Good social media needs a unicorn

I asked the man behind my all-time favourite meme what he makes of social media now, and his biggest bit of advice? Social media teams should be more like writers’ rooms

“A lot of it is surprisingly still guesswork,” is Adam Koszary’s diagnosis of the current state of social media. Why does it matter what he thinks? Well, Koszary is the person who, in 2018, sent a relatively unknown British museum viral when he Tweeted a photo of a fat sheep 👆.

For context, this was the early days of brands developing online personalities – nowadays, companies sharing memes is far less likely to get so much attention, not least because they rarely do such a good job of it.

After leaving The Museum of English Rural Life, Koszary worked with Elon Musk at Tesla for six months – an experience he describes as [REDACTED] – and later on the social media team of various arts institutions including the UK’s Royal Academy of Arts. 

So it’s interesting to learn that, despite having been at the coal face of the social internet for years, Koszary admits that much of it’s still a stab in the dark. “It’s almost trusting creatives to have a good idea, and then tying it back somehow to the people they’re trying to reach,” he explains. 

“Usually brands are saying, ‘we’ve seen other people doing this thing that looks like it might work for us’, or, ‘we know, from talking to the audience that they might enjoy this thing’ or ‘we’re doing it because we stand for this’. But you won’t know until you’ve tried it.”

Basically, too many brands online are behaving like brands. Few companies genuinely trust someone to be the voice of their organisation and to create natural, off-the-cuff content – which means a lot of social media now has a “rictus grin feel”, as Koszary describes it. “I think a reason so much stuff is bland is because people get trapped in briefing just to please everyone and not offend anyone, and that ends up risking nothing and doing nothing,” he says.

Companies need to completely rethink their relationships with these platforms. First of all, the collective obsession with ROI, particularly in the corporate world, doesn’t easily translate to something like Instagram or TikTok. And there’s still a lot of senior people, particularly in the arts world, who are thinking in old school marketing terms – brief out a campaign, and deliver x many eyeballs. 

“It’s very hard to say, ‘trust us, and we will get people down some sort of funnel that’s going to do something interesting’,” says Koszary. “But in the end we have to make people like us, and making people like you is hard to quantify. It’s brand-building, and people hate paying for brand-building because they don’t get numbers.”

It’s not just about the ROI obsession either. The bigger context is that social platforms are full to the brim. Unimaginable amounts of content are pumped out every day, and brands are competing with everyone from standup comedians and massive meme accounts to internet-famous dogs and people’s own friends and family.

That means you’ve got to hire the right people. According to Koszary: “You need the holy trinity of someone who’s got the creative spark – and not necessarily a full-on creative, but having ideas in writing or in video or Photoshop – as well as knowing the subject or brand they’re talking about, and understanding how digital marketing works, so they’re not just shouting into the void.

“If you have someone in each of those corners without having the other two, it all goes to shit. You’ll get a marketer who knows how to use the channels but is posting bland crap no-one cares about, or you’ll get a person who knows the business but can’t communicate on social media, or you’ll get a creative who’ll go off on one – which might be entertaining, but will probably get you sued at some point.”

Unless a company can hire a unicorn person that has all three, they’re going to have to be prepared to invest in training, or bring in a social media team that can cover all of these elements – and maybe start thinking about it in a different way. “A lot of people want to work in a more journalistic way where you’ve got writers’ rooms, and you’re at least cringe-testing an idea with other people,” says Koszary.

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Things I enjoyed this week, bumper edition

This interactive NY Times feature, looking at menu trends. Apparently vintage desserts are back (been eying these cakes myself ), coloured paper is popular and fonts are tiny. 

A couple of weeks back I wrote about the magic of names in the beauty industry; this article looks at cocktail lingo, including ‘fruit bat’ – someone who eats the garnish fruit off the bar.

Loyalty isn’t a very sexy topic, but lifestyle brand Kith are doing something really interesting with their programme - which has given points to people based on TWELVE YEARS of purchases. Personally also a big fan of Bao’s Baoverse app, although the reviews suggest it’s had some teething problems.  

Apparently, seaweed might be the post-nuclear food of choice.

Amazon is using a LOT of robots.

Geo-engineering is coming, with a group of Israeli scientists raising funding to build a prototype space parasol. The real thing would cover a million square miles.

I spent some time scrolling this Wikipedia list of Japanese inventions, which includes obvious things like martial arts and manga as well as less obvious examples including general anaesthesia, tactile paving, bread machines and the gel pen.

Which led me down the rabbit hole of NASA spinoffs – things developed by the organisation and now used on Earth such as anti-aging skincare additives and beds that maintain a steady temperature.

I enjoyed this long Not Boring piece about Varda, which wants to make drugs in space.

 In less cosmic news, the Ozempic backlash is here - according to this piece in The Cut one lawsuit alleges a women vomited so hard she lost teeth. 

I read about how the world’s internet basically depends on lots of oversized garden hoses filled with fibre optic cables.

I watched this, frankly, quite bonkers advert for Migros Cooperative - a major retail brand in Switzerland. The press release said, “this completely new and crazy film revisits the codes of advertising”, and for once the press release was 100% right.

Lastly, TikTok is opening an LA livestream sales studio. As we already know, social commerce is going to be a big trend this year.