As a physician, I mostly read medical journals. I also occasionally read economics and psychology literature, usually because they are frequently cited in popular books for laypersons.
But I don’t normally read business or communications literature.
That is until I saw this paper about frozen meat company Steak-umm’s surprisingly awesome Twitter account:
I haven't actually read this, but I can tell from the title it's better than most of the COVID-19 preprints I've seen in medical journals. https://t.co/ScgobNBfGn
— Ben White, MD (@benwhitemd) September 18, 2020
The title of the paper is too good to ignore. Anytime you can employ the phrase “frozen meat” in a way that only might be ironic is a communications victory from my perspective.
To give you an example of what the content Steak-umm generated to become worthy of intense positive scrutiny:
friendly reminder in times of uncertainty and misinformation: anecdotes are not data. (good) data is carefully measured and collected information based on a range of subject-dependent factors, including, but not limited to, controlled variables, meta-analysis, and randomization
— Steak-umm (@steak_umm) April 7, 2020
and then…
we're a frozen meat brand posting ads inevitably made to misdirect people and generate sales, so this is peak irony, but hey we live in a society so please make informed decisions to the best of your ability and don't let anecdotes dictate your worldview ok
steak-umm bless
— Steak-umm (@steak_umm) April 7, 2020
To examine another possible factor contributing to the success of Steakumm’s response to the pandemic, we analyze the case through the lens of expectancy violations theory (Burgoon & Jones, 1976), which predicts how individuals will respond when others communicate in unexpected ways. Although expectancy violations can be positive or negative depending on the situation, research has shown that positive expectancy violations resulting in positive communication appraisals and outcomes can happen when publics are pleasantly surprised by an entity’s communication (e.g., Yim, 2019).
Sometimes beautiful, sometimes terrible–but it’s always an interesting world we live in.