How Brands Talk About Themselves Has Never Been More Critical
The running tally. as of January 10, 2021.
In a January de-platforming tsunami that unfolded in a matter of days, President Trump found himself banned or restricted on the very platforms that had made him a global media brand. Twitter, Facebook, Google, Instagram — even Shopify and Pinterest joined the list of companies taking steps to stop the spread of disinformation on their platforms.
The insurrection at the US Capitol may have catalyzed a turning point in aggressive de-platforming, but social media restrictions had been tightening for some time. Just three months earlier, Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook would ban Holocaust deniers. “Drawing the right lines between what is and isn't acceptable speech isn't straightforward,” he wrote in an October 2020 Facebook post. “But with the current state of the world, I believe this is the right balance.”
After a four year battle over “fake news,” it seemed like Zuck was finally softening his free-speech position and taking the first steps towards battling the misinformation that proliferated in the Trump era. Six months earlier, Twitter had taken the extraordinary step of flagging Presidential tweets as violations of their terms of service:
Twitter further tightened their rules for the November election. By December2020, this led President Trump to veto the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) because it failed to rescind Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives website publishers immunity for taking down content they deem offensive.
For those of you keeping score at home, no, Section 230 doesn’t have much to do with military spending, and, seemingly, less to do with how brands talk about their products and services. But the battle over Fake News got its start over a decade earlier, in boardrooms throughout Silicon Valley.
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After the 2009 release of Simon Sinek’s Start With Why, every business embraced a startling reality — fulfilling human values was the price of admission to the new social marketplace. Today, every business needs to move humanity forward. We live in a viral, transparent and increasingly intelligent web, where the cost of disruption is simply what it takes to articulate a better value. Whether it is trust in transactions (PayPal), simplicity in design (Apple), or precision in manufacturing (BMW), legacy businesses — the ones able to build sustainable brands — fulfill essential human values.
This is invariably true and not a squishy concept, by any stretch. For human relationships to grow, we need to agree on a.) shared values, b.) an exchange (of ideas, goods or services), and c.) a common language. In business relationships, these translate into a.) the unique value proposition, b.) the product or service exchanged and c.) the universal metrics through which customers signal adoption, employees tune performance and owners determine progress. Smart brands understand this.
But here’s the rub: Not all values are created equally.
Let’s rewind the tape:
As Start with Why became a rallying cry, social media platforms undertook the value proposition exercises that brought them more broadly to consumer markets. And thus began a new era in business mission statements. Gone were the stale edicts to grow shareholder value. In their stead, they proposed their noble purpose:
To make the world more open and connected
To give everyone the power to create and share ideas
To give everybody a voice and show them the world
YouTube
They could do this through micro-publishing tools that gave everybody a megaphone. The fundamental human value was democratizing communications. Now, if your ideas resonate, they spread like wildfire through the smart web.
And the AI is real, folks. We are being fed exactly what we want.
To wit:
Facebook created one of the greatest human intel operations ever to measure and refine precisely that: What we want. To accomplish it, they asked the Appen Institute to recruit a team to rank every piece of content in their own Facebook feed across three simple, irrefutable, genius questions: Does it give you information you want? Does it make you feel connected? Does it entertain you?
Rinse and repeat.
Does it give you information you want?
Does it make you feel connected?
Does it entertain you?
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And with that, feedback loops, fully operationalized by the digital tech natives through Lean practices, took a turn into a new type of metric — empathic metrics, or resonance KPIs, measuring why a customer was engaging. No doubt, the digital natives had gotten great at feedback loops for empirical metrics, which measure how customers engage. Amazon, Google, Facebook, and almost every big player founded in this century rose by monitoring user engagement through empirical feedback loops.
But here now, with Appen’s help, Facebook had developed possibly the best tool ever for monitoring why people engaged — a massive mechanical turk operation asking people three simple questions:
Does it give you information you want?
Does it make you feel connected?
Does it entertain you?
Over and again.
Armed with the ability to now measure their missions, Facebook, Google and others fully decoupled them from their value propositions, creating lofty value exchanges.
{Human Value} To make the world more open and connected, {Business Value} Facebook makes it easy to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what's going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them.
Or more simply:
[why] To make the world more open and connected, [how] we make it easy to connect, discover and share.
That’s the AI loop that made Facebook the most effective user acquisition tool ever designed.
Alexa, how do we make it easy to connect, discover, and share?
ALEXA: Try Facebook.
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Ironically, the difficulties social platforms have had adjusting to the new misinformation realities stem from the success of their original marketing efforts. When Facebook began its meteoric rise, making the world more open and connected seemed a genuinely revolutionary idea. Before bad actors figured out how to manipulate it, Facebook was hailed as a force for good. Remember the Arab Spring?
When it was released (circa 2014, fact check anyone?), Facebook’s mission statement represented a startling new blend of brand purpose (why you do what you do) and customer promise (how you do it).
To make the world more open and connected, we make it easy to connect, discover and share.
At the time, Facebook’s unique exchange of values — openness through connection, discovery, and sharing — seemed the apotheosis of the emerging idea that brands need to compete on social purpose. Their products (what) and customers (who) could evolve with the marketplace and through acquisitions (Instagram and What’s App, in their case) — as value propositions should.
But their bedrock mission seemed built to last. Through the Appen effort, Facebook refined their newsfeed algorithm and measured their purpose: making the world more open and connected.
And in the process, they effectively built the AI that gives us what we want.
Here’s another linguistic rub:
Nowhere in their customer discovery efforts — or for that matter, in their mission statement — were they seeking to ensure the information they disseminated was true. As a customer promise, “making it easy to share and express what matters to them” sounded right, though it has proved to have some unintended consequences, notably the easy spread of disinformation by bad actors.
Facebook has since tightened their mission. Today, they are committed to “giving people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” It’s a not-so-subtle change in brand language that shifts their purpose from making the world more open and connected to making a better world.
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All of the social platforms — and for that matter, most brands that went through a Start With Why -powered value proposition exercise in the last decade — need to take a second look at the human values they are focused on fulfilling. Simon Sinek’s 2009 bestseller on leading with brand purpose is absolutely right that people don’t buy what you do, but why you do it.
But if the cost of disruption is simply what it takes to articulate a better value, it’s important to be precise.
A great mission statement is an exchange of values — a human value fulfilled by business values. (For more on this, read How to Write Great Mission Statements.) Thanks to the smart web, which we need to consciously build in a humanistic image, the dominant value needs to advance a human purpose. It’s no longer enough to make and market innovative things; what we produce must move humanity forward.
We must code the AI in our image.
Artificial Intelligence does not require that brands inspire social impacts. Values that make our lives better can be as simple as trust in transactions, precision in manufacturing or simplicity in design.
Artificial Intelligence, however, does mean that we need to weigh values. The problems arise when one value, e.g., connectedness, gets in the way of another, i.e., social progress.
That is where humans need to intervene.