want to pretend I’m cool.

Carina: I like the South by Southwest.

Cat: Okay, South by Southwest, we’ll call it South by Southwest. You’re known for curating what’s cool. There’s a lot of space and a lot of time at the event, you do not have that same space and time online. There’s only so much stuff you can really put out on a lot of platforms.

So, how much curation is going on with what you’re broadcasting on social media and how do you do that? How do you hold on to that philosophy and reputation with your curation of stuff online?

Carina: As far as our content, like that 100% goes to our participant, all the cool things that we’re sharing is because of what they’re bringing. We really stand by our purpose, which we replicate on social of helping creative people achieve their goals.

I like to think of myself as a hype woman for these participants year-round and the team too. They bring us the cool content to work with and we just have the privilege to share it with the world. And I think there’s so much that goes on other than just what happens on site.

It’s like even right now saying, “Okay, what worked, what didn’t work? What can we do new for 2024? What can we start to brainstorm?” Coming up and seeing if our strategy is still relevant for 2024, what we want to change, what we want to add, and then getting ready for applications.

Like how are we going to promote applications this year? How are we going to change now that vertical video is a whole thing. What vertical videos are we going to share?

And then once we start to have programming come in, like curating announcements, curating how we’re going to showcase the participants that are coming and then it’s the event and then it happens all over again. So, it goes all year and I think it’s just what the participants bring is what makes it cool, I think.

And I think even just thinking about Lizzo, she came to South By in 2014 and a couple years after that, and it’s like look at Lizzo today and last year she was a keynote for our 2022 event, and that’s like the full circle South By to us.

We can keep promoting this participant, show their progress, show their achievements, awards, and then they’re a keynote. It’s crazy, seeing her journey was crazy for us.

Cat: That’s such a nice full life cycle really, isn’t it, then to see that participant become a complete megastar. I mean, does mega star even cover Lizzo? She’s iconic.

Carinas: Yeah, iconic and even Everything Everywhere All At Once, premiering last year at South By and winning I don’t know how many Academy awards, but getting that recognition too, it’s like we’re bringing really cool things and it’s a privilege to be able to promote it.

Cat: I am so jealous of your job because it sounds so unbelievably fun. But another question I’m kind of not nervous to ask but I keep thinking, how is she capturing all of this? And you’ve mentioned your team, how many people are working on your social media team, because there’s a lot to do, right?

Carina: There’s a lot to do and we are small. We are a small team; there is me as a social person, we have two, three editors at a time right now, and obviously, we have a manager and some website people too and a designer. That is our web and social team.

We are a small team, but we have an amazing video team that’s also small but amazing to work with and some other content capturing teams and obviously, they outsource people for the onsite event because there’s just so much coverage, but we do it.

Like I want to give props to my team because we make it happen and maybe we miss stuff here and there because we don’t have the resources we would like. But I think that all in all, we do a really good job about making sure we’re hitting the big moments and making sure at least there’s some photographer or videographer out there that we can see later and say, “Oh, that was cool, we should share that now.”

Cat: I love that, I feel like there are hundreds of small but mighty social media teams getting a lot of like, “Yeah, amazing,” because I think there’s so many small social media teams that do unbelievable stuff and I think from the outside you can think that there’s much larger teams behind this effort, but it’s knowing your audience, knowing what you’re doing and executing it to an excellent level.

Carina: Yeah, shout out to the small social teams for sure, we are surviving every day.

Cat: I think it’s nice to hear you talk about coming onto TikTok and that sense of, “Oh, we have to be on this platform,” because again, was there a social team in the world that did not have somebody saying, “We should be on TikTok?”

Starting out from scratch on any platform can be kind of difficult. Could you tell us about the content that you’re sharing on TikTok? Are you sharing really polished content? Are you doing rough and ready content? Like what’s your style on TikTok?

Carina: I feel like how I sold it to the team for us to start there was doing the rough and ready. I was like, “This doesn’t need to be polished; this doesn’t need to be a big lift.” Obviously, having legal approved things is one thing, but in terms of style, I like Lo-fi is what I was really looking for when we launched it.

You know, just having that POV type of sense so we can just make people feel like they’re here and make people want to come here and enjoy it. And I think then we started to have a little bit more fun with it.

And as we worked with our video team saying, “Okay, there’s nice footage going out, can we just get that vertical? Can we use that for TikTok but still not be as polished?” Like this isn’t a sales video, it’s just right trying to relive that magic moment, and that’s kind of all I want to share.

Cat: I’m so happy to hear you say that because I think you know yourself when you use TikTok and you see something that’s overly polished or feels like an ad, I’m so instantly turned off by it. And I do think some brands experiment with both, so I think you’re buying on the money.

Carina: Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff on TikTok. I mean, I’m on the For You Page and sometimes I don’t even see the sponsored and I like it and I’m like, “That’s the magic right there” of me not even knowing this was a sponsored video.

Cat: Yeah, totally, and it’s not easy to do sometimes. Some people really fail and then some people do it right. And I think as you said, when you see it done right, it’s like chef’s kiss. Good chef.

Carina: Yeah, chef’s kiss, how can I do that perhaps to them?

Cat: I wanted to ask how did you help to curate a unique voice for South by Southwest online when it is already so established in the public mind? Or did you have to do that?

Carina: I would give credit to previous communications teams and also, our leadership for our department. I think, like I said, South By is so many things and to everyone it’s different and we’re always talking to specific audiences for all the things that we have to offer and that’s a lot.

But I think the team always makes sure we’re staying true to our brand, speaking to our community, speaking to — we’re an Austin-based brand company, making sure we stay true to that. We’re informative but we can also be relatable to our audiences.

And I like to tell people that we are the cowboy emoji. Like the cowboy emoji was really built for us so we just slap it on all the time. And it’s great because cowboys are trending right now.

Cat: Cowboys are trending right now? I must have missed this memo.

Carina: I feel like everyone’s trying to be a cowboy right now. Like everybody has cowboy boots, everybody has a cowboy hat outside of Texas, so it’s interesting to see.

Cat: I’m so glad you gave me this information because I don’t know if that’s hit the UK and Ireland and Europe just yet, so I’m going to get ahead of the trend.

