Clickbait Will Bite Your Brand in the a$$, Says Beyoncé's Marketing Guru | Big Think

When we first launched me on C-Calm, I was fascinated by the fact that a good 80 percent of our traffic came from Facebook referrals. As kids would use the newsfeed, they’d go and like all the brands that they were interested in. Then, as they appeared in the newsfeed, it would bounce out to whatever piece of information that they were interested in learning more about.

You know, vast change dramatically over time. The way your core audience is finding new talent is very complicated, and it's very cluttered. It's, which is really the right word: cluttered. You find a tremendous amount of outlets that are trying to figure out how to be effective editing tools. You know, a perfect example: YouTube is a fantastic video delivery service; it's an absolutely terrifyingly bad editing solution.

Being able to serve up content to people who want to see like-minded things becomes very complicated. You know, most people said to me, which I thought was fascinating, is that they spend an inordinate amount of time, whether it's through referral or whether it's my friend saw a great band last night at a club in Chicago or I saw this awesome video from this really cool artist out of London. Or, you know, here are these five new acts that I think are super talented.

There becomes an editing process that you're having your social network do for you, which essentially is the basis of social media. I mean, it's allowing your network to influence what you're interested in. Then there's a whole group of people who are just looking for controversial headlines that I think are incredibly inauthentic. You're just looking to trick people into clicking on your story in order to drive information.

I think you do yourself a disservice most times if brands look to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves. You know, we did something recently, and I’ll leave names out of it, but a television show created a very sensational trailer that had nothing to do with what the piece of media was about. But because the trailer was so sensational, there was an expectation of what was supposed to occur the following day.

There were a lot of disappointed individuals when they tuned in the next day and the story was what the story was. It was interesting, and it was a learning exercise. It was meant to be something very organic, and because of that idea of packaging and trying to drive viewership in an inauthentic manner, you pissed a lot of people off. Frankly, at the end of the day, I think you damaged your own brand.