Lessons for future marketers from the war in Ukraine
Kevin (Kazuhito) Naruse
Tech & Media Director | Digital Transformation Leader | 115K+ Social Media Growth | SEO & Growth Hacking Expert | Empowering Social Enterprises & Innovation
"Foreign affairs do not usually engage the American public unless the U.S. is directly involved and American lives are at risk. That Americans have been consumed by the war in Ukraine is unusual."
Nine months into the war, 73% of Americans still support continued aid, and it enjoys a lot of bipartisan support, which is often a rarity in recent U.S. politics. The United States has already provided Ukraine with over $18 billion in aid. All of this is despite the direct costs of war - the rise in fuel prices and the negative economic impact on ordinary folks.
What was different this time that turned typically indifferent folks into willing, enthusiastic supporters?
It's impossible to speculate how much impact was created by ?the novel deployment of social media as a "weapon of war." Still, a social media marketer?probably could relate to the struggle an underdog faces to "level the playing field" while standing up to the Goliaths of the corporate world.
Unless you are a large brand or multinational corporation, you're up against billions of other users with plenty of resources, and being heard above the din will be easy with heavy ad spending, which you want to avoid.
Gone are the days when you could use Facebook or Instagram as a broadcast channel and expect to reach many people.
Be Provocative (But Not Offensive) On Direct Messaging and Mentions
What would you do if you wanted to reach a foreign diplomat, talk directly to the U.N. Secretary General, the U.S. Secretary of State, or Elon Musk himself, and get the quickest response?
An often overlooked feature of social media is?direct messaging (D.M.). All social platforms have them. People are likelier to reply to a D.M. from an unknown person on LinkedIn than an email.
Even more direct in some ways is to directly @ mention someone in a public post, a comment, or a reply to a comment combined with an @ mention (see above).
Ukrainian politicians were great at wielding Twitter mentions to expedite foreign diplomacy.
It is rare for a head of state, or any prominent political leader not to have a Twitter account.
To be real: the person you need to address may not be a public figure or celebrity at all. It's more likely an important customer, client, or any relationship important to you or your team.
It's not the content that ultimately creates a new supporter or customer.
It's the conversation (not the content) that converts. The conversation is more important than even the snazzy meme or humorous TikTok video. There is a very targeted audience.
One-to-many broadcasting is not the way to go anymore if you want to be truly effective. It's one-to-few or one-to-one now.
Remix and Repurpose Memes Into Short-Form Video
Oxford dictionary defines a meme as:
“a humorous image, video, piece of text, etc., that is copied (often with slight variations) and spread rapidly by internet users.”
On February 24, shortly after air-raid sirens began blaring and missiles began to rain down on Kyiv, President Zelensky was offered a lift by both US President Biden and Turkey PM Erdogan, to evacuate. Zelensky's response became iconic since then.
“The fight is here. I need more ammunition, not a ride”.
Consider how this meme began with a tweet (right), and then spun off into multitudes of other forms of content (below).
It has never been this easy for a novice to shoot and broadcast a video.
Many of these Tik Tok videos were further rehashed and reshared on Telegram, Youtube, and Twitter, thus multiplying its reach.
Hubspot defines short-form video as
"Any video under 60 seconds is considered short-form, with the optimal length between 31 and 60 seconds."?
Do you want to take one short video clip, and spin it off into hundreds of viral short memes and video posts?
Short-form videos - less than a minute long - are made specifically for TikTok, Youtube Shorts, and Instagram Reels. It can be done on just about any mobile device.
Instagram made it extremely easy to create Reels with newly added features . Video remixing has become easier than ever for just about anyone and it can be done straight from a smartphone. Zelensky’s iconic response spun off into hundreds of memes and GIFs that flooded the global internet.
While Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are the favored social media platforms for news, TikTok (more associated with viral teenage dancing videos) has shown the largest relative growth in news viewership in relation to the war.
To shape the narrative, get to the news story before the journalists do
It was essential to have the initiative in the journalistic process to shape the news story and not be shaped by it.
Facts conveyed from the ground up will determine the stories told by journalists. What appeared first on Twitter, Tik Tok, and Instagram often became the precursor to an actual developing news story.?
"Ukrainian government officials, including President Volodymyr Zelensky , rely on the app Telegram for everything from rallying global support to disseminating air raid warnings and maps of local bomb shelters. So do both the Russian government and Russian opposition channels, who now find themselves cut off from most mainstream social media”
In Russia, all other social media channels including TikTok are banned.
“The messaging app, which last year reached a billion downloads, has turned into the conflict’s digital battle space. It’s an instrumental tool for both governments and a hub of information for citizens on both sides.”
The point is not that you should use Telegram. If you were reaching a Brazilian audience, you might want to use WhatsApp instead. Penetrate a wider audience by adapting your platform to your audience. The question to ask is:
Whom am I addressing and where are they?