Carina: I wonder if it will, but you can definitely show up to the office in a cowboy hat and boots and see how it goes.

Cat: I mean, I think it would definitely be a look, I love that. I guess my final question for you is, this is an unbelievably cool role that you have in a company that is fully supportive of it, which is so great to see.

However, unfortunately, we hear all the time, you know, we’re talking about small and mighty social teams, and a lot of the time there’s brands who don’t know how to get started on social media, there’s people who don’t know how to get started in social media.

Do you have any advice for both groups really about how to really make your way in social media from a brand perspective and then also as an individual?

Carina: Yeah, I would start with don’t be afraid to take risks. I mean that’s like saying about Twitter, how we helped launch them. We just got on TikTok; you never know where it’s going to lead you.

I’m always pitching memes to the legal team, you never know what they’re going to approve. So yeah, just don’t be afraid and just go for it. Honestly, you just learn insights and everything’s a learning curve, just look at it like that.

Like I mentioned vertical video too, that being the huge focus and what every brand is leaning towards right now and what the algorithms are leaning towards, for sure it has to be included in the content assets.

And like I said, paying attention to what type of contents your audience interacts with on your social platforms. They’re not all the same, different audiences everywhere. I feel like broken record, but that was something that when I came on, I had to explain to the team too.

It’s like we have to stop broadcasting everything on all the platforms and being repetitive because there’s so many different people on each. So, let’s look more into our insights there and respond with that.

And then I would end with be genuine. Like I said, stop being a salesy type social account, Lo-fi videos too, more authentic naturally, just be genuine.

Cat: So Carina we actually have a question in for you today from one of your industry peers, that’s Maeve McQuillan at WebSummit

Maeve:               Hi Carina my name is Maeve McQuillan and I’m the Head of Content Marketing at WebSummit. So I have a question for you today as a fellow marketing professional for live events. At SXSW do you feel like you need to have a presence on every social media platform, or are you more selective with the platforms you use? And why is that if so? 

Carina:               I think that it definitely depends on your brand, the goals you want to achieve and your audience. At SXSW particularly we have a lot of different audiences because we are a lot of different things. And all of these audiences are spread out across all of these different platforms. 

Carina: So we have different approaches to each platform in our social strategies so we can connect and reach these audiences, and for us I think it’s important for us to be on a lot of different social platforms to reach these audiences.  

And even try what was an untouched platform for us like TikTok to even reach new audiences and connect with more people. 

And obviously I think resources play a big factor when managing all these different channels, but I think once your goals are clear and your audiences are defined for each platform, I think it’s easier to conduct all the content and know who you’re actually connecting with. 

And lastly I think I would add to not be afraid to take a risk on a new platform just because you’re not on there, you never know who you’re gonna reach it could be a great success 

Cat: I could not agree with you more. Oh, and you forgot to mention cowboys, like throw some cowboy emojis in.

Carina: Yeah, and throw some cowboys in there. Dress as a cowboy, really, just go full cowboy.

Cat: Oh, my goodness, Carina, thank you so much.

Carina: Thank you.

Cat: I have absolutely loved talking to you. This has been so interesting and I’m so jealous, painfully jealous of your awesome job. And yeah, thank you for taking the time to talk to us. I’m sure our listeners are going to absolutely love it.

Carina: Thank you so much for having me, and again, I’ll just shout out to my team too because it’s a great role but like I said, we’re small and they really help me make everything work, so shout out.

[Music Playing]

Cat: You’ve been listening to Social Creatures with me, Cat Anderson. Many thanks to Carina for joining me today. You can find the links to all South by Southwest socials in the description of this episode. And of course, a thanks to Sprout Social for making this podcast possible.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to let us know on social media at Sprout Social and subscribe to hear other episodes like this wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you in two weeks.

The post Maximize marketing with SXSW appeared first on Sprout Social.

[Music Playing]

Cat: Welcome to season two of Social Creatures, a podcast from Sprout Social. I’m Cat, and I’m here to explore some of my favourite success stories from the world of social media.

This is a space for anyone and really, nearly, anything goes, but what makes an account successful or popular? Honestly, it is hard to know, but that’s exactly what we’re here to find out.

Throughout the series, we’ll be talking to the brains behind some of the best accounts that you know, and some that you don’t know yet, to explore the way that these businesses, organisations, and individuals have achieved their success on social media. And crucially, how you can do it too.

Second-hand fashion has become one of the fastest growing online trends of the past few years, with users on the hunt to find the next hidden gem for their wardrobe and to shop in a more sustainable way.

With this in mind, Oxfam’s Second Hand September is the perfect campaign to boost the visibility of the importance of shopping sustainably, and how that hunt for the precious rare find can actually help a good cause.

Joining us today is Oxfam GB’s PR lead, Emma Fabian, to tell us more.

So, Emma, I’m so thrilled to have you join us here today. And so, thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us.

So, the environmental impact of fashion is a problem that we are all becoming increasingly aware of. And Second Hand September is a great campaign that is trying to turn people into conscious shoppers. Could you tell us a little bit about how that idea came about?

Emma: Oxfam has existed for 80 years, so it was set up in the Second World War, in response to the Second World War, the Greek famine.

And then in 1947, the first Oxfam shop opened in Oxford, and it happened to be the first permanent charity shop ever in the UK, arguably the world.

So, we’ve been selling second-hand sustainable fashion for more than seven and a half decades and we are a very authentic voice in the field of second-hand fashion.

And the first Second Hand September campaign came about in 2019. It was part of a strategic stream of content that we’d been working on for a number of years about our sustainable fashion, and sort of on the back of a London Fashion Week show that we did in February 2019 that went really well.

At that stage, it was sort of like a nascent idea. We sort of knew that it would work within Oxfam’s overarching narrative of climate. We knew that the nation was becoming more aware of climate emergency and the emissions produced by fast fashion.

There was a select committee, a government select committee into fast fashion at the time. So, there was a zeitgeist around this issue in 2019. It felt like a campaign that would resonate at the time. So, we went ahead and did it.

And at that time, it was quite a small campaign but we were able to do it because of the work that we’d been doing before, and the relationships we’d made within the fashion industry, and the people who would support us.

