Tapping into the Groundswell with DevaCurl

“No Poo” – The Movement to Go Shampoo-less

Many bloggers have been documenting their experiences going without shampoo and using natural alternatives. I first found out about it while searching through these blogs.

These bloggers share their lifestyles and experiences and experiment with trends for psychic rewards: good feelings, altruism, validation, and belonging to a community. Even if bloggers will only review a product once, devoted users show up on forums where others are asking questions and vouch for it.

Google returned pages and pages of reviews and testimonials! Individuals and salons were talking about DevaCurl.

Embracing Curly Hair Naturally

Niche: Women with curly hair
Selling points: Natural, healthy, uniquely for curly hair

"100% Sulfate, Paraben, Silicone Free"

Brand: Looks clean, simple, natural; Focuses on empowering; Uses puns & catchy names; Uses negative buzzwords to separate itself from other products

You're Blogging It All Wrong

Left: Media page on their website. Right: Devacurl's blog

Their website focuses on big media and hopes it trickles down – should be reverse.

Blog features brand mentions from big media outlets, but not real bloggers (of which there are many).

The brand's own blog is done poorly: bad keywords/SEO, too short/uninformative, sales-y, rarely updated (monthly), un-engaging and impersonal

Devacurl should tap into the communities that already exist!

Reviews are too spread out online and need to be consolidated.

Word of mouth and reviews from real people would inspire more trust from potential new users. If I’m going to spend money to experiment with a product I’ve never used before, I want to know how it works from real people. People trust other people, not corporations.

Featuring individual bloggers would energize them even more.

The Trending Section on their site seems like it’ll be a resource,
but it’s only about their products. And it only has 3 listings.

A+ Engagement 

• Ask fans questions on Facebook and Twitter

• Post fans’ messages

• Responses to commenters are sometimes inconsistent, but they don't seem to ignore anything major.

To Tweet, You Need Something to Say

Their Twitter is boring because they obviously focus their attention on other areas.

• Links to other accounts and requires you to leave Twitter
• Redundant
• Doesn’t use photos or videos to make it interesting
• Lacks personality

This retweet from a salon shows what they should be doing:

A one-size fits all approach doesn't work! DevaCurl should be adapting their posts to the medium.

Turning Fans Into Models & Creating a DevaCulture

• Invite fans over Twitter and Facebook to participate (as models) in workshop for hair stylists. *Added incentive: gift of DevaCurl hair products based on their needs.

• Post photos of hair models and stylists on their Instagram.

• Workshops train stylists in DevaCurl cutting, highlighting, cleansing and styling. 
• The Stylist Finder helps you find a Deva-inspired stylist who is guaranteed to know how to work with curly hair. (Didn’t load on Facebook page)

They're building their brand loyalty by working with salons. They're connecting curly-haired people with important resources - hairdressers they can trust with curly hair needs.

Trends in Popularity 

First of all: Space or no space?
It was hard to use online tracking tools to find the brand, and this could be part of the issue.

Weekly Brand Review of "Deva Curl" from Social Mention

Percentage of All Blog Posts in Last 3 Months (IceRocket)

Search Engine Popularity (from Google Trends)

Conclusion

Devacurl hasn't reached their full potential appeal to people in the "No-Poo" movement. This could be done by reaching out to bloggers reviewing the products, consolidating reviews on their website, and addressing common concerns that it's too pricey/not natural enough. Current strategies could do more to energize producers on social media and bring that into their strategy of gaining trust of potential new users. Their biggest strength is that their current method creates good feelings among product users and creates a sense of community that will keep loyal customers.

Can Companies Have "Values"?

Companies Using Social Media

As companies have moved their marketing efforts online to follow people, lines have been blurred between personal communication and advertisements - particularly on Facebook, where a person's feed mixes personal updates from friends and business pages that've been liked. The idea is that a company's page portrays a certain personality, sense of humor, lifestyle that customers vibe with, posts get engagement, content is shared and the business builds connections. They end up with a direct channel to advertise discreetly and cooperatively to customers. Companies aren't just advertising to us, they're socializing with us. But is that honest?

I cringed when I saw business pages posting about 9/11. Later I saw John Oliver's video which exactly pinpointed the source of that discomfort. Companies aren't on social media to socialize, they're there to sell.

Digiorno got in trouble for mindlessly taking advantage of a trending tag (which turned out to be about domestic violence) to get exposure.

