In Brief: Brands Honor Queen Elizabeth II; LinkedIn Users Get Personal

How Brands Responded to the Death of Queen Elizabeth II

While brands often try to shoehorn themselves into a news cycle, Queen Elizabeth II’s death on Sept. 8 was a cultural moment best observed respectfully and perhaps without comment, Digiday reports.

Marketers have long been told to react to current events in real time. Doing so, the thinking went, would help brands connect with their customers and be in the moment. However, posting a message about the Queen’s death as a marketing opportunity “tells you all you need to know about how tasteless this can appear,” said Adam Chugg, an executive at U.K.-based media agency the7stars. 

Some agencies advised clients to pause marketing comms for 24-48 hours and simply observe. Said Nev Ridley, managing director at ilk Agency in Manchester, “as with so many emotionally charged situations, the cost of getting things wrong will always be higher than the cost of remaining silent.”

While many brand-related tributes were somber and respectful, others failed to strike the right tone. As The Drum noted, Playmobil, the children’s toy brand, posted an ill-advised image of the Queen as a plastic figure. Twitter users also mocked global exercise brand Crossfit for posting a workout dedicated to Queen Elizabeth featuring a “1 min rest in silence.”

Hybrid Work Hits Sweet Spot, Study Shows

While not without pitfalls, hybrid-work schedules offer greater employee satisfaction, better work-life balance and less isolation than mostly-remote or mostly-in-office alternatives, new research suggests. 

Leading a team of researchers, Prithwiraj Choudhury, an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, analyzed more than 30,000 emails sent among HR colleagues in different work arrangements during the COVID pandemic in 2020. The employees were randomly assigned days to work in the office or at home. 

Based on the emails, supervisors then rated the workers’ productivity — including their knowledge, creativity and their quality of work. The hybrid group outranked its peers. 

Hybrid schedules in which employees split their workweeks between home and the office make employees happier and more productive and creative, the research suggests. In turn, employees produce higher-quality work.

Still, hybrid work is associated with a 58% increase in the number of people receiving work emails, raising concerns that hybrid work might cause email silos that stymie broader collaboration and innovation. 

Research Uncovers Why People Share Content Online

People share content online that they find meaningful to themselves or to people they know, a new study by University of Pennsylvania researchers has found. Published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, research by authors Danielle Cosme, Ph.D. and Emily Falk, Ph.D., analyzed the behavior of more than 3,000 people to explore the psychology behind sharing information online. 

With her team, Cosme, who directs research on communications neuroscience at the Annenberg School for Communication, found that people pay more attention to information they perceive as related to themselves. What the researchers call “value-based virality” is information that goes viral online because people find it inherently valuable, either to themselves or to society. 

We’re social beings who love to connect with one another and sharing information activates reward centers in our brains, the authors wrote. When we communicate with other people, we consider what they’re thinking and what they want to hear, assessing a factor that the researchers call “social relevance.”

Should LinkedIn Be Personal, or Strictly Business?

LinkedIn users are debating whether personal posts belong on the professional social network, The Wall Street Journal reports. During the pandemic, LinkedIn has changed from a business-networking platform into one where people share emotional updates about parenting choices, burnout from “hustle culture” and the third rail of social media topics, politics. 

Career advice, work anniversaries and promotions still make up much of the conversation on LinkedIn. But users now also see tragic stories of illness and loss. Some applaud the candor, while others find it discomforting. People also sense that posts about personal subjects are calculated for professional gain. Some LinkedIn users say they prefer to keep personal information on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

Braden Wallake, a CEO who posted a photo of himself crying about laying off two of his workers, became a meme and drew more than 10,000 comments, many calling him tone-deaf or even a virtue-signaling narcissist. LinkedIn recently added ways for users to filter topics, including a no-politics setting.