For example, at that time, Stella Tennant who’d walked in the show said she would front the campaign with her teenage daughter, Iris. So, that gave us megawatt celebrity power that we knew would get cut through in the media.

And then we worked up the other content. We launched the campaign at Glastonbury, which gave us that celebrity fairy dust sprinkle at the beginning. And then we produced stories throughout the summer in 2019, and then the photo shoot launched, and the response was just very good. So, that was the first ever one back in 2019.

Cat: Wow, I mean it sounds just so cool. Some of those collabs and like the launch at Glastonbury and everything, like it’s just so cool.

But maybe for people who don’t know what Second Hand September is, what is it that you’re asking people to do in Second Hand September? I feel like it might be a little self-explanatory, but just in case people don’t know.

Emma: Well, I mean it is self-explanatory to an extent, but it has evolved in 2019. It was always a sort of mass engagement activity. We really wanted to get lots of people interested in taking the Second Hand September pledge, so pledging to only buy second-hand for the month of September.

As the campaign has evolved, we are embracing second-hand shopping in a slightly different way. We’re sort of promoting and asking people to consider buying second-hand as part of what they buy. And the reason why Oxfam does Second Hand September is because the money that they generate all go towards Oxfam’s work.

So, we don’t sell fashion simply for the fun of it. We sell fashion because it is a fundraising activity for Oxfam’s work around the world, working with partners to fight the injustice of poverty. So, we’re fashion-driven by activism.

So, this is a fashion campaign to promote sustainable fashion which is much better for the planet. And when you buy a second-hand, it’s not necessary to buy stuff that has generated emissions in its manufacturer.

So, the fashion industry is a massive emitter of emissions. Emissions cause climate change, it’s the world’s poorest communities who are being hit hardest by climate change right now.

For example, in East Africa, many millions of people are on the brink of famine and Oxfam’s recently done research that shows one person is dying every 36 seconds from hunger in East Africa. So, that’s in Somalia, South Sudan, and Kenya and Ethiopia, and it’s hunger fueled by climate change.

So, it all links up. We sell this sustainable fashion, it’s sustainable because it’s second-hand. Second-hand means less emissions. Less emissions means you’re doing something positive to reduce the climate emergency.

The climate emergency is affecting the world’s poorest communities right now, and Oxfam raises money to work with partners to enable the world’s poorest communities to deal with this terrible thing that’s happening.

Cat: One of the biggest issues obviously, when it comes to communicating messages around social campaigns is consumer apathy. And that’s for any campaign online.

And I think especially, when we’re talking about things like world hunger and climate change, it can feel really overwhelming for an individual to know how they can contribute meaningfully in a way that can actually help.

And another thing that you mentioned as well was that fast passion and having at best a few question marks and at worst, like genuinely really starting to look into the damage that it was doing was part of the zeitgeist.

But also, I love this idea of putting a cause within the confines of a month. So, we have like Dry January or the Ganuary where it seems to be a really comfortable amount of time for people to try and incorporate new habits into their life.

So, I love that you use that for Second Hand September. And as we know, it’s been extremely popular.

I wonder if you could share with us how did you create messaging that sort of captured consumer interest around Second Hand September, and how did you make it so engaging?

Emma: You know, when you talk about Dry January and the different campaigns that sort of last for a month, those campaigns are sort of meeting a need in the public.

So, Dry January taps into the fact that people have over indulged in December and Christmas, so they’re sort of ready for it. Second Hand September is sort of similarly meeting people where they are and offering them a solution to something that they are interested in and potentially, looking for already.

So, you would have to be living in a cave to not be aware of the climate emergency, but like what do you do about it? When we create campaigns, we always think what’s the objective? We always put the audience first. How can they feel that this is for them?

So, the what’s in it for them is that they’re doing something positive, but also, the fact it’s a fashion campaign, right?

So, Oxfam is fashion-driven by activism, but people don’t buy clothes because they feel sorry for something. They buy clothes because actually, they like the look of them, they can afford them hopefully, and they feel that they suit them.

Oxfam has this extra feel-good factor because actually, you probably think you might well be doing the right thing for a good cause. So, I think that our messages were sort of really riffing on those issues.

And also, we had the advantage of the relationships we already have and the reputation we already had in the field of sustainable fashion to be able to get those messages out and amplify them.

So, we were talking about the problem of the climate emergency and the place that fast fashion particularly at that time, has in that, and what you as an individual can do about that by deciding to shop second-hand.

And at the same time, we were making this a fashion campaign with a celebrity shoot showing if it looks cool like this, you can afford it, and these people are wearing it and supporting it, then why wouldn’t you?

So, we tried to do all these things and we worked with another second-hand retailer called Vestiaire. We worked with Emily Sheffield who was setting up an Instagram news channel, and we did a social campaign on Instagram, a wardrobe clear out, so people donated to Oxfam, they donated to Vestiaire, and the money went to Oxfam’s work, all part of Second Hand September.

So, we were looking for ways that people could participate in the campaign. That’s how I think we tried to sort of get our message out.

But we were lucky because the time was right, we were tapping into a very live conversation already, and I think that that’s partly why the response was welcoming because people were ready for this information, ready to feel less paralyzed by the climate crisis, and ready for action to do something that they already wanted to do.

Cat: I love that this campaign is about, as you said, people don’t buy clothes because they feel sorry or sad, people are buying clothes because it sparked some joy and love and excitement in them. So, people are buying something that they feel great in, and then they also know that they’re doing the right thing and helping Oxfam.

It’s a perfect campaign. I just love it so much. I think it’s such a lovely uplifting story. I wonder because obviously, you’ve got an inside scoop that we don’t know about, you’ve got the inside track. What was one thing that you maybe find surprising when you were developing the concept?

Emma: I think one of the surprising thing was how successful it was because we really weren’t expecting it at the first year. I mean, that genuinely was the really surprising thing. The response was just much better than we thought, and was sort of a trial the first year, and the springboard to what happened later.

But we had lots and lots of positive press and lots of interest from fashion journalists and celebrities who were well-known for being very stylish in brand-new clothes. And there they were saying how brilliant second-hand clothes were and second-hand fashion was and is, and how it made sense.

So, we were following our instinct, but it was a surprise and a very nice surprise.

