What is your brand’s voice?

It’s a question more and more marketers are exploring as they ramp up social media efforts to engage with fans.

Jodi Lennon, editorial director of brand creative at Comedy Central, provided insight on how the network incorporates the brand voice of “funny and smart”—and a whole lot more—into its social media strategy during the session “Fan Connections” at Station Summit 2016.

Lennon began her fairly recent role at Comedy Central by asking employees to describe the brand voice at Comedy Central, and got responses like: “We’re not snarky.” “We’re not judgemental.” “We’re risk takers.” Then people began to personify it:

“We’re like the cool kid in the back of the classroom who’s that guy who has the funniest things to say.”

Lennon collected the feedback, created a document, and handed it to her team of writers who use that insight to create not just content, but content with a purpose that results in real connections with fans.

“You can’t just put stuff out because it’s like, Cat Day,” she said. “It has to make sense coming from your voice, and it has to be true to your voice.”

For instance, Comedy Central got really excited to discover National Pretzel Day fell on April 26, the same day as the unofficial holiday to celebrate the Alien movie franchise, and came up with this:

The post was made specifically for social with the goal to shape the tweet to match Comedy Central’s brand voice.

“Let the brand voice inform and inspire the creative,” Lennon said.

It’s also great when content resonates with fans in an authentic way.

For instance, when Adele’s song “Hello” came out, Comedy Central immediately thought of the Kroll Show catchphrase “Oh, Hello.”

“Our instinct was to mash up that content,” Lennon said. The network put it out on Vine and Twitter, and hosts Nick Kroll and John Mulaney tweeted it out to millions of their own followers.

“They found that content, they liked it, they shared it, and it drove traffic to us in a really authentic way,” Lennon said.

Comedy Central also looks through the lens of its brand voice to get ahead of trends. With an ample “stoner” audience the network knew they wanted to do something around the marijuana smoking holiday 420, and knew that social media was also going to be doing something.

They decided to post something on the eve of the event.

“We were scooping what we knew would be a really popular hashtag,” Lennon said. It did so well on Twitter and Instagram that Comedy Central decided to post it on Facebook as well.

“We watched and responded to performance in real time,” Lennon said.

Lennon said she uses a lot of programs and apps to create content, like social media management tools, GIF creation tools, and group text apps.

But there’s also an essential element to Comedy Central’s brand voice that gives Lennon the freedom to experiment, learn, and adjust strategy.
“I have permission to take risks,” Lennon said. “That’s absolutely enormous, because you never know what’s going to hit.”

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