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I laughed the entire time while reading! I believe it went viral because of how hilariously detailed her descriptions are. Also, Candy corn has consistently been a debate on social media for the last few years and I believe that Brach knew this specific product would be a conversation starter at the very least. I hate candy corn but I almost want to try it to add my two cents to the conversation. If other food brands have a goal of standing out and drawing attention to their brand (whether it’s favorable or not), tapping into a social media hot topic will most likely get the job done.

First of all, for anyone that listens to “My Favorite Murder” podcast, Georgia and Karen talked about this on a few episodes and then did a live taste test of the flavors, which was hilarious and gross. Like Aisha said, I do think that candy corn is one of those funny subjects that people like to debate about on social media, especially this time of year. I think Brach’s created this gross bag of festive flavors to spark a conversation with their brand name, and also interest people to buy the bag just to get involved with the risky taste test. Either, it worked for them. If you check out #brachsturkeydinnercandycorn on Twitter, you can see her post started a whole viral trend – a win for Brach’s, even if the flavors are gross!

This for some reason reminds me of the ‘Bean Boozled’ Jelly Beans that you can find as a gag gift, but obviously not on such a disgusting level. There is no reason that a sweet candy should be mimic a very savory meat product.

I think this post went viral purely because of its humor. It’s always entertaining to read the funny opinions of others, especially when it comes to having to ‘take one for the team’ and try an unnatural taste of candy!

Here is a video of a guy doing a live tasting of these disgusting morsels:

I read the entire post and I don’t regret it at all. Heather Martin is a modern day Shakespeare.
I think everyone here explained it well; it all relates to surprise and uniqueness. I found this post about Oreo and it talks about how they started to diversify from its standard flavor. It all started when they released a birthday cake flavor in honor of their 100 year anniversary, and the flavor was a huge success. After that, Oreo thought it was best if they started to release interesting flavors based on trends in the industry or what’s happening in pop culture.
I think Brach understood this as well and decided to make these horrifying Thanksgiving flavored candy corn based on the upcoming holiday. And based on how well Heather’s post has been received, Brach might have had more sales just because a user saw Heather’s post and decided to try out these candy corn for themselves.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/oreo-flavors_l_5c76ca5de4b062b30eba5eaf

I am not big into reading, but I could not stop. Her writing was an art form. It was executed so perfectly. It sounds just like a person talking. What I think is even funnier is that although she said in many different ways it was not good, so many people will now go out and purchase it, even though they have a heads up not to get it. I guess the big take away is even when someone’s talking bad, at least they’re talking, all publicity is good publicity. Many brands try to be so perfect all the time, but sometimes even flops can work in their favor and sometimes it takes a little humor. If a brand is able to evoke an emotion whether that’s making them laugh until their belly hurts, cry a river, motivate them to strive for excellence, they have caught a new customer.

To point three here: this is prime listening on social media. Twitter was being proactive, knew what was going on in the world and capitalized from it.

I’m intrigued by the content piece of this prompt. We talked yesterday how social media is a vehicle for your content, but take that a step further. With the outage, would people have gone to the sites they normally read content from. For instance, let’s say I follow techcrunch on FB. Due to the outage, would I have sought out the website on its own to get my daily fix in content? I wager this outage was too short to see that shift, BUT what if FB goes down for a week? Very interesting thought experiment.

Lastly, I’ll say – though I do not use FB or Insta, I was still affected by the outage in that I had to reconfigure all my analytics APIs to pull everything again. Very time consuming.

Just like “everyone”, my first instinct was to head to Twitter to see what was up, and as usual the Twitter world found it comical that anyone looking to get their slice of social media for the day ended up there as well. As someone who uses Twitter heavily for work, and for news, I used it the same amount as normal on October 4th BUT my engagement was much higher! Twitter and other brands took advantage of the larger audience and engagement on Monday as well.