Cat: Oh, you absolutely don’t get any guarantees with a campaign. And even if you think you’ve cracked it, sometimes they just don’t work out that way. But that’s why I think this is such a nice one because it’s for good, it makes people feel good, it’s fun as you said. Yeah, I just think it’s fabulous.

How do you think that the growing trend — I mentioned it there about the sort of the holy grail of going vintage shopping is that you might find, I don’t know, like some incredible like design or garment or something, and I do think there probably are second-hand stores around different parts of the country where you can do that.

But how do you think the growing trend of thrifting and bargain hunting for hidden fashion gems, how did this help Second Hand September? Because as you say, this sort of came at the right time, there was an appetite for this.

Emma: So, it has definitely helped Second Hand September and that’s very clear on the social engagement. So, Second Hand September was conceived always as a mass engagement activity, but I think it has grown particularly because Gen Z is very engaged in climate issues, and genuinely, they’re quite enthusiastic about charity shopping.

They probably don’t have a large disposable income because of the demographic they are at, and there’s lots of activity, lots of discussion, conversation across all platforms on charity shopping and thrifting, and the thrill of the hunt. And I think that that has helped us, but we’ve genuinely managed to be a really authentic voice in that conversation.

I mean, the thing about Second Hand September is it’s taken a life of its own. At the beginning, we were keen to try and think we would have a grip on it, have it called Oxfam’s Second Hand September.

And then we quickly realised that actually people were talking about Second Hand September without mentioning Oxfam, and we thought well, the people are sort of embracing it, they’re taking it and making it their own. And actually, that’s a good thing because they’re connecting with it.

And I think that that was partly because of the enthusiasm for second-hand shopping, the concern for the climate, and the knowledge that this was something that individuals could do to make a difference and feel good about their shopping habits but also enjoying it.

The conversation is very much about sharing tips how to do it. I think that people really enjoy that. And so, the ownership of the campaign, it is Oxfam’s campaign but we sort of relinquished a little bit of it, but are happy to do so because we are a campaigning organisation fundamentally, we want to do the right thing.

And the right thing is to try and do what is necessary to fight the climate crisis. And this is something that people can do and we are just delighted that they are.

Cat: I mean, I think that’s so fabulous that it has actually outgrown Oxfam and I say that only is a positive thing in that its people are embracing the concept. And the more people who embrace the concept, it is ultimately having a positive impact.

As you have mentioned, it very quickly grew into a phenomenon and as we’ve already heard, there have been multiple brands and countless social media stars all now promote Second Hand September.

How have you find that growth? How did it go from a small grassroots campaign into a yearly social media event?

Emma: So, we always wanted it to be a mass engagement activity. We worked with Glastonbury the first year, we worked with Vestiaire, and we’d already been working with organisations such as Burberry and Marks & Spencer. We had big partners to start off with.

And then the second year, we had a partnership with Selfridges. So, I think that these heavy lifters have helped grow the campaign and this is exactly what we wanted to do. We want to get as many people as possible buying Oxfam’s fashion because it generates funds for Oxfam’s work.

And fundamentally, that is the reason why we do it. We are feel good fashion but we are driven with a serious message at our heart. So, we want as many people as possible to engage with that.

And I think success sort of breeds success really. And more people have become involved, and in recent years, that has been very much with influencers as well as celebrities.

So, we’ve had people fronting the campaign. So, the first year it was Stella Tennant and her daughter Iris, and then we had Michaela Coel who was just incredible, and Sienna Miller and laterally Felicity Jones and Miquita Oliver and her mom, Andy and grandmother.

But you’ve also got loads of people participating online and in the fashion shows that we’ve done, which sort of all link up with Oxfam’s work on sustainable fashion. We have incredible names who’ve walked on the runway, and of course, they’re all volunteers who do it for free.

So, this has helped amplify the message across loads and loads of channels. So, I think that’s how it’s grown to the extent it has grown.

Cat: Can I just ask, you mentioned some of the celebrities, we’ve talked about them a few times now. How did you come to work with them? How did you get them looped into the campaign, and how big a role do you think they played?

Emma: I think that they play a massive role. I mean good communication only happens with other people. So, you’re speaking with them and you’re speaking with your audience, and I think that having these amazing women mainly who’ve fronted the campaign each year has really given the campaign extra oomph because if these amazing women, who probably can have whatever they want to wear are wearing are Oxfam’s second-hand clothes, it elevates the brand, I think.

And also, just demonstrates that this fashion is for everybody and it’s really nice. Whatever your taste or style you will find it. So, it’s worked in different ways. So, we’ve been approached by celebs to participate in the campaign, and we also go out to celebrities, and we have a celebrity and ambassador team that is heavily involved in that.

And we’ve also worked with a stylist called Bay Garnett, and she has also helped with that, but it’s a sort of team thing. And these celebrities, they’re brilliant because they’ve enabled us to do a fashion shoot with the difference because it’s all second-hand fashion.

And then we produce content for different channels, including everything from paid social activity to posters and shops, interviews in the press. And the content from those interviews is repurposed into lots of different types of posts.

So, they have been very important in the campaign. We do need influential third-party voices to work with to get our message out and we’re just very grateful for their support.

Cat: Yeah, we are also very grateful for all the work that Oxfam has done because I think this is such a fantastic campaign and I thank you so much for your work in that as well. I think it’s amazing the impact is probably immeasurable from this campaign.

I think one tiny quick question to finish, Emma, do you have a favourite piece of second-hand fashion that you own yourself and what is it?

Emma: Well, actually I have got a few wonderful things. So, for Christmas, I managed to find myself a really cool grey sparkle shirt that was quite fitted and it had a tie that I could make at the front. So, I thought that was very nice. It cost me £17, and I wore it on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. So, I was very pleased with that.

And I went shopping with a colleague of mine and she took me to an Oxfam boutique and she found me amazing, Armani net top. It was just incredible, and it wasn’t very much money at all. So, you can get your favourite things second-hand.

And we did a really interesting piece of research for Second Hand September last year. And we worked with a psychologist, a professor of fashion psychology, who set up the first ever VA in fashion psychology. And we did some research and it found out that the thrill of buying something new wears off after four wears.

