Nick Kossovan is the Customer Service Professionals Network’s Director of Social Media (Executive Board Member). Submit your social media questions to nick.kossovan@gmail.com. Follow @NKossovan on Instagram and Twitter.
The American way (read: capitalism's primary goal), which greatly influences the Canadian way, has always been about separating you from your money. I'd wager that within moments of the Internet becoming available to the public on April 30, 1993, many asked themselves, "How can I use this new medium to hawk stuff?"
Smartphones have made us dangerous.
It is estimated there are more than five billion mobile devices in use today. Studies predict that by 2025, 70% of internet users will only use smartphones to access the Internet.
Every day, millions worldwide use their smartphones to take photos, make videos, or write texts documenting their reality and then share them on social media. Until recently, journalism and filmmaking were difficult to break into, let alone make a decent living in, without proper training or connections.
I get it. International Women's Day was happening. Every major brand on the planet sees it as a marketing opportunity, a chance to virtue signal, but I digress. Marketing professionals, competing with all the social media noise, sometimes feel they need to push the envelope, hoping to get noticed.
Well, did Burger King's (@BurgerKingUK) IWD tweet "Women belong in the kitchen.", intending to get people to read their subsequent tweets, get noticed!
Here's the scene:
While stirring his Starbucks coffee with a plastic stir stick, he scrolls through his Twitter feed. He likes a few Tweets that insult climate change deniers and retweets a Tweet with a link to an article outlining how climate change will significantly raise sea levels by 2050. I hate climate change deniers, he thinks to himself as he tosses his plastic stir stick into the trash and places a plastic lid on his coffee. He then walks to his SUV, running to keep the AC on (it's a sweltering and humid late September day for Toronto), parked in front.