«That tweet could be the beginning of the end», the CEO told me, slowly closing his office door as if to mask the urgency of the situation from workers in cubicles outside. In less than 140 characters, a well-followed tweeter was able to foist an attack on a corporation as disproportional and devastating as crashing a hijacked plane into an office tower.
The details of the scandal are unimportant. It turned out the Twitter-amplified attack on the company was actually initiated by the improper use of hashtags by the company’s own hired online publicity firm, anyway. But the speed with which error became a virus and then spread into a public relations nightmare covered by mainstream media was shocking.
We like to think having more connections makes us more resilient. Isn’t more friends a good thing? Yes, there is strength in networks – particularly grass-roots networks that grow naturally over time and enjoy many levels of mutual support. But all this connectedness can also make us less resilient.
In a globally connected economy, there is no such thing as an isolated crash. It used to be that the fall of one market meant another was going up. Now, because they are all connected, markets cannot fall alone. A collapse in one small European nation also takes down the many overseas banks that have leveraged its debt. There’s nowhere to invest that’s insulated from any other market’s problems. Likewise, thanks to the interconnectedness of our food supply and transportation networks, the outbreak of a disease on the poultry farms of China almost inevitably becomes a global pandemic. A connected world is like a table covered with loaded mousetraps. If one trap snaps, the rest of the table will follow in rapid, catastrophic succession. Like a fight between siblings in the back of the car on a family trip, it doesn’t matter who started it. Everybody is in it, now.
Welcome to the world of feedback and iteration. In a normal situation, feedback is just the response you get
from doing something. It’s the echo that comes back after you shout into a canyon, the quizzical looks on the faces
of students after you tell them a new idea, or even the size of the harvest you get after trying a new fertilizer. You take an action, and you get feedback. You then use this feedback to figure out how to adjust for next time. You shoot an arrow, it lands to the left of the bull’s eye, you adjust by aiming further to the right, and so on. Each time you adjust is another iteration of the feedback loop between you and the target. For feedback to be useful there must be some interval between the thing you’ve done and the result you’ve created. You need time to see what happened and then adjust.
In a presentist world, that feedback loop gets really tight. Feedback happens so fast, that it becomes difficult to even gauge what’s happening. You know that feeling when you’re holding a microphone and the speakers suddenly screech and you don’t know which way to move to make it stop? That’s actually feedback you’re dealing with and trying to control. Normally, the microphone simply hears the sound of your voice, and passes it on to the amplified speaker. When you get too close to one of those speakers, however, the microphone ends up listening to its own noise. Then that noise goes back through the amplifier and speaker, at which point the microphone hears it again, and sends it back on through – again, and again, and again. Each iteration amplifies the sound more and more, thousands of times, until you hear the combined, chaotic screech of an infinite and instantaneous feedback loop. Only we don’t hear a cyclical loop – we just hear the high-pitched whine. That’s the way the world sounds right now to most governments and businesses. Everything becomes everything.
Feedback used to be slow. A company might upgrade a product, put it out into the market, and wait a full season to see how it did. Feedback came in the form of inventory reports and returns. The way a product sold was the feedback a company needed to plan for the next season. In traditional politics, feedback came every few years through the voting booth. It eventually tightened to polls conducted weekly or even daily, but at least there was some control and sequence to the process: leak a policy, poll the public, then either announce it or not.
When feedback comes instantaneously and from all sides at once, it’s hard to know how people are reacting to what we are doing – or what we’re doing that they’re even reacting to. Social media lets people feed back their responses immediately and to one another instead of just back to the business or politician concerned. Then other people respond as much to those messages as they do to the product or policy. They are feeding back to one another. In a landscape with instantaneous lateral feedback, marginal box office on the opening night of a movie – even if it has
nothing to do with the movie – ends up being Tweeted to the next day’s potential viewers. The negativity iterates, and the movie fails, even if it got good reviews from the traditional channels of feedback.
Corporations are attempting to enter the feedback loop – or at least to create limited opportunities for controlled feedback to occur. Crowdsourcing is really just a corporation’s way of trying to focus the otherwise random feedback from consumers onto a particular task. Of course, in a landscape where everyone is connecting and feeding back to everything and everyone else, there is no such thing as not having a social media strategy. People inside and outside every organization – even clandestine ones – are still engaging with friends, colleagues, competitors, and strangers online. They are happy or unhappy with their jobs, purchases, representatives, schools, banks, and systems of government. Except for the few who are paid to do otherwise (professional online shills), most are telling the truth — or at least revealing it through silence, subtle cues, or their data trails. Things stay open, anyway.
An official social media strategy, exercised by a professional PR firm, might help an organization deal with explicit complaints about its products. There are filtering services that can scour the net for comments made to almost any feed, giving clients the chance to answer complaints or accusations appropriately within minutes. That a company in a presentist universe must be always on and ready to respond to critique instantaneously should go without saying. As long as these Tweets, updates, and posts are limited to a few thousand a day, this remains a manageable proposition.
But this approach is still a carryover from the days of broadcast media and easy, top-down control of communications. Back in the era of television and other electronic communications technologies, a «global media» meant satellite television, capable of broadcasting video of the Olympics across the globe. This was the electronically mediated world Marshall McLuhan described as the «global village»; he was satirizing the hippy values so many thought would emerge from a world brought together by their TV sets, and instead warning us about the impact of globalism, global markets, and global superpowers on our lives and cultures. With the rise of digital media, however, we see the possibility for a reversal of this trend. Unlike the broadcast networks of the electronic age, digital networks are biased toward peer-to-peer exchange and communication. Instead of big institutions responding to (and in some cases, mitigating) the feedback of a world of individuals, those individuals are feeding back to one another. The institutions aren’t even in the conversation.
Narrative has collapsed, branding has become irrelevant, consumers see themselves as people, and everyone is engaged in constant, real-time, peer-to-peer, non-fiction communication. All the while, companies are busy trying to maintain linear, call-and-response conversations about brand mythologies with consumers. In such an environment, it’s no wonder a tiny gaffe can overtake many years and dollars of strategy. Amplified by feedback and iterated ad infinitum, tiny pinprick of truth can pop a story that took decades to inflate.
Businesses attempt to adjust in real time to the comments about their products emerging on bulletin boards, update feeds, or anywhere else, and often don’t even know whether the feedback is coming from someone who has seen or touched the actual product. Brand managers know they’re in a world where companies are expected to be present in all these venues, responding and adjusting, clarifying and placating – but it’s hard to do when everybody is talking at once, feeding back into one another and the product and the competition and the shareholders. Thanks to feedback and iteration, any single Tweet can mushroom into a cacophony.
Ideation, corporate culture, development, production, branding, consumer research, and sales all become part of an interative equation where causes and effects can no longer be parsed. When feedback comes through the cycle in that uncontrollable way, it’s like putting that microphone next to the speaker amplifying it’s own signal. All you get is screech. You don’t know where to stand to make it stop. The speakers are everywhere.