Three main point I got of FB outage was
1- How users/ will users break their norm to get their information : first thing if something goes wrong (I felt an earthquake, power went out, etc.) I go to either instagram to see whats going on. With Fb and Instagram being down, I was forced to go to my forgotten platform to understand what was happening. Brands like twitter who were able to capitalize on this new audience probably gained a full blown user.

2-How social outages effect e-commerce: as a small business owner is is fascinating to see how e-commerce is blurring with digital marketing (mainly social media). For me its simple I don’t post= i don’t get orders. The day after the outage I saw many small business owners explain how their fall launch failed since Instagram was down. Some even going to Tiktok to make joke of the situation while simultaneously drawing attention to their launch.

In relation to the first point, I found this post from Pew Research that breaks down users using social media for news. It says that 53% of U.S. adults “often” receive news from social media “often” or “sometimes.” Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are the top three sites used regularly as news sources. The most interesting part about the article was that just about 60% of users expect these news outlets to be inaccurate. I guess the question now is, if a majority seem to think that these news outlets are inaccurate, then why do more than half of U.S.. adults often or sometimes receive news from social media?

I think the best answer would be instant reception. Social media essentially gives anyone a voice. This means they can “break” news whenever, whether it’s the truth or not. You don’t have to wait for the nightly TV news or go to a news website when all you can do is go on social media and filter your search and find something.

News Use Across Social Media Platforms in 2020

Continuing on with brands engagement strategies and “listening”, one use case that stood out to me following the Facebook / Instagram outage was a post by E! News. When the sites were down, I admittly had an impulse to keep checking Instagram, even knowing it was still no up and operating. In the act of doing so, I like many users found myself staring at the same image on my feed over and over again. Whatever follow posted last before the site went down, had their post ‘stuck’ on their followers timeline. When things were back up and running again, I came across E! New’s reaction post which was an image of Zach Efron with the caption reading “This wasn’t the photo that was on top of our feed when Instagram was down , but we wish it was.”

I found this reaction very responsive to the situation, and on brand for the E! social tone of voice. Did anyone else have a favorite brand reaction post ?

https://www.instagram.com/p/CUn3nUUFnN-/

@Jen’s comment- I had the same line of thoughts when I first saw their tweet- it was humorous, but I wondered if it was because it was in-line with their brand voice. Which had me thinking how tones are supposed to shift during emergencies– but then again, it wasn’t Twitter’s emergency. Facebook had to come out with a “we’re sorry” acknowledgement, which had a solemn tone. It’s usually kind of hard to craft messages during an emergency with the right tone, nevertheless trying to keep the typical business tone. No doubt the Twitter team had to have multiple draft rounds for a three word tweet. But to Jen’s point, not everyone is Twitter, so throwing out a snappy response in the face of a competitor issue is usually going to look cringey.

I checked out a few of Emily’s latest TikTok videos – lol they are attracting a lot of attention, especially from Brands as well as consumers of TikTok. As other accounts that become large prior to this example, brands usually comment on these videos to ask if the user can create them “one”, whether it be a sand created logo, an animated logo or in this case, a redesigned logo.

https://www.insider.com/tiktok-logo-redesign-nascar-tinder-washington-post-2021-9

As you see above, some of these brands actually changed their profile pictures to the logo Emily created for them. The brands are receiving exposure for doing this. By social listening, they were able to find this TikTok creator who is attracting many views and commenting on her posts so now viewers will see the brand’s comments since it pushes to the top usually. It is a good tactic for free visibility and essentially brand’s also want the chance to be featured on the tiktok as well to create even more “buzz” about them. Brand awareness is boosted easily by taking part in this.

I just sent some of Emily Zugay’s videos to a friend of mine, who’s a graphic designer. Such a simple concept but turned so funny and SO effective! I got a really good kick out of the response TikToks from Washington Post and Adobe as well. This is just really clever content, and again, super effective for both Emily and the brands she’s been tagging. I wonder what will come out of this for her?!

