When It’s Fun The People Will Come And When It’s Not Your Community Will Rot

Very often you’ll see people try to raise awareness leveraging negative emotions.

Scare tactics get this intense, visceral reaction out of people. You can rally them up and get on board with your cause. Usually that initial reaction is more flash in the pan than meaningful engagement.

My original intention with the article was to try to discourage fear/anger based marketing, but as I read around online I realized they are useful tools when implemented correctly. 

The headline still holds true.

People that like raging in the morning, or doom scrolling, find it fun in their own way. Or at least they take the time to engage in this sort of thing of their own accord. Tapping into that could be good marketing, but it needs to be done right.

There’s a fine line between a raging person ranting online and a social activist fighting for the cause. 

A lot of it has to do with intention.

People join communities to belong and have fun when they find purpose

I use the term fun pretty loosely.

For me, it’s something you choose to engage in because you find it worthwhile. It doesn’t necessarily need to be entertaining. I find non-profit work fun when I think about it more than when I’m at a board meeting.

For the most part, if you create a nice hospital environment, people will be attracted to that. 

People like humour because it’s implied there will be laughing and good times. They join reading clubs to find companionship with others on a reading quest, which they enjoy. Sometimes  the fun even comes from achieving social activism doing sincerely unfun things like raging at the system.

Currently a lot of people are raging over lawns not being mowed in our Montreal parks. Montreal chose to use no mow May as a way to avoid cutting the grass, for better or for worse. A lot of people are posting rage posts about this.

Overall the reaction to these rage posts is poor.

They are missing a key ingredient that makes these posts effective. 

When dealing with rage and fear, there needs to be next steps defined with a CTA.

Rage is fleeting if there’s no call to action

The thing about a lot of rage and fear based marketing is they rely on strong emotions. 

People see the content, they get emotional and they respond in that moment. If there is no clear direction in the post, their reaction will just fizzle as the next thing steals their attention. Even if they leave a comment and share. 

You had them ready to give you their energy for real. 

Then they moved on.

The real danger of rage posting is people may get turned off if you just get them riled up for the clout. It takes a special kind of person to leverage that hate to grow, I think 6ixbuzz in Toronto is the perfect example of that. But even then, they legitimately pump out a lot of news and create value, despite their ragebait posts.

6ixbuzz wants you to follow for more content, but ends up leaving you more informed to what’s going on around Toronto, silly and serious.

DMS uses entertainment news and Montreal sensationalism in the same way. They leverage that attention to then put shine on local talent. They create real value for others.

When your rage posts are just for the views, without some direction, it doesn’t end up leading to community. Instead you get people mad about that issue who then move on to get mad elsewhere.

At least let the people know that you can rage together for social change or something.

Fun is more about promises being delivered than activities

When people come across content that is well executed, they understand who it was for and can connect with it or move on.

Engagement based on confusion is a different beast. Sometimes people engage because they don’t understand the point of the post. Yes it’s identifying a problem, but at the same time it’s not really doing anything but collecting rage. 

Even the people who rage, leave their little shit post comments and move on.

While those people are having fun, they are clearly not sticking around. Or imagine the community if they do. Just a bunch of grownups who enjoy whining on social media, not my idea of fun… anymore. 

To get people to stick around you need to give them a reason to stay. A great post that captures attention is effectively a landing page. A landing page is basically an internet version of the advertisement in a newspaper.

If you make an effective landing page, but neglect to mention what it’s for, all you get is eyes on your page that will then stop looking.

You need to establish why you are raging and what raging with you means. This could be a great joke of a caption, but also information on how someone gets involved. Whether it’s to support your cause or it’s to annoy the people you want them to annoy.

Basically people want to see a leader that leads with purpose, not someone who gets on the soap box to yell into a microphone about everything broken.

Doing that, you’ll have fun even if you are the angriest person ever. 

Live Long and Prosper Everyone