10
votes
Wendy's Twitter and gatekeeping a company mascot
@wendys:
@THEONLYKOH @Michaelramos227 @EvanFilarca @GailSimone You wanna do this? We got time. Saga is on hiatus. It's not really bandwagon when you've been reading for decades.
I really, really dislike this whole "brand twitter account" trend. There's something viscerally disturbing about an account that exists solely to market an orange flavored drink pretending to have depression.
Thank you for sharing that. I'm not sure how to even react to this thread.. viscerally disturbing is a start, but it's also nervous chuckle inducing and cringeworthy.
While I agree with you in principle, It's hard to agree in practice when the Wikipedia account is posting puppy gifs.
I dunno. I find wikipedia's twitter much less cringe inducing, having looked at it briefly. That's probably also because I think that they don't have as directly of a link between marketing and success metrics, so it's not as skeevy.
Recently there was a thing on Twitter where Gail Simone asked fast food franchises what their favorite Comic book universe is, because Twitter, and Wendy's replied Marvel, which got some push back because "obviously the digital avatar of the fast food conglomerate only likes the universe for the movies." This kind of got tied up in my head along with the idea of "fake geeks" and "fake geek girls" in particular, since the situation is a female presenting mascot operating in a traditionally male domain that has to drop bonafides in order to be taken seriously. The irony is that even with a corporate character blog that exists only to form a parasocial relationship so you stuff your face with their food, the kneejerk reaction is still "oh, you just like it cause it's popular." #NotAllEverybody, but is it that "simulacrum of a human being" and "woman" are effectively the same thing to some people and them trying to engage you in your interests is deserving of a defensive response, or am I taking a bad read? I was wondering if you all had any thoughts on it as well.
I think it's more of a capitalism check than it is a geek check or a woman check or a gatekeeping check. People are always wary that accounts like this exist solely for PR reasons and to get people to keep buying the brand - the goal is to sell. People often forget that there's an employed person on the other side of this avatar and that even though they are doing a job, they want to talk about their interests and hobbies as well. It's not always a ploy to sell more borger.
Sure, sure. But that person who just wants to talk about their interest isn't really the person the gatekeep is addressed to. And hiring people with social media sass or pop culture cred is -imo- an intentional, capitalist move of the corp to "sell more borger". They're not being paid to talk about marvel comics, they're being paid to talk about that as wendy's.
Now, that's not an excuse to be an ass to anyone employed by a megacorp, quite the opposite. But the twitter accounts exist solely for the purpose of making money.
Yes, I can confirm this is an actual thing that both of the megacorps I've worked at (fortune 400 last job, currently fortune 5) do--create more relaxed communications guidelines within very strictly defined employee populations and then encourage them to "keep it authentic" on issues unrelated to the brand's core. I'm not in the Social Media/Brand Relations offices, so I don't know the full details, but there is definitely a push to "humanize" certain interactions in an effort to lend "authenticity" to the traditional legal/compliance approved brand core communications.
I'm not sure we can say definitively that it's just one or the other. Especially due to the nature of Twitter throwing all types into all conversations. I would think though that Rude Twitter wouldn't have a history of going into a corporate account's mentions and saying that "Your opinion is compromised, invalid and/or basic!" At least nowhere near the history of Rude Dude Twitter doing that for Women.
You're not wrong, I think, though my read would be a bit different. The original reason is "Fake geek maybe bandwagons for attention" => "Let's check whether that is actually legit interest" => "How many turbolasers does an Imperial-II-Star Destroyer have?"
Whereas, with wendy's, it's more a case of "they're just bandwagoning on it for more customer engagement" => "Let's check" => "Gib nerd-cred pls"; the difference is in the first part. With wendy's it's a legit concern - because commerce is a company's MO. It's not coming from a bad place necessarily, just from (healthy or not) scepticism.
Frisking geek girls for cred is... different. But the threat is very much only in their head. Though I get it, if one gets little action, getting positive attention from an interest who shares interests can easily lead to one becoming unhealthily infatuated; and it's good to stay on your toes. So (assuming the problem exists) the waryness is rational. The actions taken in response are very often... less so. You can stay on your toes while keeping those thoughts in your head, and then check for nerd cred in a nerd conversation.
The fact that these behaviors end up looking so eerily similar is, well it doesn't say much good about how the gatekeepers view women. So maybe it's good they're pretentious gate keepers.
Someone who replied to this topic linked this video: https://youtu.be/Z6bLq4466LM
Seems relevant to the topic, don't necessarily know why the comment got all ate up.
That was actually a really good and highly relevant video, so thanks for reviving it.
p.s. Any comments that are removed by Deimos leave a "removed by admin" message behind afterwards (without exception AFAIK), and since there isn't one of those anywhere in the comments section, the only explanation for the comment's absence is that the person who posted it deleted it themselves afterwards for whatever reason.