I think one of the grandaughters of the #grandinfluencers said it best – younger people are following those in the older generations because “it’s what (they’re) representing, that people can do what they think they’ve not been able to do or were told that they couldn’t do.” Aging is fact of life, even though it may not feel that way when you’re young. It’s almost like people are looking to this generation on Instagram and TikTok to show that you can still be “with it” and “in the know” even when you are older. It’s awesome that they can build these communities and kind of give inspiration to the generations coming after them.

Now, what do we think about the opposite end of the spectrum – child influencers? Why do we think people follow them? https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/02/inside-lives-child-instagram-influencers/583675/

I agree with Kathy’s statement above. People are looking up to this older generation because they are the epitome of ‘better late than never’. People also look to them for advice. While many of the younger influencers can have content that is light-hearted, the older generation may have more to offer in terms of life advice and experience.

On the topic of child influencers…no, just no. The parents behind these kids are the new-age stage moms/dads. On one hand, it is the equivalent of being a child model and the parents have more control over what gets posted, but I personally would never have the need or desire to do that if I had a child.

Loved this article. I’ve always wondered why is it that a human’s value decreases when they age, but everything else moves in the opposite direction, like wine or a piece of art. These grandfluencers are special because well, you don’t see them often on social media. If you do, they’re usually private or they aren’t active. One of these grandfluencers summed it well, they’re comfortable in their skin. They have knowledge and their confident in an area that isn’t oversaturated. We’re taught to respect our elders and people flock to them. For brands, it’s an opportunity to work with them. There are many people like these grandfluencers; they have a wealth of knowledge to teach, but they don’t know how to use social media or technology overall. This is where the brand comes in, and becomes essentially a manager for them.

Thanks for sharing this article! I feel like seeing #grandinfluencers on TikTok and other platforms automatically have the “stop the scroll” factor. It’s out of the ordinary to see the older demographic on social media (most do not want to conform to the digital era) much less killing it with content. Authenticity also plays a big factor. Would you ever look a your grandma and think “wow this woman has seen and done so much, she must be lying?” – no, never! Combining their life experience and knowledge with being technologically paired makes #grandfluencers a force to be reckoned with. I also believe that their generation can target everyone because of their authenticity, reliability and age. With that being said, #grandinfluencer may be the next big thing for many brands.

I actually see this group on TikTok all the time! The feeling of genuine expression and happiness is a breath of fresh air! Since ancient times people have been creating guilds of masters and apprentices, trying to pass along helpful information– and in certain fields like mechanics still work that way, but I think in the era of the internet, people have been increasing looking to the online conglomeration of information rather than going to their elders, or the people that would typically gather that information (like a library). In the age of information, if you don’t have the latest and greatest, you are considered obsolete. People like the men in the article above show that there is still the opportunity for a great intersection of generational information and computational information. Makes me want to tag the topic on socials to see how this pans out!

Seeing older people make use of technology to share their lives and build community really touches my heart! It’s great to know that older generations are adapting to social platforms. Focusing on fresh faces online ignores the wealth of knowledge and diverse lived experience that comes from the folks who’ve lived through a few decades.

The mother of one of my friend’s from undergrad started using TikTok earlier this year and has gone viral a couple times. She did the #FarrahFawcett challenge and people went crazy over it. You can watch it here: https://www.tiktok.com/@pattican/video/6954204410566184198

Chiming in to say, what a great article! Kimberly, your post immediately caught my eye having used Joan MacDonald’s photo for the post’s featured image and I absolutely love her. Before the pandemic I was super committed to lifting, and she has been a major inspiration to me because she’s an example of how it’s never too late to make a dramatic change to your health, wellness, and life. I’ll echo what others have said above, I think it’s so refreshing that there’s a community of #grandfluencers sharing their experiences on social media. They have such vast knowledge and unique perspectives, and I’m happy to see they’ve embraced social media platforms and are sharing their stories.