And actually, that something can feel new to you even if it’s not brand new. Second-hand is definitely not second-best anymore and we are very lucky because it is genuinely becoming more and more fashionable to wear second-hand.

And I think that is something that has evolved not just because of Oxfam at all, and not just because of Second Hand September, but it has been a movement in the past four or five years that second-hand fashion is becoming future-focused and very fashionable.

Cat: I mean, it definitely has, and I love that point that something doesn’t have to be new. It can feel new to you, and I bet you still pull out that Armani top and feel fabulous about that.

Emma: I do.

Cat: Because there’s always going to be the excitement of like, yes, I find this. Like I can’t believe that you’ve had one of those experiences that I dream about, so I’m exceptionally jealous.

But Emma, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. It’s been such an interesting conversation, and I really hope it will inspire some of our listeners to take part in Second Hand September this year.

Just to finish up, where can people find out more about the campaign?

Emma: Well, if they go to Oxfam GB, they’ll be able to find more about the campaign. But if you go to the Oxfam GB press account, there’s all the information about what we’re up to and what we’re saying at the time.

So, Oxfam GB on Twitter or on Instagram is where you can find out everything about Second Hand September and what Oxfam is up to generally.

[Music Playing]

Cat: You’ve been listening to Social Creatures with me, Cat Anderson. Many thanks to Emma for joining me today.

If you’d like to learn more about what Oxfam is getting up to, you can find all the links to their socials in the description of this episode. And of course, a huge thank you Sprout Social for making this podcast possible.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to let us know on social media at Sprout Social, on the web at sproutsocial.com/socialcreatures, or subscribe to hear other episodes like this wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks very much for listening, and we’ll see you in two weeks.

The post Sustainable Fashion Marketing with Oxfam appeared first on Sprout Social.

[Music Playing]

Cat: Welcome to Season Two Social Creatures, a podcast from Sprout Social. My name’s Cat, and I’m here to explore some of my favourite success stories from the world of social media.

This is a space for anyone and really, nearly anything goes, but what makes an account successful or popular? Honestly, it’s hard to know, but that is what we’re here to find out.

Throughout the series, we’ll talk with the brands behind some of the best accounts that you know, and some that you don’t yet, to explore the way that these businesses, organisations, and individuals have achieved their success on social media, and crucially, how you can do it too.

The online world of professional athletes is a wonderful place for sports stars to connect with their supporters and build their brand, but it also has a dark side. Online abuse of players seems to be a pervasive problem that can seriously affect the mental health of athletes.

FIFPRO is a representative body that advocates on behalf of professional sports people and is trying to tackle the issue.

We spoke to FIFPRO’s, Head of Communication, Alejandro Varsky, to try and get to the bottom of the issue, and to find out exactly what FIFPRO are doing to create a fairer and less toxic environment for all on and off the pitch.

So, Alejandro, can you tell us about FIFPRO and what it is that you do?

Alejandro: FIFPRO is the global union for professional football players, the trade union. So, as you know, football players are also workers (people tend to forget that) and as such, they have the right to get together, unionise, and negotiate with the employers.

So, each country has its own domestic union that take care of the domestic thing. So, let’s say the PFA in England looks after the players in England, but then you have over 65 unions that then come together as FIFPRO and FIFPRO represents them, and then the players in global issues.

So, basically, just to give you an example, FIFPRO is independent from FIFA, but FIFA recognizes FIFPRO as the official voice of the players. So, when there’s some kind of negotiation that needs to take place, let’s say the international match calendar to say something, the voice of the players is represented by FIFPRO. And my role within FIFPRO is the Director of Communications.

Cat: Wonderful. And that’s interesting that you mention how you work with FIFA because separate, but you do work very hand in hand with them. And you actually used to work at FIFA, didn’t you?

Alejandro: I used to work at FIFA for 19 years, basically like almost my whole career. And yeah, we work hand in hand in some topics, and then we have different discussions in a different tone, as usually happens between employers and employees.

But of course, we recognize each other and we need to work together to make sure that the players get the best outcome, which is in the end, our biggest interest.

Cat: So, diving right into the issue that we’re going to talk about today, obviously, the world of professional sports has a somewhat unique problem in that there are pretty much at all levels, there’s some layers of abuse, and it’s often online abuse.

So, whether this is towards players or referees, managers, pretty much you name it, there’s probably someone out there who has got some sort of dislike for somebody who’s associated with the world of football.

What are the types of things that we’re seeing online directed to players these days?

Alejandro: Well, it’s funny that you mentioned because in football, in sports, but football in particular, happens a lot where people think that it’s right to abuse players. Not only on the online space, also you go to the stadium, and you see that all the time, which doesn’t happen with any other workers.

If you go to see a play in a theatre and you don’t like what you see, you don’t get up and start insulting the actors every time they come on stage. Or if you have a doctor’s appointment and the doctor takes half an hour more to see you than it was planned originally, you don’t do that either.

But when you go to see a player performing and they do something that you don’t like, you immediately, people immediately get up and insult them and abuse them. And I find that very interesting as such. And that is an extension of that, that is a social media, the digital space, as you said, which is no different.

And we as FIFPRO, in 2021, we did a study, across sports study with two other unions: the MBPA and the WNBPA, who are actually the unions that look after the professional players from the NBA and the women’s tournament in the NBPA.

And we monitored for a space of four or five months from May to September ‘21, over 160 accounts of players from both sports; men, women, non-binary players, how many comments, abusive comments these athletes were receiving.

We were looking specifically at messages targeting the players, which means including their handles on social media. And the founding was like horrific, like really horrific. Like not surprising, but once you see the data, it’s really shocking.

And we’re looking at over 160 players from basketball and football and more than 1,500 abusive messages targeting that. So, you do the math on what that means. And then of course, we took different information, and we found different conclusions into these.

So, on how some players or those who actually have or show any solidarity with social issues are targeted the most, it’s really shocking once you get the numbers and you break it down. So, we’re facing a major issue, major problem here.

Cat: It’s so interesting the comparison you made between people don’t shout at their doctors if they’re a few minutes late. Is it something about people being in a crowd, perhaps, or is it just the passion that people have for the sport?

