"Uplifting stories only": The impact of 'peak internet' on technical PR
27 July 2023
Sandvik unbreakable guitar
Despite over 30m people signing up for Threads in its first couple of days, with nearly 100M sign-ups at the time of writing, humanity appears to have hit peak internet. According to the research company GWI, we spent 13 percent less time online in 2022 than in 2021, explains Richard Stone, Managing Director of Stone Junction.
Clearly, we peaked in 2020 and 2021 because lockdown caused so many people to take refuge in their phones and laptops. This meant 2022 was always likely to show a dip.
I don’t think anyone expected that downturn to be quite so steep though, which points to more causes than Covid alone. The first of these is the complementary ideas of news avoidance and news fatigue, whereby readers side-step current affairs content because it’s very often bad news.
A survey by Reuters Institute and The University of Oxford, which questioned 303 professionals holding senior editorial, product or commercial roles in publishing companies, has established how those businesses intend to counter this trend.
The most popular plan was to increase the use of news avoidance explainer content, which 94 percent of respondents said they were doing or intended to do.
Next was question and answer material, with 87 percent, followed by inspirational stories at 66 percent. Producing more positive news was the least popular response, with just 48 percent choosing that option.
Influencer schminfluencer
Like news avoidance, influencer fatigue is reducing the amount time that people choose to spend online. People are increasingly turned off by a lack of authenticity, increased repetition and cliché, an increased incidence of fake influencers and the appropriation of social causes for marketing gain.
Responses to this include the idea of curated imperfection, whereby brand and influencers post content that isn’t quite as prepped as it would have been in the past. Ironically, there’s something deeply inauthentic about trying so hard to be more authentic.
What does this mean for technical marketing?
Does this really impact our role as marketers and publicists in technical PR? Are people less likely to read your content on a B2B magazine site because they are experiencing news fatigue? Does it really matter to us that fewer people want to pay attention to Kim Kardashian and PewDiePie, when we only care about whether they want to read about motors, robots, software, and AI?
I think it does. While it’s not the existential crisis it might be for consumer PR people, it will have an impact.
The impact on technical PR
The first problem is that our behaviour as consumers is mirrored in our behaviour at work. People who don’t read at home, don’t read at work and people who don’t use social media at home rarely use it for work.
However, if the PR content you are putting out is well purposed for search, and shows up for relevant key terms, then it will be found when the audience looks for it.
But this problem is much harder to solve if you sell a product that isn’t searched for, either because it’s entirely new or very niche, or if the purpose of your campaign is to change minds first and sell things later.
For instance, the smash-proof guitar project that Stone Junction ran for Sandvik Coromant back in 2018 was intended to make young people think about a career in the machinery sector, which often suffers in comparison to more obviously glamourous technology careers.
Irish YouTuber Jacksepticeye
Young people don’t Google ‘change my opinion about a career in machinery’ because, like everyone else, they search for the things they want, not the alternatives to the things they want.
If you want an SKF 6203 deep-groove ball bearing, you are more likely to search for that than you are to ask ChatGPT to convince you of the benefits of non-market leading 6203 bearings.
So, if you are another bearing manufacturer, how do you change people’s opinion on their preferred brand if they aren’t asking Google to change their minds? The answer lies, as it always has, in media content, including the print media.
The only way to change someone’s mind is to reach them when they are in an open-minded position – when they are reading the media or browsing social sites.
The way to ensure that your content is seen, despite the knock-on impact of news fatigue is to promote that content on multiple platforms, using joint-up-content techniques, and to engage with publishers themselves in all their communities.
This could mean speaking at their events and referencing your content. It could mean engaging with their posts on social media when they mention you, and by posting about them as well. It could even mean advertising your content using PPC or social advertising, which by itself is the subject of an entire article.
The impact on technical social media
The second problem is that, particularly in large corporations, the social media output of technical and engineering businesses has become as bland and polished as the photoshopped output of Kardashian, Osmann and Tuffen et al.
The key difference here is that an overly polished social media output has always been unpopular in engineering and technical environments. The content that performs well in these contexts is precisely the reverse – photos and videos of actual engineers actually doing something.
And you would be surprised how well a video of something that you consider mundane, because it’s a task completed in your plant, factory or workplace every day, will perform as a video. This rough and ready video of an industrial robot picking things up and putting them down again, which I posted 12 years ago, but didn’t personally film, has 41K views.
And it’s not alone. The same account has lots of similar videos with 10K plus views. Crucially, none of them have been the subject of a concerted marketing campaign.
So, despite hitting peak internet, and probably only aided by Thread’s 100M+ users, there is still a clear path to your audience using technical PR and social media. But ignoring news and influencer fatigue isn’t the best way to tread that road.
Richard Stone is the Managing Director of Stone Junction, one of the UK’s leading technical PR agencies, with offices in Germany and Romania. The company boasts a team of 35, with 12 languages in house and more than 46 award wins since 2015. It specialises in impactful scientific, technical and technology communications, spanning media, content, search, design and visual. He can be contacted on richards@stonejunction.co.uk or by calling +44 (0) 1785 225416.
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