A laser focus on your own supporters can get you in trouble
If, like me, you live in the UK and spend your morning scrolling through social media and listening to the news, there’s a reasonable chance you got hit with this image along with the news that Israel had begun an assault on Rafa.
Initially I thought it was a parody account or a hack, but no, this is from Joe Biden’s personal Twitter account and by that I mean his comms team because I very much hope POTUS is not spending his time messing about with memes on Twitter. (It’s not 2016-2020).
The image was, incorrectly, seized on as evidence of the US government’s support for the latest Israeli military action. The problem is that to correctly interpret this image you need 1) good faith, 2) knowledge of a recent sporting event in American football, 3) awareness of a conspiracy theory involving Taylor Swift and the next presidential election, and 4) familiarity with a meme war.
Joe Biden is quite famous.[Citation needed]. People will follow his account for many different reasons, generally related to him leading the most powerful country in the world. It’s a large and varied audience.
When you start doing niche humour from parts of the internet best left under a stone on a popular account with complex followers, here’s where you’re aiming.
The post is maybe funny if you knew there was a conspiracy theory that Taylor Swift’s interest in American footballer Travis Kelce is a Pentagon-backed operation to swing the next US presidential election in Biden’s favour via American football. (Or something like that – it’s a theory so achingly-online I wanted to run outside and live in a forest the moment I read about it.) Kelce’s team won the Super Bowl last night, which is nice if you like that sort of thing (I have no idea about it so I’ll not be adding any more detail), but it’s just another piece of background knowledge needed for people to squeeze into that red dot and understand the Biden team is mocking and playing up to the conspiracy.
You would also have to recognise that Biden’s account is co-opting far-right ‘Dark Brandon’ imagery of him (stemming from a series of events that need a trombone slide as background music where chants of “F*** Joe Biden” were wilfully misheard as “Let’s go Brandon”, then memes took over and I can already hear the forest calling again).
Ultimately, the number of people who chuckled at the Democrats’ dig at right-wing conspiracy theorists was eclipsed by the number of people who don’t watch American football, but who were aware of live events occurring in one of the most-discussed global flashpoints and who now associate a laser-eyed Biden with plots to attack Rafah. You could of course look it up, but few people are going to and frankly Biden’s comms team should have known better.
What are the social media lessons?
- Your audience, your followers and your supporters are not the same thing.
- Your post will have a different potential value to each of these and you need to weigh them.
There are other Democratic Twitter accounts that could have made this post where it would have been appreciated by 90% of followers and not been mistaken as something grotesque. Yes, this is Joe Biden’s personal, thus political account, not that of the President, but he is still the Commander-in-Chief and while he may not have lasers for eyes he has the most powerful military in the world at his disposal.
By the nature of their job, Biden’s social media team are going to be immersed in online politics and point scoring, however a key comms skill is being able to step back and take an outsider’s view of the organisation and weigh up the impact of different interpretations.
A tiny minority of Biden’s supporters versed in appropriate lore may have smiled (and I keep saying ‘may’ because it’s not even that funny) but most were confused or even horrified. It really shouldn’t have happened.
Express Words 