Huffington Post

Limits of the Groundswell

The beginning of chapter 11 in Groundswell talks about marketer Rob Master, who "knows how to market when it matters." Then it gets weird. The book uses his proposal to his girlfriend as an example of his marketing skills. (The proposal involved "an elaborate trail of rose petals that lead her across Manhattan to the site of their first date.")

"She always teased me that I wasn't such a romantic guy. But I'm a marketing guy. I recognize the importance of how to position things." 

Doesn't that sound insincere and perhaps manipulative? My point is that in some places, marketing just doesn't seem appropriate or sincere. I don't care if several companies compete to convince they have the best cleaning product. But when it comes to something like a proposal, the thought that marketing can manipulate the perception of the truth by something as superficial as "positioning," as Master puts us, is unsettling. So what happens when companies take on important causes while simultaneously piggybacking their brand for attention? 

Rob Master is also one of the minds behind Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty, a marketing campaign with the mission to redefine narrow definitions of female beauty. Apparently Dove saw an opportunity when a survey turned up that only 2% of women found themselves beautiful.

The caption says: "Yeah your things need to be firmed, but only a little!"

Theoretically I support this completely. But it seems like a conflict of interest for Dove to tell women that they're beautiful the way they are and sell them skin care products. Can an internal groundswell at Dove do anything to actually affect the issue.

 The concept of groundswell in many ways seems appealing. Customers define brands. Companies listen and actually evolve (everything from products to company culture) to become what customers want. 

Checkboxes = evaluation. 

But beyond customer support and product development, how much a company really transforms to mirror the customer's concerns is in question. Companies aren't people. The techniques described in Groundswell seem to allow companies to develop marketing strategies to pretend like they care. Hopefully, companies working with customers that choose to support causes will only do so ethically out of truly caring about the issues, but it seems a difficult area to police.

Exploitation, Tourism and Viral Videos

The t-shirt company FCKH8 came out with “F-Bombs for Feminism: Potty-Mouthed Princesses Use Bad Word for Good Cause,” a video of girls age 6 to13 reciting scripts full of gender inequality statistics and swear words... while wearing princess outfits. 

What's wrong with it? The information isn't new. It relies on shock value. It's gimmicky. It uses young children as props, because clearly those children were told what to say. It exploits children for attention and profit.

On the other hand, is the fact that the video is getting a lot of attention a sign that FCKH8 has done something good? It seems doubtful that their superficial and provocative tactics have converted anyone. However, the video ends by saying t-shirt company also funds activist organizations that work for gender equality, so... maybe?

Apparently this isn't the first time the company has flocked to controversy. The company used similar tactics when making a video about the events in Ferguson that (spoiler alert) also promoted a line of shirts. Negative responses on twitter have also pointed out that the company is far from consistent. Hopefully we'll hear more from companies about how they plan to prioritize the ethics of representation and marketing/ attention-getting tactics. For now it seems marketers have a long way to go.  

Comparing Apples to Onions: Traditional vs. Satirical News

Social media technologies have enabled communication to evolve in a number of interesting ways. Viral videos spawn memes and catch phrases. Memes evolve independently and spontaneously to synthesize a cultural stereotype and because they resonate with viewers and allow open participation, they gain a lot of traction. Both circulate through social media, taking on layers of cultural meaning.

These memes encapsulate stereotypes of the college experience. Left: freshman, overeager in academics and social life, transparently/ unsuccessfully tries to act like his idea of a cool college student to fit in and impress others, lacks experience and social awareness. Right: lazy college senior, has no work ethic, much more laid back and authentic than the freshman.

If it's a close friend's birthday, you might write a long public post on the wall of their Facebook page and a photo of you together, perhaps creating a collage with Pic Stitch. Even people you barely talk to can see a notification on the day of your birthday and easily send you happy birthday wish. Overall our social lives and documentation thereof are much more public.

As someone who grew up before viral videos came to popularity, it's strange to realize that younger and current generations have had their childhoods affected by social media in ways mine wasn't. It's merely a matter of timing that my day-to-day life as a young child was left mostly in obscurity.

David After Dentist

What did I look like when I had a tantrum when I was four? I don't remember, but I think there's a VHS tape of my brother and me eating peas while arguing at the kitchen table about who was "dumber." For many children today, social media has already captured these intimate moments of growing up. In some cases it's not only remembered, it's searchable - shared irrevocably to a mass audience far outside the immediate family.

