The Need for Thoughtful Engagement in an Age of Clickbait

TSL Episode 301: The Need for Thoughtful Engagement in an Age of Clickbait

Transcribing live conversations can be tricky so please be forgiving of any typos or errors that you find. Love something here and want to share? Great, please read the notes at the end. Enjoy!

Michelle Kane [00:18]-[00:43]: Thank you for joining us for this episode of That Solo Life, the podcast for PR pros and marketers who work for themselves. People like me, Michelle Kane with Voice Matters, and my ever-wonderful co-host, Karen Swim of Solo PR Pro. Hey, Karen, how are you?


Karen Swim, APR [00:43]-[00:44]: Hi, Michelle, I'm doing great, thank you. How are you?


Michelle Kane [00:44]-[01:45]:I 'm doing good, doing good. You know, we're just, we're rolling along these days, right? Everyone's on, everyone's on the same rollercoaster ride, whether we like it or not.


Karen Swim, APR [00.45]-1:00]: I know this time of year, it gets really busy for everyone as we, you know, get deeper into the spring season. It seems like things just, the pace of everything just picks up. So I am trying to catch my breath. Right? Right.


Michelle Kane [01:00]-[02:10]: This, what do they call it? Maycember? I don't even have anybody in school. So God bless all the parents out there dealing with year end everything and graduations and, That's a fun pop in time, but today we want to talk about something that we're calling Here We Go Again. Just some things we've seen out there, especially on social media, where, you know, we, we, we drum this into our heads, our listeners' heads of, in this era of AI and misinformation, how some people just can't help themselves. They'll post something on social and they'll do it in such a manipulative way that it's quite easy for the person reading it or seeing it to go, yeah, you're right. Without taking a beat to go away. Oh, wait a second. Let me verify this. Is this correct? What, perhaps, is this poster's motive? You know, what's going on here? Which I think, and certainly not think I know in this day and age, we all have to take a beat before our trigger finger hits the angry emoji.


Karen Swim, APR [02:11]-[03:22]: Yeah, it's really interesting that I find even with people that are well-intentioned and maybe passionate about a particular cause or a particular issue, and it could have nothing. This is so far beyond, you know, politics. It could be, you know, you're passionate about, you know, animals and someone shares something and it, you know, triggers you because honestly, can we just be honest about it? I think for a majority of people that use social media today, they do have a motive. And that motive is to get seen, to draw engagement. Whereas in the earlier days of social media, I believe that the motives were a bit different. It wasn't to amplify your visibility and make money off of your content. It was genuinely engagement. You were looking for community. You were genuinely sharing, you know, opinions and funny stories and what you were doing. And as the tools, you know, got more sophisticated, and we, we learned about metrics, you know, it is people are using it. And so clickbait is real. And I don't know that we're ever going to get away from that.


Michelle Kane [03:23]-[04:00]: So, so true. And, and being this far down the road with it all, we all know, guess what still works? community, community content, things that, you know, if you're a business sharing about your people, interesting things, they'll say, wow, we got so many clicks and comments on that. Yeah. Because before, kind of like anything, right? When, when people, when humankind gets involved, sometimes we tend to ruin things. And I think very true. Yeah, we've seen that definitely in the social media landscape. And I don't know, we'll see where the pendulum swings, or maybe it'll just swing into a totally different direction. And we won't have to worry about it.


Karen Swim, APR [04:01]-[05:16]: I mean, I think it's particularly exhausting as a reader because you read something and even when it is a very well done piece of content that seems thoughtful, you still have to take a step back and do your own research because people have a way of presenting facts to fit their narrative and to fit their own agenda. And sometimes people get riled up about it. And so there's a headline about something or some perceived wrong, some perceived slight, then everybody jumps in and suddenly you have like 900 people agreeing with you and that's not really what happened. And You know, as public relations professionals, I feel like it's one reason why I've had to push back on my own social media use because it's very difficult to be off the clock because we're always fighting mismatch and disinformation and we do it for a living. So when I see things, I can't just pretend that, hey, I'm not a PR professional who deals in ethics. So I'd almost rather just shield myself and be like, you know what, I don't want to see this in my off time.


Michelle Kane [05:17]-[06:02]: How true is that, right? And yeah, it took me a while to come to that realization of why does this bother me so much? Well, because it's part of who you are. Not that I'm, you know, some high and mighty perfect person, but yeah, you're right. It's like, well, that's incorrect. don't don't and i see you trying to sway people into thinking something's incorrect which you know some instances it's not harmful but in some instances it absolutely is and and it's definitely part of our responsibility certainly as we you know conduct ourselves and surely how we help our clients because you want them to remain you know untainted and on the up and up and still being a source of trust that people can depend on at the end of the day.


Karen Swim, APR [06:03]-[07:03]: I agree. And when it comes to client work, I think today more than ever, it's important to resort to some of the things that we used to do very routinely, such as fact sheets. You don't see those that much anymore, but I think it's important for companies to have on their website very clearly who they are, what they believe, what they represent. If you're doing a campaign, you should definitely have a Q&A that's ready to go, that is somewhere that answers questions so that when people are searching for facts, they can find those facts easily and you've really got to spoon feed the public. This does not mean, of course, that someone's not going to take images that your client puts out and manipulate them or that they're not going to take words that are put out and manipulate them. But I think you have to make sure that your clients have a go-to place where it's factual information, regardless of what industry they're in, because it's so needed today.


