Kony 2012 packs social media lessons for business

Can a Ugandan warlord be responsible for helping push social media from lightly entertaining pastime for hundreds of millions of users to a force for global geopolitical and human rights change? Joseph Kony may hold the answers.

Three days ago, virtually no one outside of Africa knew who Kony was or why his story mattered. Today, his name and face dominate the global news stream thanks to a determined American documentary filmmaker named Jason Russell, the Invisible Children charity on whose behalf he shot and posted a 30-minute video, and the 50 million — and counting — viewers who have turned the story of this once-shadowy Ugandan warlord into what is arguably the most meaningful viral phenomenon in the short history of social media.

Kony has social media to thank for the near-speed-of-light viral growth of this. Without it, Kony, the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army rebel group who's spent much of the past quarter century allegedly kidnapping children and turning the boys into child-soldiers and the girls into sex slaves, would still be operating under the shadow of anonymity. Instead, the pressure is now mounting for the U.S. government, among others, to step up efforts to bring him to justice.

Masterfully executed example of how to build buzz and focus action among a key group of stakeholders. Businesses should be watching closely, as this social media watershed event holds fundamental lessons for companies still trying to make sense of the evolving space. Keep the following in mind as you make plans for your own business:

Stop treating social media like a sideline
Social media has become a prime communication channel for engaged consumers. Five years ago, they would have surfed the web to learn more about a product, service or issue. Today, they're scanning tightly built Twitter streams and lists and contributing to and commenting on YouTube channels and even Pinterest boards. This is where the conversation has moved, so companies need to move here, as well, or risk being left out of the conversation altogether.

Be comfortable with less control
Traditional messaging strategies typically involve relatively few resources — PR, marketing and c-level executives — holding the communication reins rather tightly. Outbound messages and inbound requests for information are carefully metered. In the social media-enabled world, random tweets from uncontrollable consumers can seriously upset this carefully built apple cart. Learn to roll with the punches — as the Invisible Children charity has been forced to do amid allegations it's spending too much on expensive film production — in case the message veers off-script.

Restructure your staff
Since social media competency is now central to any company's marketing communications plan, it should be staffed as such. It isn't enough to hang an additional title, such as social media manager or community media director, on a marketing rep. Dedicate the resources and build entire teams whose only accountability is building a social media strategy, then executing and evolving it every hour of every day. If you're still too small to justify a full-on team, assign a dedicated employee and build a proper job description to ensure it remains a priority.

Restructure your message
Don't think your existing marketing communications can be simply dropped onto a social media platform. Twitter is not a repository for PR reps to dump links to press releases. The entire message needs to be boiled down into smaller, more easily digestible chunks. Not everything needs to fit within a 140-word tweet, but it should be modularized to not look so awkwardly official when it's discussed on Twitter and other SM platforms.

Find the emotion
Messages with emotional connections to the target audience stand a greater chance of first connecting with consumers, then prompting the call to action that fuels near-logarithmic growth. If you make your audience think, cry or otherwise reflect, they'll be more inclined to share it with others like them. Not everything goes viral, of course, but the messages that blow up big-time tend to all have an emotional subtext that even cynics can't ignore.

Give everything a call to action
Simply getting someone to view your video or follow a tweeted link isn't enough. What do you expect them to do about it? Lay out verbally what they should do — share the link, email their MP, or join an upcoming event, for example — and build automation into the page to make it easy for them to actually get it done.

Social media is rapidly morphing from its immature early years of poking and sharing photos of what we had for dinner into a serious platform for geopolitical discussion and change. As the Kony 2012 campaign builds to the planned April 20 day of action, it's clear the lessons here are as valid for profit-seeking businesses as they are for those seeking justice on behalf of Africa's abused children.

Carmi Levy is a London, Ont.-based independent technology analyst and journalist. The opinions expressed are his own. carmilevy@yahoo.ca