Being heavily involved in the arts for most of my career, I always enjoy going to the theatre. I find that sometimes I can be watching a play and glean something from one of the lines that, while totally unrelated to what’s going on on stage, makes something I’ve been thinking about make perfect sense. That’s the power of theatre.
For the past week, I spent nearly every night at the Ottawa Fringe Festival, taking in plays, talking to actors and drinking too much at the beer tent. One show in particular – a performance poet called Jem Rolls from the UK – probably left the most lasting impression on me. He said:
I decided to think about why the world is the way it is. And I spent hours, just laying on the floor, thinking, determined to come up with an answer. I thought about it for days and days until I came to the conclusion – the world is the way it is because the people who are run the world are paid too much. So I went and told all my friends at the pub this, and they paused for about 10 seconds, and said "Jem – we all already knew that." And I realized that I did too… but with all the thinking, I’d forgotten.
All this is to say that I came to a revelation last night that quite possibly be one of those epiphanies that had already occured to everyone else – nonetheless, here it is:
Dealing with social media PR does not mean giving up control over your message. It means giving up the illusion of control over your message. As soon as someone with an internet connection decides to talk about your brand, you’ve lost control. Admitting that you have no control from the outset means that you have to take a different path to mitigate bad PR: giving your customers something they WANT to talk positively about.
Again, I’m pretty sure I knew this already, but when it came to me, it still blew my mind a little.
