Last Tuesday Twitter put the words state-affiliated media under NPR's name, the same tag it hangs on outlets that are run by the Chinese and Russian governments. By the end of the week it had been softened to government-funded media. NPR gets roughly one percent of its budget from federal sources. Nothing about NPR changed in those four days. The label changed.
I have spent this week on calls with people asking me what they should do about it, which is a strange question to get about somebody else's account.
It is not a strange question, though. What every brand with a presence on that platform actually watched was an owner reassigning an organization's identity overnight, without appeal, and then quietly adjusting it again once the noise got loud enough.
You do not own your presence there. You rent it.
Every follower you have on a platform is a follower the platform is holding on your behalf, under terms it can rewrite on a Tuesday morning.
We already knew this in a soft, ignorable way. Organic reach got throttled and we called it an algorithm update. Instagram decided everything was video and half the brands I know rebuilt their content calendars in a month. This is the same lesson with the volume turned up, because now the checkmark is a subscription product and the descriptor under your name is an editorial decision made by someone who does not work for you.
Three things I have told clients this week.
One, own a channel outright. Email, SMS, a physical location, a printed thing that arrives in a mailbox. Oatly puts its entire argument on the side of the carton, where no one can relabel it. Your list is the only audience that stays yours when a platform changes its mind.
Two, decide now what would make you leave. Write it down while you are calm, because you will not be calm when it happens, and a brand that exits a platform in a panic looks like it has something to hide. A brand that exits with a policy looks like it has a spine.
Three, stop letting the platform define your category. If your identity lives entirely in a bio field, someone else is writing your bio field. Patagonia would still be legible with every social account deleted tomorrow, because the position lives in the products, the repairs, the lawsuits, the store staff.
If your identity lives entirely in a bio field, someone else is writing your bio field.
I walked down to Ovation on Saturday and stood behind two people arguing about the whole thing in line. Outside, the sandwich board still said what it says, in the same handwriting, and nobody in San Francisco could touch a word of it. That is a channel. Small, slow, and completely theirs.