"This is all great", you might say, but "let's be real; You're not a huge multinational company brand and you're limited in manpower, and social media content can be time-consuming"
True: effective social media marketing involves more than posting videos, photos, and memes. It also involves:
The workaround?
领英推荐
"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world."
~ Archimedes
Leverage the "heavy lifting" with a willing army of volunteers
"It is a people’s war, fought away from front lines by self-starting networks of donors and volunteers... A loosely organized patchwork of numerous social media and other cloud-based platforms."
The best example I could think of is the hacktivist campaign supporting the defense.
The IT Army of Ukraine is defined in Wikipedia as: "a volunteer cyberwarfare organization created at the end of February 2022 to fight against the digital intrusion of Ukrainian information and cyberspace”
Who could’ve guessed an international cyber-warfare team is gathering and coordinating actions straight from a social media messaging platform?
The bottom line: Leverage the enthusiasm of people not directly connected to nor in close proximity to you but who want to be there in some capacity and help.?
Fighting disinformation on social media with social media
There’s no doubt that disinformation was and still remains a problem on all social media, and the problem is expected to grow, as the growth continues to outpace the capacity of content moderators to vet the sheer volume of content for validity.?
Fortunately, every photo and every video on social media provides metadata. The problem comes equipped with the very tools it needs for the solution.
"Metadata ?provides information about digital data. In other words, it's the data about data. As an example, the metadata of a social media post would include information about the author of the post, the message type, post date and time, versions, links (un-shortened), location, likes, and comments."
Problem: This verification process is not instantaneous.
It takes work to distinguish between valid and invalid data, and it can't solely rely on AI.
Bellingcat comes to the rescue. Bellingcat is a Netherlands-based?investigative journalism ?group that specializes in?fact-checking ?and?open-source intelligence ?(OSINT). Bellingcat began as an investigation into the use of weapons in the Syrian Civil War . Its reports on the Russo-Ukrainian War (including the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 ), the El Junquito raid , the Yemeni Civil War , the Skripal poisoning , and the killing of civilians by the Cameroon Armed Forces have attracted international attention.[5]
I'm not suggesting that you should form a fact-checking volunteer community of your own or start a crusade for fighting disinformation, but the basic idea is that there are plenty of people who want to get involved. All you need to do is create a space for the community to form around the effort and to grow. The results are sometimes extraordinary, like this:
A pro-Kremlin journalist posted photos of his visit to a Russian military base (the Wagner Group HQ to be exact) somewhere in the Russian-occupied Donbas region. The address was visible in the photo. The post was deleted, but not before circulating on Telegram- a social messaging app that is hugely popular in both Russia and Ukraine with over 500 million users.
Guess what happened next?
Governor Serhiy Hayday wrote on Telegram : Ukrainian forces "hit an enemy HQ whose whereabouts were established thanks to a Russian journalist" ~ BBC, August 2022
The takeaway for marketers?
"Swarm intelligence is defined as?a collective behavior of a decentralized or self-organized system. These systems consist of numerous individuals with limited intelligence interacting with each other based on simple principles."
Consider an analogy that compares the military to the producers and the civilian population to the audience of consumers.
If there is a lesson in this conflict, it is that the sheer size of numbers and firepower does not guarantee victory. It's about leveraging a much smaller force against a much larger one using ingenuity and technology.
It is a classic David Versus Goliath story.
Nine months in, the prospect of a Ukrainian victory now appears within reach. Capturing the stories of Ukrainian civilians and troops alike struggling against a numerically superior, better-equipped foe may have made the difference.
How else did they completely defy expectations and achieve the "impossible"?
Involve the consumer in your process and strategy directly on public messaging channels.
"Actively involve them in your marketing process so that your team can generate new product ideas, marketing campaigns , and content topics based on the feedback you’ve received directly from the people that matter most."
To foster close collaboration between producers and the consumer don't be afraid to do what the IT Army of Ukraine did on a public messaging platform.
Outsource the strategy.
Outsource the conversation.
Allow a community to build around the effort.
It involves a certain level of trust and letting go to let the process play out, but the results are infinitely worth it.
Further reading:
Prior to the invasion, users uploaded videos of tanks being moved across the country in Russia. Researchers were able to geolocate these photos to see the buildup of military power on the border prior to the invasion of Ukraine.”
Social media: The newest weapon of war , San Diego Tribune, March 2022
From Times Magazine Telegram Becomes a Digital Battlefield in Russia-Ukraine War
Using social media platforms for Open-source intelligence gathering ( OGIT) is not an entirely new concept,?
Thanks to the rise of Twitter sleuths , many researchers are catching on to the importance of?open-source intelligence (OSINT). Twitter has been on the digital frontlines of the war in Ukraine – becoming a place where OSINT researchers crowdsource to geolocate photos, identify victims and soldiers, or sometimes debunk staged shots.