Here’s something to contemplate: Oreo spent $4,000,000 on a thirty second SuperBowl commercial– you probably don’t; but you’ve probably heard about their “dunk in the dark tweet that went out during a 34 minute blackout. That tweet had tens of thousands of retweets and perhaps hundreds of mentions on online media the following day– and it was a tweet; so it was a non-
expense for the company. The tweet itself wasn’t particularly good or funny on its own– what mattered was of course the context of the timing which made it so outstanding and gave Oreo plenty of value for its $0 investment in clever timing.
Greg Finn, social media expert made a comment on the “dunk in the dark” tweet:
The biggest thing is just being active. To be honest, that Oreo tweet was fairly lame. It wasn’t really funny, it didn’t really have to relate to Oreos (you could do a “you can sip/taste/try/talk/etc in the dark” for anything), and it wasn’t even that hard to do design-wise. The number one thing it had was that it was timely. If you have a team, make sure you’ll always have someone at the helm to take advantage of social friendly topics.
It’s all about context. A hugely overlooked and often misunderstood portion of the context of anything is the timing embedded in the context. Standup comedians will be able to tell you all about how important timing is. It’s not just the content of a post and its meaning– but when it’s posted, or said, or delivered, that determines such a huge portion of how it’s received by an audience. That’s what made Oreo’s tweet worth so much– the timing; not the content.
Timing is difficult to learn– it’s much more art than a science; and if you’re anything short of a god-gifted artist, then you’re probably better off just using what’s called evergreen content— which is content that’s literally timeless and still holds true and relevant to searches regardless of the time it’s read. However, you can’t ever fully close yourself off from in-the-now content that will pull in surges of viewers; you can easily keep up with hot-topic searches and stories in a process known as newsjacking which the savvier of brands have been taking advantage of in order to show off their marketing abilities. There’s been plenty of clever ways that brands such as Mercedes and Audi, Kraft, and PBS have stayed culturally relevant by commenting on events as they occur. This isn’t something that only big brands can take advantage of, either– when there are search terms that are trending, of course it’s quite easy for any given website to rearrange or publish some content that reflects the sentiment that that search term happens to be about.
Timing is all about keeping your brand part of the cultural zeitgeist– and social media and search engines are designed to optimize those sorts of things that are that kind of relevant.