Jed Hallam

I obviously spend a lot of time on Twitter, mostly (these days) grabbing interesting links and publishing random thoughts and ideas. I’ve been on Twitter a while, I’ve got a fairly good handle on it, and in general, I love it. It provides me with an accelerated adjacent possible into things I wouldn’t usually encounter and I try and follow a really broad mix of people. But there is one thing, one constant meme, that frustrates me.

The “madding crowd’s ignoble strife”; the cry of “#FAIL”.

The major and minor social media backlash when we don’t like something that someone else (usually a brand, but not limited to) has done.

I hate it.

When did we become the judge, jury and executioner? Maybe, just maybe, we’re not the target demographic for the latest social media campaign by FMCG brand X? This type of negativity helps no one. The internet is a big place, and we have to share it with other people, other people that might not be just like us. Our sense of entitlement seems to be skyrocketing well beyond our freedom of speech.

This is part of two much wider problems; 1) the expectation brigade (which Paul Carr, Charlie Brooker and Becca have written about fairly extensively) and 2) the speed at which we want to criticise others. We’ve been empowered by access to information, people and brands, but it’s gone too far and people are demanding, not collaborating or talking.

I am in no way exonerated from this. In fact a few years ago I caused a storm in a tea cup when I publicly criticised a telecomm brand’s social media agency – so my hands are just as dirty. Except I learnt two things pretty quickly; 1) my opinions are my own and it isn’t always necessary to share them in a very public way and 2) the #FAIL brigade can work against people (after the blog post went up, there were about 500 tweets about why I was an idiot for sharing my opinion – you can see that there was a certain irony ).

As marketers, we spend hours and hours advising brands on how to become more human and more collaborative, yet a lot of the time we’re criticising other brands for putting a foot wrong. The human interaction works both ways and if we want brands to become better at interacting, we need to stop burning their fingers with flippant remarks and snarkiness.