Why do you think people feel the alliance to be able to do this? It feels so against how a human would behave as a singular individual. And yet, as you say, on mass, this seems to be something that is very prevalent. What are your thoughts on that?

Alejandro: I think it happens because it was allowed to happen for too long. So, then you create the habit that it’s fine to do it. Some people say, “Well, I pay my ticket, so I’m allowed to go and just bring out all my frustrations of my daily life.” And I would question that, like why is that?

Then of course, there is something about the masses and the way they behave, people how they behave when they’re in the middle of a crowd. We could read this from many different angles. But the point to me is like the simple answer is because it’s been allowed for too long.

If the pandemic shows something is that football can happen with no fans. It can be a bit boring to watch, it loses a lot, bit can happen. But it cannot happen without the players. So, I think the players, we need to look after the players, and this is a very growing issue that need to be tackled ASAP.

Again, going back to your original question, there are many answers to that, I would stick to it’s been allowed for too long, so people think that’s alright.

Cat: You did mention in your previous answer as well that there is a little bit of a gender. You assess the gender of different players as well, and like how gender played a role in this.

Were there any particular findings there, was there anything that was particularly different for male, female, or non-binary players?

Alejandro: Yeah, absolutely. So, the sample of players that we follow and monitor for that time, men, 80% were discrimination and homophobic. For the women, 90% were sexist and homophobic. And on top of that, there was a lot constant explicit sexual harassment as well, and abuse on social media.

So, our take on that is basically like the online world is just an extension of the existing gender, lack of equality that occurs nowadays. It’s a lot of misogyny, violence against women, and that’s also happening on the social media space.

With the men, you will notice a big increase of spike in abuse when they made a big mistake in a game. Let’s say they missed a key penalty or also around the transfer window when they changed clubs, there is a lot of abuse as well.

On the women, there is a lot just for the fact of being women, which I don’t think it comes as a surprise. But again, as I said at the beginning, once you see the data, it’s not just a feeling, it’s not just a guess. It’s a fact and it’s very alarming.

Cat: Yeah, it’s such a shame to hear because unfortunately, I agree with you, it’s not a huge surprise to hear that, but it’s just so disappointing to hear.

Obviously, FIFPRO is the voice of the players. You must know firsthand then the personal toll that this takes on players. Can you tell us a little bit about how this affects players?

Alejandro: For sure. I mean, and going back to the previous answer, it’s also the players who were, for instance, transgender, we had a few transgender players on the list, and they were abused and targeted specifically on that, which shows that it’s very related to the personality, not even to the sport.

So, we’re looking into more than just performance when we talk about abuse, just to comment on the gender part. And when it comes to the effects, we can talk about many effects, but I think there are three or four that are quite specific.

One is the mental health, basically. It’s not only what you suffer when you go to the pitch now because you have a phone with you, it follows you 24/7. So, if people are abusing you or telling you these kind of things, you see the last thing that you do when you go to bed is probably check your phone.

And the first thing you do when you wake up is to check your phone, and that’s following you wherever you go. So, this creates a lot of issues around mental health. So, anxiety, depression, sadness. I mean, we could go on and on for a while naming this.

And then the other topics, the performance, because of course, the mental health issues affect your performance. There’s no way that you can just switch that off and go and play and perform at your pick.

There is a cover up effect in football that I don’t think this will surprise anyone, but recognizing that you’re having an issue like this puts you in a position that you look weak towards different people in the industry — could be teammates, could be coach, staff, it could be fans.

So, many players cannot even admit that are going through this, which of course, brings all the type of issues connected to it. And we shouldn’t forget if we need to mention the last one, the effect that this has also in families and the people around the players, because this is directed to play, but it affects the whole group here, the whole family and stuff.

So, I think it’s a lot, and as I said before, people tend to forget that football players are first of all workers, and number two, I mean, not because we need to put it in different order, but they’re also human beings.

So, they’re not just immune to this kind of attack. And I would say like we could go on and on, listing the effects, but I think these three or four capture pretty well our main concerns.

Cat: That’s such a good point that you’ve raised because I can imagine people saying like, “Oh, these football players have massive salaries, they’re in the public eye, they must know to expect this,” but how can anyone expect this sort of abuse?

That’s not what football is about. And it doesn’t matter what you’re being paid or if you’re in the public eye, because unfortunately, yeah, it’s just a strange phenomenon.

And I wonder then further to that, they’ve got processes in place that will help protect people’s experiences online. What are social media platforms doing to help these players?

Alejandro: To start with, not enough. Not enough. That’s why organisations like FIFPRO have recently, at the World Cup in Qatar, we partnered up with FIFA to have a proper program of protection and monitoring for football players and other participants of the World Cup in Qatar at the end of 2022, is because it’s not enough what’s in place, it’s very limited.

Just to give you an example, 87% of the abusive messages, we identify and reported in the report with the MBPA and the WNBPA are still online, 87%. So, that shows you that even if there are certain things in place, are not enough, the take down rate should be way higher.

So, we can find different reasons to explain this, but in our opinion, social media lacks viable and worthwhile safeguards. And the very few that are in place in some countries are definitely not enough. That’s why organisations like FIFPRO, FIFA, they need to proactively come out and help.

And this is due to different reasons. Sometimes you can talk about lack of resources, sometimes you can talk about the lack of understanding of different languages or cultural nuances that might happen. There is abuse in all languages — in Spanish, in Portuguese, in Arabic, not only in English. What happens with those other languages? How do you monitor those?

Yeah, just to summarise, I would say things are done but not enough. And probably everybody listening to this, remember Thierry Henry, the former French player, world champion? He at some point in 2021, decided to go off social media.

He shut down his channels and he said something like, “Until social media platforms react the same way they react when you infringe some commercial rights in your account when it comes to discrimination, I will not be back.”

And that’s true, like if you try to post on social media a video that you don’t have the rights for from any of the big leagues in Europe, your account will be shut down immediately. Clearly, there are ways to interact with this in a bigger scope, but it’s not happening.

Cat: Do you think that there are organisational issues? You touched on this, that non-English language content moderation is something that is overlooked. Are there other organisational issues that you see within the different platforms that mean that the support isn’t there? Or what other things do you think are getting in the way?