You might also want to consider that in some cases sharing and documenting can be a good thing. A new serial podcast spawned by the popular radio series, This American Life, follows a 1998 murder case and mystery abounds as few people interviewed can even remember where they were or what they were doing.

The World at Large

Social media has changed more than the way individuals share and document personal moments. It has also become a large source of the material we read and consume for news about the world.

How has this method of consuming news influenced what we're consuming?

Satirical news sites have exploded in popularity, namely The Onion. By having Facebook pages, these sites can share links to their content and gain exposure with "likes" and shares. The rise in popularity seems to have followed the success of The Colbert Report, a news show much like any other except that the host, Stephen Colbert, is actually playing a fictional persona, delivering satirical versions of news events. Clearly television, news sites and social media have all mirrored a change in our cultural sense of humor.

Some articles feature remarkably absurd ideas dressed up in journalistic style and tone, somewhat mocking the claim to authority of traditional journalism. Many also respond to current events.

This article about a fictional sick healthcare worker perfectly captures the irony of a culture moment.

However, the one thing social media can be guaranteed to do is spread - even if what's being shared is totally made up (something talk show host Jimmy Kimmel proved with when he revealed several highly popular viral videos were hoaxes). Satirical news sites frequently get misinterpreted as real and contribute to misinformation, like in the example below from Empirenews.net, which a quick Google search reveals as satire. 

Personally I believe misinformation often results from a site unsuccessfully trying to imitate the way other popular sites do satire and instead end up writing about fictitious events that are merely unlikely. Satire can also be done well but come before social media users who are ignorant of the issue under discussion and simply neglect to do basic fact-checking. Other times the intent of the site is much hazier. 

In September 2014, Stuppid.com posted an article about lesbian mother-daughter couples that spread like wildfire. Other Internet users quickly dug up fishy details proving the article to be false. But why did the site try to fool people? With the lengths they went to cover their tracks it seems hard to believe that this is some kind of deep social critique meant to be seen for its true meaning by smarter people. 

Even though hoaxes don't always succeed, the dangers of how social media proliferates news are clear. But are we better off than before? You could say that in some ways news has evolved by allowing more information flow and access without relying on big institutions that act as gatekeepers. In another way it has regressed, allowing rumor to spread easily, like in the debacles caused by small town rumor sites. 

In my opinion, when a satirical news site does something well - it shows. Aside from purely humorous jabs at topical events, they provide something more. They make us laugh not only because it's absurd. A good satire must first recognize the outlook and experiences of a generation and, once it does, can get readers to engage with news and look at events through a new critical lens. 

Facebook and Your "Real" Name

Recently my Facebook newsfeed has been buzzing about the company's enforcement of its official naming policy, specifically targeting a community of drag queens. Facebook's looming threat to delete the social profiles of these individuals if they refused to comply gained a lot of buzz - and people used Facebook itself to circulate their dissatisfaction. These performers shared their experiences and eventually received an apology. (Facebook Chief Product Officer Chris Cox's apology can be read here.)

NPR

Not everyone is necessarily on the same page with why they disagree. Confusion abounds in the general population about what it means to be a drag queen, so not everyone is going to understand the intricacies of that identity or why it was so insulting.

My view: I recently graduated with an English major specializing in Ethnic Literature, so I talked a lot about "marginalized identities." I see a big company yielding it's power to become a gatekeeper of forms of identity expression. Telling individuals that the identity they can privilege is the one recognized by the government institution clearly leaves people with multiple coexisting identities at a disadvantage. But even if you don't look at this way, it seems Facebook saw how the tide of public opinion would shift based on another thing:

Social Media that tells me how to be social (and how to identify socially) is NOT good social media.

StraightFromTheA

I think in the beginning, Facebook's limitations of customization created a cleaner, easier to use look, that gave it legitimacy. MySpace lost credibility because it was too open to customization, which quickly became cluttered, unattractive, and difficult to use. The lack of insistence that your profile coincide with a verifiable identity decreased accountability and made profiles susceptible to spam.

Techsmart

Facebook's atmosphere insisted on legitimacy and use of "real" identities in a way that comforted people. It even facilitated people sharing themselves in a way that other people really wanted to see: your real name, real pictures of your face. You only friend people you actually know.

However, the performers using their stage names in their profiles were using identities that corresponded with real life. Pen names, nicknames, etc., still correspond with the spirit of connecting profiles with real people. I don't doubt that there will continue to be issues of this kind as the creation of social media profiles intersects with highly contested issues of identity.