Michelle Kane [07:03]-[07:15]: Yeah. I mean, and even more so, right? So if a manipulation occurs or a misquote occurs, you have something to point to and go, uh-uh, facts are right here. Nice try. Yeah.


Karen Swim, APR [07:15]-[08:32]: And I mean, make sure that your clients understand social media policies because read those privacy policies, read what they can do with your data, who owns the information. who owns the information that you are sharing because you let go of some controls and then you want to make sure that your clients understand this as a protection to you and as a protection to them so that there are certain things that they may not be sharing on social media channels, that they're sharing through owned media and that they're having disclaimers about how content can be used. I think that we just have to get really, really stringent around putting those guardrails around those things to protect our clients and to protect ourselves too. Branded images, pointing people to where they can go to get images that they can use publicly of your company, of the products, how they can utilize your logo. What are those guidelines? I mean, again, some of that stuff seems to be disappearing off of websites and I'm sure that that's because of a lack of space, you know, wanting to streamline your site. But these things are important, and they can protect you.


Michelle Kane [08:32]-[09:19]: Yeah, I mean, it's it's like anything, if you don't control what you own, someone's going to do it for you. So I think it's true. It's like, you know, don't ditch those newsroom pages, don't ditch those, those source pages on your website, where, like you say, people can download legitimate information and just find out what they need. without that meddling of any kind of third party trying to swing things in another direction. Because as we've seen, things take off quickly, and often the rebuttals or the corrections aren't shouted as loud. That's true. It's like, oh, by the way, that was wrong. And we'll get into the whole bunny trail of trying to convince people what facts are. That's exhausting, but I haven't given up.


Karen Swim, APR [09:20]-[10:26]: And I think if you go back, we'll share some past episodes with you because we touched on parts of these topics. But one thing that one of our guests, Shaniqua Major, shared with us before was she talked about how she provides a fact sheet for how to speak about their company. So this is not directing journalists, but things like, you know, words that you should say. If you work with people that are unsheltered, you want to make sure that person-first language is noted so that the journalist knows how to refer to that, how to refer to your company, how to refer to executives. The things that are really key and central to your brands messaging of the companies that you represent, provide journalists with a quick and easy sheet to make it easy for them, too, so that mistakes are not made in how they describe you or how they talk about you or how they speak about your audience, which is one small step that you can take to make sure that you're presented accurately and that you don't offend your audience.


Michelle Kane [10:27]-[11:41]: That's so true. And it really doesn't take much effort to do it. It's an easy thing. It's a simple thing. And I think oftentimes it's just something you probably don't think of. And then once you realize it, you think, oh my goodness, of course we should be doing that. Why wouldn't we? Otherwise, I think the more helpful that we can be to our publics and on behalf of our clients, the better. Hopefully, clients will agree. Hopefully, they won't see that as fluff work because it really isn't. It's really creating a stable basis of information about them. You don't want anyone to wonder. It's like, I don't want anyone wondering, well, I wonder what they do about this. Well, here it is. I agree. And another thing in all this is, as we speak of often, is just how critical thinking is so lacking. And I was thrilled to hear a new Pope Leo address critical thinking and the need to focus more on that. And this is, of course, not to down anybody, but it's like, just stop and think. Think things through, anything you see or hear. What might be the reason why it's being put a certain way? I think if we all did a little bit, we'd be that much better for it.


Karen Swim, APR [11:41]-[13:20]: Yeah, you know, it's interesting. Someone tied to this and where I think that some of the decline has happened over the years is I was discussing education with someone in college courses. And, and, you know, in times past, because you're paying a lot of money for education. And these days, kids are in classes that may be 100 people. So it's a lecture. It's a lecture hall. But remember those classes that were smaller size, where there was truly discussion and interaction as part of the learning process. So you learned how to share opinions. You learned how to listen. You learned how to think critically and to form your opinions. You research things. And you know, unfortunately, this generation is not getting that as part of their college experience. They're just being lectured to. And while they're, you know, questions are allowed, it's definitely not the same as having that intimate discussion group that used to be part of the educational experience. And so as peer pros, I think that's, you know, in terms of our responsibilities, I think We have to make sure that we provide forums to lead those types of discussions, to help people, to remind them of how this is important. We have to model it. We have to model slowing down and not being caught up in the overwhelm and the, you know, onslaught of information where we're not you know, using our critical thinking skills. And we have to remind clients to do that too, because they can be, you know, so overwhelmed and overburdened that they're just clicking through the task and moving from one thing to another. And that doesn't serve any of us.


Michelle Kane [13:21]-[13:41]: No, not at all. Well, that's a good note to end on. We hope that you found this time valuable. Just a nice little check-in with ourselves, not to get caught up in all the noise. And if you did, please do share this around. Let us know what you think at soloprpro.com. And until next time, thanks for listening to That Solo Life.

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