Plus: The TikTok to Google pipeline; rumors show how little trust consumers have in tech.
Oh, TikTok. A tool equally powerful for brand promotion and misinformation.
It all began innocently. Medical student Sydney Clements posted that she’d lost her Revlon lip oil while dancing. The brand popped into her comments and offered to send her a new one. Typical TikTok stuff.
The problem? A month later and Revlon hadn’t sent the oil. Clements posted a video calling them out. It racked up 9 million views and offers from other brands to send free stuff, ranging from Prada lip products to fashion hoodies. Revlon did eventually make good ohttps://www.prdaily.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=gf_new_formn its promise, too.
@sydneycle hey @Revlon Cosmetics , not cool #revlon #lipoil #makeup #ghosted ♬ original sound – tayler⸆⸉
Lured by the promise of free stuff, other people began following the same template of Clements’ video, claiming brands had reneged on their own promises of free stuff. But the purported promises were much more than drugstore lip oil. One woman even claimed Honda had offered her a new car after hers broke down.
@mcubed hey @Honda, not cool #honda #ghosted #revlon #lipoil This is a joke based of a video by @sydney | MS1 ♬ original sound – tayler⸆⸉
The video gained millions of views. Commenters rode to war on the woman’s behalf. Of course, however, that promise was bogus. It was a joke.
“We’re aware of a recent TikTok video that has circulated widely,” Honda said in a statement to the Wall Street Journal. “The individual who posted it has since confirmed that the content was intended to be a joke.”
“I only thought 200 people would see this,” original poster Anna Fleming told WSJ.
Honda is far from alone. One poor KitchenAid representative commented on a video apologizing and asking the poster to reach out so they could help. JetBlue was accused of not delivering on a promise of a flight to Italy – a destination the airline doesn’t fly.
Why it matters: Brands chiming in to the TikTok comments section, often with the promise of free merch, is becoming a powerful marketing tool. But Revlon found out that when there’s no follow through, big reputational headaches can ensue.
But more than that, this incident shows the dangers of an algorithmically driven platform. If TikTok hadn’t fed you the original Revlon video, you’d have no context for understanding these were joke trends playing off that actual scenario and not intended to be taken seriously.
When algorithms put us into silos, understanding is impeded. Customers are quick to side with the “little guy” and against large corporations. Even when the scenario makes no sense, like JetBlue’s lack of flights to Italy, the public is still ready to get out pitchforks and demand what’s owed.
There’s no real solution here, unfortunately, without dismantling the entire current social media ecosystem. To minimize damage, deliver on what you promise, do your best to stay on top of trends and know when you don’t need to respond – even if people are very, very angry.
Editor’s Top Reads:
- A new article from The Verge explains how many college students get – and fact check – their news these days. It starts in millions of cases with a TikTok or Instagram influencer. Sometimes this is a real person, like Dylan “News Daddy” Page with his nearly 18 million TikTok followers. Sometimes it begins with a talking fish. In either case, the influencer shares either lightly sourced or unsourced news. Users either take this at face value and keep scrolling or, if they want more information, move to Google. “I see the TikTok, I see more, I get interested, I look it up online,” one student explained. For additional fact checking, he might turn to the comments section. This generational shift in news consumption leads to real challenges for PR professionals. It’s still important to get your news into traditional media. But now, that news is being repackaged and reinterpreted for audiences largely taking it at face value and missing out on the broader context of a well-reported article, who only finds content when the algorithm pulls them in a certain direction.
- Google is currently battling misinformation after a viral rumor started that all Gmail users are automatically opted in to have their emails used to train AI. Numerous reputable news outlets believed the tweet and posted step-by-step articles on how to opt out. The problem? It isn’t true. “These reports are misleading – we have not changed anyone’s settings, Gmail Smart Features have existed for many years, and we do not use your Gmail content for training our Gemini AI model,” a Google spokesperson told Mashable. This is a story of countering misinformation, but it also shows just how little trust consumers have in tech companies to handle their data in a way that’s safe and transparent. Even when a company is doing the right thing, the default assumption is that they’re not. It’s necessary to overcommunicate about how data is being used – and how it’s not.
- SitusAMC, a vendor that services many major banks, was the victim of a cyberattack earlier this month. The current scope and scale of this attack is unknown, but it may have revealed sensitive information related to residential mortgages, the New York Times reports. JPMorgan Chase, Citi and Morgan Stanley were all notified that their data may have been compromised. But all of those banks refused to provide any public statement on the attack. A JPMorgan statement said only that the bank had not been attacked directly. That may be true, but it isn’t transparent. Even a simple statement that the bank is currently working to understand if its customers were impacted would engender more trust than a curt “no comment.” Cyberattacks are an inevitability now – rebuilding trust starts with the initial response.
Allison Carter is editorial director of PR Daily and Ragan.com. Follow her on LinkedIn.
The post The Scoop: TikTok users are claiming brands reneged on promises as ‘jokes’ appeared first on PR Daily.
