Marketing & PR News & Advice for June 2018

Welcome to Consonant Marketing’s News & Advice for June 2018. In this issue, we discuss Memorial Day and outrage culture. In addition, we recommend a few sane people to follow on social media.

Memorial Day

Monday was Memorial Day. To me, Memorial Day is the most important US holiday because we take time to recognize and honor the brave men and women who died to protect our country and our way of life. That said, our way of life would not exist without our Constitution and Bill of Rights. In the Bill of Rights, the First Amendment is incredibly important. It prevents Congress from making laws that infringe on our right to speak freely. Free speech is essential to a free society, which is likely why the First Amendment was added… First.

Where am I going with this? We’re getting there, I promise.

Outrage Culture

The “big news of the week” focused on two comedians who used their right to free speech to tell two very unfunny jokes. This has been over-reported and over-analyzed so I am not going to harp on the bad jokes or demonize the people who told them. In fact, I believe the real story lies within the reaction to the jokes.

Once again, social media has become a dumpster fire of virtue. Twitter has become the digital battleground of the war between tribes. For the most part, the loudest voices are not actually offended by the jokes. If they were, they would simply make the choice to ignore the women who told them. Instead, they found an opportunity to use the negative PR as a way attack their ideological opponents. Guilt by association.

Instead of simply attacking bad ideas, social media users have taken to attacking and demonizing each other. How is this a good thing?

The tribes are encouraged by a main stream media who would like us to believe that 50% of the country are Fascists and the other 50% are Communists.

 

Why? This sort of thing gets a lot of clicks.

The problem: It’s simply is not true.

 

There are 325 million people in the US. There are not 162.5 million Fascists and Communists. Surprisingly, most of us agree about most things in life. Are there disagreements on hot-button issues? Sure. However, attacking each other instead of debating ideas leads nowhere.

Back to Memorial Day. Throughout our short history, over a million brave men and women died during wartime to preserve our way of life. I think the least we can do is honor them by treating each other with respect. It is possible to disagree with each other without comparing each other to Hitler and Stalin. People can be wrong without having evil intentions. We live in the greatest country in the history of the world. We should respect it, and each other, more often.

A needle of brilliance in a haystack of outrage.

Not everybody spent their time fighting their neighbors on Twitter this week. Yesterday morning, Naval Ravikant, CEO and co-founder of AngelList, crafted a thread on Twitter that restored a little bit of my faith in social media. Naval basically condensed hundreds of books and thousands of hours of life experience into 40 tweets… and it was brilliant. You can read it here.

Naval’s thread reminded me of how important it is to value our time and surround ourselves with positive people. This includes social media. Do not be afraid to follow positive people who you do not personally know. Feel free to mute the negative people you do. It’s healthy. If you are looking for sane people to follow on social, Jean has some great recommendations!

Lastly, it is almost officially summer. Let’s unplug as much as we can. Let’s enjoy the real world. Let’s turn the “outrage energy” into something productive.

Thanks for reading and remember… You rage, You lose.

 

Dustin Templeton
Founder, Consonant Marketing