🎃Spooky media shenanigans
Instagram's out! Twitter's a mess! Halloween is here! DUDE. Context Collapse #165
Greetings from Halloweentown. As usual, leave a comment or reply to this email with your thoughts on the newsletter. LET’S GO.
On a purely personal level (and we’ll get to the comms stuff soon-promise), it’s been a good three-day Halloween weekend so far.
My son is three years old and finally old enough to understand what’s happening when we go trick or treating. On Saturday a friend invited us to go to her downtown high-rise apartment building’s trick or treat (Thanks T!). On Sunday we took the kid to the Lincoln Square trick-or-treat-at-stores thing, which was even more candy. Then today we do the actual trick or treating.
Halloween as a parent is different. You grow up doing trick or treating, then around the time you turn 18 it turns into a party shenanigan holiday. Then it ends up as a holiday where it’s all about creating memories for the kids and you end up non-ironically decorating pumpkins and making Target spooky vampire hot chocolate bombs instead of shots of Power’s during the Monster Mash. All good, all appreciated.
Let the kids have those memories 💯💯💯.
Obligatory Halloween comms note:
Bethany Biron at Business Insider leans hard into what Spirit Halloween’s leadership is doing with all those damn Spirit Halloween memes. (Note: Biron/Insider own the Spirit beat with this second article on The Rise of Spirit Halloween.)
Also, Sun-Maid Raisins is leaning hard into their reputation as the Halloween treat only given out by dentists and old people who hate fun by creating a dystopian world where all the Halloween candy’s been replaced by raisins. Love this!
Marketers: Use Multiple Platforms
If you run a small business or work as a marketer, something profoundly shitty happened Monday morning: Instagram went bonkers and appears to have accidentally suspended a whole bunch of accounts.
This is annoying-but-temporary if you use social media for fun or as a proxy for actual human interaction.
But if your business uses Instagram as a main channel for selling stuff or communicating with channels, this outage costs lots of $$$.
No good.
My pro tip as a professional goon making decent money in the marketing, public relations and advertising worlds telling people WTF to do with their money: Don’t depend on any one social media service or platform for the bulk of your sales or for reaching customers.
Make sure you have a mix.
Use Instagram and TikTok but make sure they’re backed up by you getting your customers email addresses and actually emailing them.
Go through the trouble of learning how to use MailChimp, ConvertKit, Substack or Constant Contact (or hire us to set it up for you and handle your email marketing!)
Carry on.
ALL THE LINKS
Elon Musk just took over Twitter on Thursday and has already fired the company’s entire board and posted Paul Pelosi conspiracy theories. Congratulations on Twitter Inc. for graduating from a slow-motion, mostly private meltdown to a rapid-fire and entirely public meltdown!
Newsletter ad spending trends for 2022.
Fox News’ hunt for the Kanye West-Tucker Carlson leaker.
The autism spectrum, the military-industrial complex and AI work.
The weirdness of Russian anti-American propaganda.
Life after lifestyle and subcultures in the digital age.
How to actually change someone’s mind online.
Apple demands a 30% commission from ad revenue on promoted social posts, which is basically declaring war on Meta.
Doctor Who’s moving to Disney Plus.
How new computers screw over older users. (Twitter thread)
And, last but not least, Jess Zafarris’ Halloween tale keeps getting better and better. (Twitter thread)
