There's a distinct before and after in corporate social media, and the dividing line is Wendy's discovering that being mean on Twitter was good for business.
Before Wendy's: corporate Twitter was cautious, sanitized, run through legal, and ignored by everyone. After Wendy's: every brand decided they needed to be 'funny' and 'relatable' and have 'personality.' The results have been... mixed, to put it charitably.
Before Wendy's: corporate Twitter was cautious, sanitized, run through legal, and ignored by everyone.
Emily Weiss built Glossier by reading 1,000 comments on her blog before designing a single product. The audience wasn't the market. The audience was the R&D department.
The problem is that Wendy's voice emerged organically from a specific person's sensibility (their social media manager was genuinely funny) and then got elevated because it worked. But you can't reverse-engineer organic voice. When a bank tries to roast someone on Twitter, it doesn't feel like Wendy's. It feels like a corporation wearing a backwards cap trying to connect with the youths.
What actually transfers from the Wendy's lesson isn't 'be snarky.' It's 'let a human be human.' Give one person creative freedom, accept that some tweets will be weird, and trust that personality is more engaging than polish. Most brands took the wrong lesson and it shows.
I'm watching a client right now try to replicate this and it's excruciating. Their legal team approves every tweet. By the time something is approved, the moment is gone. You cannot committee your way to personality. You either trust a human or you post corporate karaoke.
I'm writing this with Truffles on my lap and Barnaby yelling at a bird outside the window.