What Urban Legends Can Teach Us About Social Media Marketing

The study of urban leg­ends is a branch of folk­lorol­ogy and for social mar­keters it rep­re­sents a vast and largely untapped bank of knowl­edge into the processes of infor­ma­tion trans­mis­sion. Here’s a list of just a few of the extremely use­ful con­cepts urban leg­end sci­ence brings to the table.

Com­mu­nal Recre­ation
His­tor­i­cally urban leg­ends were passed on from per­son to per­son in what amounted to a giant game of tele­phone with each per­son chang­ing the story a lit­tle bit as they passed it on. Each per­son in this recre­ative chain attempts to fit the story into their exist­ing men­tal frame­works and in doing so they apply a bit of them­selves, of their own val­ues and per­spec­tives, alter­ing the story and retelling their ver­sion. Often the first per­son in a new soci­ety to effect this change to an urban leg­end makes the leg­end more intu­itive for the rest of the group because he or she has imposed their shared val­ues on to it already.

In online social media the same effect occurs. The lol­cat meme was trans­formed by each per­son who par­tic­i­pated in it and is prob­a­bly the most obvi­ous recent exam­ple of com­mu­nal recre­ation. Blog­gers usu­ally put their own spin on a story they dis­cuss in a post. Rumors and gos­sip spread almost entirely unchecked (trans­mis­sion fric­tion is nearly zero in social media) and are wildely recre­ated into count­less vari­a­tions.  All the best social sites are plat­forms that make the cen­tral act of the site com­mu­nal recre­ation, Digg, deli­cious, Newsvine, Myspace, Face­book, Youtube etc.

The Goliath Effect
A phe­nom­ena occurs in urban leg­ends where large com­pa­nies, rich indi­vid­u­als or gov­ern­ment agen­cies are metaphor­i­cally turned into a Goliath-type fig­ure and the leg­end cen­ters on the suf­fer­ing or vic­tory of an “aver­age per­son” and their inter­ac­tion with the megolithic entity. Obvi­ously the repeated occur­rence of large and well known orga­ni­za­tions in urban leg­ends is tes­ta­ment par­tially to the high aware­ness of those orga­ni­za­tions in the mind of the aver­age per­son in a soci­ety, but the grass­roots nature of folk­lore means that the nar­ra­tor almost always sides with the under­dog, the lit­tle guy, the aver­age Joe.

The par­al­lels of the Goliath Effect for social media mar­ket­ing are pretty clear. Digg is a great exam­ple, large brands and pub­lic fig­ures dom­i­nate the site and with a few notable excep­tions (Apple) the Goliath is por­trayed as the bad guy. There are count­less social media mar­ket­ing night­mare case stud­ies in which the web turns against what they per­ceive as a large and loom­ing cor­po­rate force. On a purely quan­ta­tive level, the larger a brand is, the more dis­pro­por­tion­ate the amount of organic (that is not influ­enced by mar­keters) social media men­tions of the brand.

The Social Con­flict The­ory
A school of urban leg­end thought exists in which the moti­va­tions of var­i­ous social groups involved in the cre­ation, trans­mis­sion and preser­va­tion of leg­ends. The argu­ment is that social groups all gen­er­ally in con­flict with other social groups, for con­trol of mem­bers, resources, and pub­lic image. Urban leg­ends (espe­cially those con­tain­ing warn­ings or based on social rules) are cre­ated by these groups in the hopes that they will ben­e­fit the group’s aims or dimin­ish the suc­cess of com­petet­ing groups. Pro­po­nents of the social con­flict the­ory search for the mean­ing of urban leg­ends in the moti­va­tions of these groups.

Online, social group mem­ber­ship tends to require less invest­ment and com­mit­ment from users mean­ing peo­ple often feel the pull of moti­va­tions from many more groups than they would offline. The scale of these groups varies from Face­book and Google groups to Ron Paul sup­port­ers and Apple fan­boys. Every group has at least one pur­pose for exist­ing, one moti­va­tion. Depend­ing on their level of engage­ment with the group, mem­bers may be pur­suaded to spread social mar­ket­ing mes­sages if they align with their group’s motivations.

Con­text
In the study of urban leg­ends spe­cial atten­tion is paid to the con­text or “set and set­ting” of the trans­mis­sion of a leg­end. Con­tex­tual fac­tors affect­ing trans­mis­sion range from the teller and listener’s age and gen­der, social sta­tus, edu­ca­tion lev­els to the phys­i­cal loca­tion of the com­mu­ni­ca­tion. The actual act of telling the leg­end is also stud­ied, details are notably impor­tant (if its vague, its just another story). Cer­tain peo­ple are known by their social groups to com­monly be in pos­ses­sion of “inside” infor­ma­tion and leg­ends they tell are much more likely to be received, retained and re-transmitted by listeners. 

Web­sites pro­vide a spe­cific type of con­text, with a spe­cial­ized set of cri­te­ria. The site or source’s rep­u­ta­tion is of utmost impor­tance to accep­tance of the mes­sage in the reader. But the web is all about find­ing new things and users will accept memes from sites they’ve never been on if they appear to be legit­i­mate and aligned with the view­ers own rel­e­vant moti­va­tions and expe­ri­ences. Authen­tic­ity becomes an issue in a mod­ern online con­text, big cor­po­ra­tions and mar­ket­ing agen­cies aren’t trusted on social sites.

Warn­ings
The most well known trait of urban leg­ends is that they very often con­tain parental style warn­ings. Don’t go with your boyfriend to lover’s lane or an escaped pscyho will get you. Don’t eat at fast food places or you’ll eat a rat. These warn­ings turn urban leg­ends into the cod­i­fi­ca­tion of a nor­mally unspo­ken behav­ioral code imposed by the social group respon­si­ble for the leg­end, its social con­flict the­ory again. Much like gos­sip, leg­ends are often used to impose these rules on to lis­ten­ers. Reli­gious leg­ends (and the reli­gion meme in gen­eral per­haps) are an incred­i­bly effec­tive exam­ple of this phenomena.

Bogus warn­ing emails are a memetic study group all to them­selves they’re so numer­ous. Warn­ings are likely one of the first and most pop­u­lar forms of on social media mes­sages and they are just as strong today. Social news sites are filled with sto­ries about the “worst” things, or bad cus­tomer ser­vice expe­ri­ences or kryp­tonite lockpicking.