The fly - and what you should ask your social team today
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As a general rule, I do not post about politics on any of my social media accounts. This post is not about politics. Please don’t make it about politics. This post is about THE FLY and how the Biden campaign managed to seize the moment last night.
First let’s recap. If you’ve been living under a rock or just did not have the stamina to watch last night’s vice presidential debate, a black fly landed on Vice President Pence’s head and stayed there for more than 2 minutes while he talked. Predictably, Twitter lost its mind. Within minutes, there were dozens of Pence Fly Twitter accounts created. As of right now (8:30 a.m.), #flygate is still trending. I will admit, I spent a ridiculous amount of time scrolling through tweets last night and laughing until I cried.
Minutes after the debate ended, the Biden campaign tweeted this (the website reroutes users to iwillvote.com). Not only is this genius, but it requires a good amount of back-end work. They had to have the idea, get the green light, buy the domain, get into the site and reroute it to iwillvote.com. And then tweet. I was impressed (and also laughed a lot).
Then the campaign quickly followed with two additional tweets that equated to a Twitter-style mic drop.
Meanwhile, the Pence campaign made no mention of the fly at all and tweeted things like this:
You tell me which campaign won Twitter last night.
Now – my second point is really a PSA on behalf of social media teams around the world. If you are a communications leader or a C-suite leader, and you planned to send an email this morning asking “How can we be more like this and take advantage of opportunities in the moment,” please don’t. Here’s the answer:
Trust me, your social media team would also like to be witty and smart in the moment. It’s a simple idea and a hard thing to pull off. In order to do something witty that quickly and get it out on social media in time to seize the moment, you need a couple of key components all working together:
Your people have to be in place and paying attention. Obviously, both campaigns had their social media teams on call and probably in a war room. If you run a major brand or company and you need to call people at home, get them out of bed, distract them from their kids, catch them up on what happened and then ask for their fun ideas, it’s already too late. You have to have the people in place to respond immediately. Even a 20 or 30-minute delay destroys the opportunity entirely. The Twitter game is a game of seconds or minutes, not hours.
You have to have the creative assets. If you have no images prepared, no video already shot, etc., you can’t produce something in the moment. I am still somewhat bewildered about how the Biden campaign had so much fly-related content at their fingertips. But I guess that’s what people mean by preparing for every situation. I’d love to see the creative assets they had ready in case a bear charged the stage.
You need clear approval paths that can be executed in the moment. A normal piece of corporate social media content can take days to work its way through the approval process and often goes through multiple iterations. In cases like this, you have to have the right approvers ideally in the room (virtual or otherwise) to approve content on the spot. Unless you can get it approved in the moment, you can’t post it.
Courage. You have to have the courage to move quickly and take the risk.
Typically corporate social media teams are stuck between a rock and a hard place not because of a lack of desire. Usually they are lacking the people, resources, assets or approvers at their disposal in the moment to pull off something like this. But when brands are able to bring all of those things to a major national news event unfolding live, the results can be magnificent.
Case in point, one of my favorite tweets of all time: The Super Bowl blackout Oreo tweet. Just like the Biden campaign’s tweets last night, the tweet was super relevant, extremely timely, witty and well-done. And they went from concept to execution within minutes of the power going out. This delivered the unexpected brand boost that Oreo experienced, winning one of the most media-heavy events of the year and beating out brands that spent millions or billions on advertising.
So if you are one of those leaders who was planning to come in this morning and ask “How can we be more like this and take advantage of opportunities in the moment,” the real question you should ask your social team is, “What do we need to change to enable you guys to do something like this?” Your social team will thank you. And if you equip them as outlined above, they might just surprise you.