Going viral sounds like a marketer’s dream (and many of their agency briefs), until the internet decides to make your brand famous for something you never intended to be known for.
Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, X and other social platforms have made it increasingly difficult for brands to control the conversation. A product, campaign, customer experience or offhand comment can suddenly take off, racking up millions of views and interactions, with audiences creating the narrative before the marketing team has even had time to react.
And within a few seconds, it can become “uncontrollable” and a daunting situation for marketing teams.
According to SAS CTO Bryan Harris, brands need to accept that they can’t control every conversation about them — but they can control what happens next.
Speaking to B&T during a recent visit to Sydney, Harris said marketers need to look beyond their own campaigns and pay closer attention to the “unfiltered” conversations happening about their brands online.
“Sponsored content is you in the room. Unsponsored dialogue about you is when you’re not in the room,” Harris said. “And you need to get that understanding and elevate that into your MarTech stack and strategy.”
Harris said that means treating social platforms not simply as places to distribute marketing, but as sources of insight into what customers actually think about a brand.
He pointed to Reddit, TikTok, X and LinkedIn as examples of spaces where brands can uncover conversations, sentiment and perceptions that may never surface through traditional campaign reporting.
“The big opportunity is for marketers to analyse those conversations at scale — identifying what audiences value, where misinformation or misconceptions exist, and where the public perception of a brand differs from the story it is telling through its own marketing.”
“Every business needs to be thinking about it because you’ve got to be aware of what’s being said about your business when you’re not in the room.”
When does going viral become a problem?
That becomes particularly important when a brand suddenly goes viral for a reason that was never part of its marketing strategy.
“When something goes viral, it may go viral for good reasons or bad reasons, but the message isn’t exactly what we want as a brand,” he said.
“It’s someone else saying something about your brand,” Harris said.
Rather than attempting to simply drown out the unexpected narrative, Harris argued that marketers should first understand why it has gained traction — and then determine whether the conversation exposes a genuine gap between the brand promise and the customer experience.
“Maybe that’s because they had an experience that was not the best with you,” he said.
That means the solution to a viral brand problem may not sit entirely within the marketing department.
“If the words are backed up by the actions, then they’re just words,” Harris said.
“Everyone that touches your brand in any way gets this premium, great experience they love, it’s hard for them to talk negatively about it.”
For Harris, marketing therefore has to be connected to the wider business, with every customer touchpoint reinforcing — rather than undermining — what the brand is promising.
“The experience people have with your brand at every touchpoint is what reinforces the messaging of the marketing,” he said.
Listen to the internet, don’t fight it
Harris said brands should start by gathering and categorising the sentiment surrounding them, before comparing those findings with their existing campaigns.
Where the two align, marketers can “double down” on what customers already associate positively with the brand.
Where there is a disconnect, however, brands need to identify which audiences are driving that perception and which channels can be used to address it.
“First step starts with, okay, what audiences, what channels do I want to hit them on?” Harris said.
That could mean Instagram, LinkedIn, X, email, paid media or a combination of channels, depending on the audience and the problem.
But he said the biggest opportunity may lie in changing perceptions rather than simply reinforcing what customers already know.
“Doubling down on what people already know or identify with you is fine, but it probably won’t yield the biggest results,” Harris said.
“What will is overcoming the perceptions of maybe who the brand is today versus who they were.”
How AI can help brands manage the conversation
This is where Harris sees AI increasingly playing a role in the MarTech stack.
Rather than using AI simply to generate more content, he said marketers should be using it to “make sense of the huge volume of conversations taking place across paid media, search and social platforms”.
The next stage, he argued, is using AI to identify brand sentiment and “unaided awareness” — essentially, what people think about a company when the brand itself is not there to influence the conversation.
“AI can define potential recommendations of strategies to overcome these pain points,” Harris said.
This could give marketing teams a clearer picture of what they need to address, rather than simply producing more content in response to a viral moment.
However, while AI can help marketers make sense of conversations at scale, Harris said it should not replace human judgement.
“Just because you can do that and you might have a signal that says, ‘Hey, we can drive revenue here’, you must ask yourself, ‘Does that align to who we are, and does it align to who we want to be?’”
For Harris, that means brands still need to understand why people are talking about them, address the experiences behind those conversations where necessary, and ensure their actions match the promises made through marketing.
“The execution of the business builds trust and reinforces the messaging of the promise that marketing puts out there.”