Alejandro: As I said, it can be different things. It can be the lack of resources, because of course you need a whole team that then reviews … when we report the stuff and we send it to the platform that they need to review and see … if they’re not going to trust a hundred percent, they need to have their own people actually going through the documentation that we send.

Maybe they don’t have the people. As I said, it’s the lack of understanding of the cultural differences and nuances. It can be many things, but again, it’s not only the platforms. Like governments should be doing stuff, authorities in general should be doing stuff, employers should be doing stuff, clubs, the leagues, the federations.

I mean, in the end, the players are representing them as well. And if they have a safe workspace, it’s better for everyone. I do understand to the point that we try to make with the platforms, but I think the scope is even bigger and more actors need to get together to solve this issue.

Cat: Totally. And realistically, as well, the issue isn’t the social media platforms. The issue is how people are using them.

And I always think this is something that it’s quite easy sometimes to point blame at the wrong place because truly, the source of this is terrible behaviour in humans behind screens who think that they’re anonymized and can just say whatever they want.

And unfortunately, it’s at such a volume that it is difficult to get the safeguards in place, as you say. But I absolutely understand what you’re saying, and I think it isn’t completely unique to this situation that there are points where online jurisdiction and legislation is quite hard to define.

We’re starting to see that some laws being made about online behaviour, but I think that’s going to be something that’ll continue to develop, hopefully, in the years to come. And this will be a really good case in point to look at as something which has, as you say, has gone on for far too long.

Tell me where FIFPRO comes in then. So, as a representative body for the players, how do you help protect them from this, and what do you do?

Alejandro: So, in principle, for us, it’s very clear that it shouldn’t be the case that FIFPRO needs to like proactively come and with FIFA, establish this program to protect the players. There should be like a bigger protection safe net for them, for all the athletes in general.

But yeah, we do these reports and say we joined with FIFA and we did also this program during the World Cup, which was not only monitoring and reporting to the different authorities and the different platforms on all the abusive messages that were going to towards the players, we were also hiding them so the players couldn’t see them.

So, kind of try to protect them like that as well. And also, there is a part of education. So, educate the players by our unions for them to understand what they can do in cases like this, what their rights are, who they can go to, how they can deal with this. Because not everybody has the same tools to face an issue like this.

For us, what we did in Qatar with FIFA, it’s kind of like setting the standards for all competitions’ organisers. For us, that’s the key. It should be part of like any future, what we call CBA (collective bargaining agreement) between players and leagues and competitions organisers to make sure that the players have this kind of protection.

Because in the end, I said before, today the players (now we’re talking players, or it could be athletes or whatever) have to be on social media. It’s not much of a choice for them because it’s part of the business as well.

That’s where a lot of commercial transactions are happening, where sponsors come, where they promote or cross-promote what their leagues are doing, what their clubs are doing, what their national teams are doing.

So, as such as an extension of their workspace, and the authorities and other stakeholders, they must ensure that the workspace for players is actually a safe space.

So, FIFPRO, that’s what we come in and we try to help them and navigate that situation, and try to also show and discuss with the different authorities that these should be implemented. But as I said before, we do it practically because the people that should be doing it are not doing it.

Cat: Yeah, it’s interesting you mentioned that obviously sports people are now somewhat commercial entities as well because of brands and partnerships and everything like that, and obviously, social media is a huge part of that, and they have to carry that with them, as you’ve mentioned.

How do you coach people through that? Are you able to also work directly with the brands and to say to them like this is something that we anticipate is going to happen, how are you going to protect this player? Or do you just work primarily with the players in that instance?

Alejandro: No, we work with the players and the unions representing the players. And of course, then we also advocate with authorities to start taking this seriously and try to implement the different laws that can protect the players.

And there are many things that can be done. I don’t want to get too technical, but there are different ways to actually recognize who’s behind each account.

Like if someone has a ticket and it’s in the stadium — let’s say someone has tickets during the World Cup and it can be identified, its account to its ticket, that it’s a person that is actually abusing players during the matches on social media, can something be done?

Same as you would implement to a fun that’s just misbehaving in the stadium. As you said, there is a lot to be done because it’s a new thing — and not that new. But in terms of legislation, it’s becoming now very trendy. But going back to your original question, we work most primarily with the players and the unions that represent the players.

Cat: Do you think that AI could play a part in this in the future? Because I think obviously, AI has got loads of different ways that it can be used, and we are increasingly seeing how it can be used on social media.

For example, I don’t know if you’ve been on Twitter recently, if you share a news story or you share an opinion of something from somebody else’s tweet and they can recognize that you haven’t opened it, they will say, “Hey, do you want to open this news story before you share it?”

And that’s obviously, been a safeguard that’s been put in place to protect against spreading of misinformation. I wonder, with the advent of things like ChatGPT, do you think that with a bit more of an understanding of what language is, that that could be something that could maybe help in the future?

Alejandro: Technology is evolving at crazy pace. Like I think 10 years ago, we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all. So, for sure, with the technology opportunities come, also risks. If there was no social media, we wouldn’t be talking about abuse on social media, but social media is great for many reasons.

So, I think with all the digital and new tools that come up, now you’re mentioning artificial intelligence. For sure, there will be things that can be done. I’m not exactly sure what that’s going to be like, but ideally, there will be a point where you can actually identify every person behind each account and you can hold them accountable of their act, like as you would do in the real world, so to speak.

But how far that’s going to go, I don’t know. I do think it’s going to be very quick because as I said, like the tools that we’re getting every year, every five years are like incredible. So, hopefully, they will help us to solve this issue.

At the same time, we don’t believe that we need to wait five years or one of these tools to come up. I think we have enough tools now to take action, and we hope that the people that need to take that action, do it as soon as possible.

Cat: I appreciate you saying that social media isn’t all bad because obviously, that is also something that we believe on this podcast. So, I would love to hear how FIFPRO uses social media in the work that you do as well. How does social media factor into your communications and work?

Alejandro: But social media for us at FIFPRO, it’s key. It’s something that I bring with myself as well. When I was working at FIFA, as you mentioned before, I was working on the digital team, at the beginning working on a website like everyone else in early 2000, and then ended up working on social media.

So, for us, it’s key for many reasons. The first one is we are not a massive brand, so we need to face it. Many people outside of the football industry don’t know what we do.

