When I first set out to write this article, it clearly focused on what we thought was the impending sale of Twitter to Elon Musk and what kind of implications such a shift in ownership and ethos would have on the future of the platform, and the social media sphere in general. 

Then on May 13th, on the heels of the SEC taking a look at events leading up to the announcement of the acquisition, Elon tweeted that the deal was now on hold until Twitter could prove that its actual daily account user numbers were valid.  There went the main subject of my article…or so I thought. As we can all agree, this is far from the first time we have found ourselves in such a position as marketing and advertising professionals: thinking you know exactly what’s up right before the universe says, “Hold my beer” and upends our carefully curated world view to incorporate something entirely new and unexpected for us to contend with. 

The reason we have all been here before is because this flux IS the state in which we advertising professionals living in the digital age exist within. This eternal fluidity teaches us that the importance of objective media education within the greater context of its evolution is more important than ever. 

Un-brand safe videos being served to kids on YouTube, Facebook whistleblowers, Gamestop stock prices directly affected by Redditors, Twitter’s stock price at the immediate mercy of Elon Musk’s tweets! What can we do to prepare for the unexpected… when the unexpected is so predictable? In discussing these never-ending media volatilities with Taylor Guthrie, Managing Director of Media Experts’ social team, he recommended the following steps:

• Avoid over-reliance on a single platform, a recommendation particularly important in moments where we need to be agile (re: Facebook boycott, Facebook outage)
• Identify testing opportunities to drive innovation and garner greater performance
• Align your brand with socially responsible partners

IPG/Magna’s Media Responsibility Index, the holding co’s social media assessment report from February 2021, named Twitter as the top performing social platform, garnering above-benchmark performance in 8/10 principals (promoting respect, protecting people, diverse and representative, data collection and use, children’s wellbeing, no misinformation, enforce policy, advertising transparency, accountability). Twitter also got the top score in three of those categories – protecting people, diverse representation, and a lack of misinformation. External evaluation and comparisons like these from agencies are key to ensuring the places we put our brands’ money are living up to the values they espouse. 

As much as having eggs in a few baskets can mean cost efficiencies – and we all love efficiencies – the cost of efficiency is subjective, which means it’s important to plan on having more baskets on hand. And that reminds me —  I’ve got to get to HomeSense!