Wu-Tang and Steak-umm: A tale of two brands

While every last brand and their mother has jumped on the repetitive   k  e  e  p      y  o  u  r     d  i  s  t  a  n  c  e  bandwagon, some are doing so in a relevant way, and Wu Tang is one of the few "brands" to get it right.

On March 15th they posted and pinned to their Twitter account a simple mnemonic to help you remember how to mitigate.

Protect Ya Neck against the Coronavirus. We are making a few thousand prints and distributing them across New York City. Feel FREE to do the same in your City.
Share and RT this to the world. #wutang pic.twitter.com/coS5M3WdiW

— Wu Tang Clan (@WuTangClan) March 15, 2020

This has been shared  more than fifty-eight thousand times, and liked more than a hundred thousand times. 

Compare this to frozen sliced meat brand Steak-umm, who has thrown out its goofy memes and tiktok videos. This was the usual kind of messaging from Steak-umm on March 4th.

the first recorded steak-umm bless

(1250 AD) pic.twitter.com/teFcGqCJbz

— Steak-umm (@steak_umm) March 4, 2020

Now they've gone full-on ponderous, and meandering, telling us not to believe anecdotal evidence or conspiracies.

just gonna come out and say it: vulnerable people are always the most susceptible to propaganda, misinformation, and conspiracy, especially in times of cultural anxiety, and if there is a way to help them out of these traps, targeted self-righteous vilification isn’t it

— Steak-umm (@steak_umm) April 10, 2020

Everyone is going through some really hard times right now and while the keyboard warrior wants to tell everyone that some victims are more victims than others, there is no such thing as mental health "privilege." This is damaging to all of us in one way or another, and to believe or say otherwise is insulting.

 Everyone feels lost right now, and all of us wish we could do something to make it better. Time will tell of Steak-umm's epistle to humanity in thread form will do any good for the world, let alone its brand. It certainly won't harm either. And unless you're a journalist scrolling through years of Tweets to play the gotcha game, Twitter is ephemeral by nature.

Of these two brands, I think Wu-Tang is more effective for several reasons. One, their message came in one, pinned tweet. Two, they took their message offline into the real world, where it actually matters.

I'm sure whoever runs Steak-umm's social media account decided to use the platform other than their personal account to reach as many people as possible, but a long thread about models, anecdotal evidence and conspiracies isn't succinct enough to be remembered and meanders from mental health to support the working class, to being nice to each other and listening to credible experts and only at the very end of the twelve tweet thread does it get to any semblance of a tangible call to action. In this case, a link to Feeding America.

play your part however you can. we're in a dystopian time when months feel like years. the emotional weight of online media can be heavy. take a break. talk to friends. listen to credible experts. hang in there. we're in this together

steak-umm blesshttps://t.co/0qVy1MVVgl pic.twitter.com/RiV8jGnGoY

— Steak-umm (@steak_umm) April 3, 2020

Again, very admirable and probably should have gone first. It could have also gone on their website along with their COVID-19 here's what we're doing to keep you safe" messaging, especially because they have a list of supported charities on their site..

Again, while a message from some anonymous person behind a social media account is nice, as an actual piece of advertising, it isn't, "Just what we need right now." to use click bait parlance. It's just more noise in a sea of noise, from a sea of lost people who are whole holed up and wanting to make a difference somehow.