Plus: LinkedIn introduces an ‘AI slop’ button; even Reddit is losing search traffic.
Remember the Ferrari Luce, the $640,000 vehicle that social media compared to the entry-level Nissan Leaf?
The car was roasted on the internet and caused the luxury car maker to lose $5 billion in market cap after the announcement.
It turns out that it was all just noise.
TechCrunch reports that the Luce hit its annual sales target in just two months, with about 20% of the vehicles going to the electric-loving Chinese market.
And that stock dip? It was only temporary. The stock price is currently up 19% since that Luce-related blip.
Why it matters: Everyone is not your customer.
This is an incredibly important and often overlooked piece of wisdom.
It doesn’t matter how the world feels about your product. It only matters how your target audience feels about it. For Ferrari, that’s a small and rarefied group of car purchasers (they sell only 13,000 cars each year), many of whom are not in the United States and may have different views on design, luxury and electric vehicles.
As a PR professional, it’s your job to help figure out what’s signal and what’s noise. Sometimes social media can show us signals that need to be heeded. But sometimes it’s people who never would have bought from you anyway who just jump on a meme.
Social media monitoring and listening are important tools, but in a case like this, when you have a small and defined target audience, more direct conversations with potential buyers are more likely to show their true feelings. Focus groups, discussions in your place of purchase, serious inquiries via phone or website — these are often the metrics to pay attention to, not social media chatter.
What is LinkedIn’s AI Slop button?
LinkedIn has released a curious new button users can select on any user’s post: “Seems like AI slop.”
Hari Srinivasan, chief product officer at LinkedIn, explained that cutting down on AI is a top priority for the social network. This comes in a variety of forms, from cutting down on automated comments (Srinivasan says they catch hundreds of thousands of these comments each day) to reducing the number of AI slop posts you see in your timeline.
LinkedIn also recognizes that it has encouraged slop with some of its features.
“We asked ourselves why do people post with AI anyway?” Srinivasan wrote. “The answer is LinkedIn isn’t a one-word kind of place and they feel more confident running their posts through AI. We’re taking this learning, removing the ‘enhance your post’ feature you see when you write a post or message & replacing with a feature that proofreads your words, but does not change your voice.”
We are seeing less and less tolerance for inhuman, uninteresting AI-generated content. That’s what slop is. Not anything made with AI, but things poorly made with AI. As we move into a more mature part of this technology cycle, we may begin to see organizations like LinkedIn encourage more thoughtful AI use rather than using AI just because you can.
People want to connect with people. Not machines. It’s true on LinkedIn, and it’s almost certainly true in your industry, too.
Why is Reddit losing referral traffic?
Reddit has been one of the darlings of the AI search revolution. More and more companies are interested in the platform as they realized that bots are scraping Reddit for information to answer users’ questions.
But now Reddit has a problem: like most sites that rely on Google search referral traffic, they’re seeing big declines.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman did not reveal exactly the extent of the decline, but it worried investors, sending the stock into an 11% fall despite a strong earnings report. That demonstrates just how vital search traffic has been for the social platform in acquiring new users over the last few years.
The current woes around Google search declines show a mistake PR pros must not repeat as we move into the AI era. It is extraordinarily dangerous to so heavily rely on another company to send customers your way. This is true of Google, it’s true of social networks, and it will be true of AI. Even as people want to go all-in on GEO, remember that you must have a diverse pipeline. If you become too dependent on any one source, you put yourself at risk when the situation changes. And it will.
How did LemonLime apologize for its tattoo interview stunt?
An AI startup has apologized after it guaranteed job seekers interviews if they would get a tattoo on the spot during a meetup. They did not have to get a tattoo of the LemonLime logo, just a tattoo. The company’s founder said it was because “We are bold, we take risks, and we do things that haven’t been done before.”
Seven people got tattoos. And, presumably, interviews.
Unsurprisingly, the optics of this were rancid. People pointed out the severe imbalance of power at play and how this could impact someone desperately seeking employment.
Surprisingly, the company took it well and issued a full-throated apology backed by action.
“I messed up,” founder Jordan Zietz’s LinkedIn post begins.
He goes on to explain his intent, but that the intent does not negate the action. He also offers to pay for removal for anyone who regrets their tattoo. His apology is clear and unequivocal: “I’m sorry to the people we put in that position, and to everyone who expected better from me. There’s no clever explanation here. I got carried away, and I was wrong.”
It was a boneheaded move, sure. But Zietz’s apology sounds genuine, explains what he’s done to make amends and even puts an offer out for an expensive procedure for anyone who regrets their tattoo.
If you’re going to make a mistake, this is the kind of apology to make after.
Allison Carter is editorial director of PR Daily and Ragan.com. Follow her on LinkedIn.
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