Who's Better at Social Media?

     Over the past few years, I have kept hearing that ISIS uses social media to attract, recruit, and radicalize young Moslems in the US and Europe. It is a notion that is reported in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNN, the BBC, and all those British papers that include the words Globe, Mail, or Guardian in them. These bad guys can reach out and influence the thoughts and allegiances of young people crazy things like websites.

• ISIS exploits social media to make inroad in U.S. - CNN
• Terror on Twitter - Popular Science
• ISIS recruits teens on social media - teenVOGUE

     Oh my... what are we to do? How can we ever combat such a dastardly and dastardly evil us of the all these wondrous sites and portals we created?
     Wait. What was that? Hmmm, yes, we created all this infrastructure. Al Gore created the internet based on an idea from, I believe it was, Millard Filmore. Americans created Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Amazon.com, Pinterest, Tumblr, and the rest those other icons that populate websites that almost no one know what they are and make us wonder who the heck uses them. We created social media. We spend way too time on our devices tending to things, trying to be engaging, clever, comical, insightful, and sometimes inciteful. It is a world of selfies and foolish observations. It is a world I blog in and about.
     The point is that we invented most of it. We are masters of it. And, we have just sat by and let ISIS beat us at this?  Huh?
     Shame on us. Really. Shame on us for letting them beat us at the game we both created and are masters of? Oh, the shame of it. Oh, the humiliation. We are the masters of internet marketing and we are letting these novices at it beat us at our own game. Where is our counter marketing campaign? Is it unbelievably possible that we simply never thought of it.
 

   I just googled "social media marketing." The first article that came up was about Chick-Fil-A:
How Chick-Fil-A's Social Media Marketing Translated Into Twitter, Facebook and Instagram Success. This article on the International Business Times website discusses

Forging past 2012 boycotts from an anti-gay controversy, Chick-fil-A honed its social media presence with an engaging voice, original visual content and timely posts, but experts say the Atlanta-based company's grasp of its consumer base is the kernel of its social network mastery. Six days a week, the food chain goes full-throttle on social media, but then, like its restaurants, rests upon the seventh day, going offline Sundays.

     Chick-fil-A does it with simple, but frequent Facebook posts, Instagrams, and tweets like "A couple that eats waffle fries together, stays together" combined with a couple emojis. There is nothing special about their campaign except the

Source: Engagement Labs eValueTM 2015 rankings
of America’s 10 favorite brands for 2015

do it often and effectively.  Their results are impressive. Chick-fil-A was ranked as the "the overall favorite brand of 2015 on social media" beating out the likes of Coca-Cola, Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target, and Netflix.

     If this can be done for Chicken Sandwiches, why can't a similar campaign, e.g. AntIsis, be run with equal effectiveness.  Of course, there is no way we can let governments be in charge of this.  Heck, our government can't even make the No Call List work.  The US and the European Union would have to fund it, but they just can't run it.  I would hire, Moxie, the social marketing agency Chick-fil-A uses let them at it.  I will give them a couple tweet options gratis while at the same time re-enforcing my complete lack of marketing and advertising skills:

• Channelling Chick-fil-A:  A couple where neither is a suicide bomber, stays together and lives happier.
• Dated but still effective:  Take a chill pill.
• Lennon Classic:  Give Peace a Chance.
• Subaru Classic:  Coexist
• I really should stop here:  Have a Chick-fil-Aful and stop feeling awful.

     Clearly, this is not the job for me.  But you get the idea.  I think if done properly we could use one of our strengths to limit the recruiting and radicalization of young people.