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literally everyone on socialmedia is a hypocrite. Click to the idea of being a social media hypocrite nasty Greek. Maybe you prefer to think of your activity on social media as just a persona, much more in line with current marketing terminology. However, the etymology of "persona" also dates back to classical times. This time in Latin, it's a mask designed to hide your real self while presenting a fictional person to the audience. As Shakespeare later tweeted, if all we had was a smartphone and a reliable connection, "every internet is a stage, and every man and woman is just an avatar." Fake it till you make it Since the advent of social media, brands and organizations have realized often reluctantly that their actions are far more public and far more scrutinized than they would like or admit.
That's not to say that customers and the wider community aren't constantly monitoring how brands behave and form opinions, but the near-instantaneous feedback provided by social media and the 24-hour news cycle have made it a relentless I'm Special Database holding up a mirror. Making it much harder for brands to ignore or rationalize how they are perceived. Social media puts brands face-to-face with real people tweet to tweet rather than abstract viewer ratings or subscription numbers. And this made marketers realize how inauthentic brands can be. This was especially true in the early days of social media marketing. Many brands have entered a new social environment, like a guy wearing a tuxedo to a beach barbecue. Socialmedia brings brands face-to-face with real people, says kimota. Click to Tweet Brands also function as masks, designed to present a consistent and carefully constructed public face while concealing the complex and often messy work that lies beneath.
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Behind this mask there is usually another mask. An agency or marketing department implementing a pre-planned strategy. If you remove that, there are many more people underneath, each with their own curated persona. Each person contributing to this brand persona first assumes their public self, then an employee, then an agent, then the brand. For agencies, this may mean switching brand masks multiple times a day. And each layer of these personas comes with a different set of rules, different values, opinions, and even language. Real people can be buried, resulting in public personas that feel more robotic, more unnatural and less human. No wonder "authenticity" became an issue. Unfortunately, some marketers try to solve this problem by putting another mask on top: script authenticity. In Australia, Airbnb and bank Westpac were widely ridiculed in 2015 for attempting a brand-by-brand joke. No one bought it. It did not read as spontaneous, natural and fun, and was almost universally criticized as a brand pretending to be spontaneous with clearly scripted exchanges.
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