And social media helps us to connect with those people and reaching bigger audiences and different audiences to escape our bubble, our usual bubble of people working, policymakers and football industry and get out there.

Also, to connect with players because we need to understand that we are talking about a very young group of people that are not going to learn or hear about us on reading the newspaper or going on TV, turning on the TV at 9:00 PM to watch the news.

The way they consume content is completely different, so we need to be in those spaces where they are. We’re looking at people who are between 17, 18, and 35, so you name it.

So, we use a lot of our digital platforms. We have a platform strategy implemented in which we treat each platform differently, understanding who’s behind it. So, of course, on Twitter, because our following day is a lot of media, sometimes the approach is a bit more serious and more newsy.

On Instagram, we’re way more fresh if you want, because as we have fans but also players, and we also implement, I don’t know, on Instagram, we use a lot the collaboration to the collab. So, then, we can definitely share our content.

So, let’s say we talk to a player and this player didn’t share the content we did with them, and then all of their fans that maybe didn’t know about us start getting to know us.

So, if a million people see our content and I get 10,000 that understand what we do and follow us, then it’s a big win for us. On LinkedIn, we talk to the industry, so we have a big use of social media, and we consider it crucial for what we do.

Cat: So, it’s not all bad, which is good. I’m glad to hear it’s not all bad.

Alejandro: I love social media, but we need to address also those blind spots just to make it a healthier space for everyone in the end, so more people can enjoy.

Cat: I totally agree. I absolutely agree. In terms of, you mentioned collaborations and stuff as well, and you surely are not the only organisation that exists in the world of sport and beyond, about helping protect the mental health of those in the public eye.

Do you work a lot with other organisations or get together to swap notes or is there any opportunity to do that in the work that you do?

Alejandro: Yeah, yeah. We try to, same as I mentioned, the MBPA or the WNBPA, just to stay in the same topic. We constantly try to find different organisations that can help us in different ways.

Like recently, we launch a collaboration with a company, an organisation that is actually developing some devices to find on time and before something happens, different cardiac problems or issues in athletes.

We’re constantly trying to find different people to partner up with to do things to benefit the players. And we work a lot with data, and we try to work a lot with data because technology gives us a chance to monitor different aspects of the profession, and then come to the table with policymakers and discuss from data, you know what I mean?

Like you can argue about different things, but when you have the data in front of you, it’s more difficult. So, we work with different organisations in different spaces, and we’re taking like big steps, I believe.

Cat: So, Alejandro, in this season of Social Creatures, we are sourcing questions from the industry for some of our guests, and we have one today for you from Scott Sloan from the Olympics Committee.

Scott: Hi Alejandro, my name is Scott Sloan, I’m part of the Safe Sport Unit at the International Olympic Committee.

My question for you today is, can soccer players and the unparalleled platforms that they have be utilised to model more tolerant and safer online spaces? Further, what does FIFPRO advise, or what resources do you provide victims of such abuse?

Alejandro: Yeah, I mean, it’s undoubtedly, we can say that the players have a massive reach and impact by using their own platforms. And I think some players, quite a few players, stars and also some players that are not stars as such have been doing it.

Recently, Mark-Anthony Kaye who’s the player from the Canadian national team, he played the World Cup. He’s also a member of Global Player Council at FIFPRO, was sharing his own story in his platforms and via FIFPRO as well with a campaign. He was abused heavily. He was a victim of that during the workup qualifiers for Qatar a couple of years ago.

So, he shared his story, trying to basically make sure that more people are conscious not only of how it happens, but also the devastating consequences that it brings to the players.

Alejandro: And then you have also other players that do it with a different approach. Like recently, two players from the Premier League in England from Tottenham decided to leave social media like Davinson Sánchez and Pedro Porro, which I think is very interesting.

It’s another way to get a bit of a wave and discussion around it. Independently of what kind of approach these players take, I think, and we think that it’s always important to remember that it’s not their responsibility to do it.

The ones that do it, actually, sometimes what they’re doing is exposing themselves because they get more abuse by doing it, but it’s actually the responsibility of the different platforms and the authorities and the employers, leagues, clubs to be able to protect these players.

When it comes to what FIFPRO is doing to basically deal with this and support the players, we can talk about two different things. What FIFPRO is doing directly, we’re like providing protective online systems for players as it was done at the World Cup in partnership with FIFA. But also, you can say what the unions that are part of FIFPRO are doing domestically.

In here we have like different examples. I mean, two examples that I could give to you. One is the PFA in England. They negotiated with the clubs and the clubs are now creating mental health mechanisms to support the players that are actually abused on social media.

And the union is also developing guidelines for the players so they know how to deal with it when they unfortunately have to face that situation. And then you can have another case like the PFA of Australia that is also very proactive on this.

They create a partnership with the government’s eSafety Office to address exactly the direct instances of abuse. This, on top of it, they also partnered up with an agency that provides a software to protect the players, a software that actually hides the text and report abusive comments that the players might receive.

That’s quite similar to what FIFA and FIFPRO did at the World Cup. Also, the UNFP in France has done the same.

So, I would say that different instances and channels in which FIFPRO is actively trying to mitigate this issue. But as I said at the beginning, it’s something that the industry as such should tackle and not just the unions or the players in isolation.

Cat: If some of our listeners are curious to find out more about FIFPRO or to follow you on social media, where would you direct them to go to?

Alejandro: So, basically, our website is fifpro.org and then on social media, they can find us at FIFPRO in every platform: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn. We have plans to launch some other platforms soon.

We’re pretty active there, so anything that they wanna know about how football players live and their rights and the different face to what they see in the stadium every weekend, then they’re more than welcomed to come around.

[Music Playing]

Cat: You’ve been listening to Social Creatures with me, Cat Anderson. Many thanks to Alejandro for joining me today. If you’d like to learn more about what FIFPRO is getting up to, you can find all the links to their socials in the description of this episode.

And of course, a huge thank you to Sprout Social for making this podcast possible. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to let us know on social media at Sprout Social. Check us out on the web at sproutsocial.com/socialcreatures or subscribe to hear other episodes like this wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks very much for listening, and we’ll see you in two weeks.

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