It just got a lot easier to find an effective message ambassador for any niche audience or check in on what your opponents are saying.
Let me introduce you to TikTok One – a tool for campaigners like you to search for and directly contact content creators (otherwise known as people with a following/influencers).
Why should I care?
I am well accustomed to standing in front of union secretaries explaining why they have to be on yet another digital platform they have never heard of (and then hearing them explain it back to me two years later like it’s something they just discovered), so let me give you a script.
Your union-branded content is reaching an audience – maybe that includes some of your members and probably a lot of other general supporters (think members of other unions and left-wing politics enthusiasts) and maybe even your opponents. But it’s probably not yet reaching all the people you want to reach – especially the ever-elusive potential members. Those people are out living their best lives, watching videos about gym routines and pressure washing, not even vaguely aware that their industry union has urgent news for them.
TikTok One lets you find the pressure washing creator, gymfluencer, or gen z comedian who can reach those people. I’m not talking about someone with 20 million followers who has an agent (although they’re out there too), I’m talking about someone with 20,000 Australian followers, who is maybe themselves a member or potential member, who will be absolutely delighted to make a video for you for $2-300.
You can search for creators by the topics of content they create, or search for the topics that their audience is interested in. That’s huge! Imagine you’re scrolling on TikTok, you see your favourite gardening and indoor plant propagation influencer, and while they show off their succulents they start talking about an issue relevant to your industry!
Creative brief
As the advertiser you’re in charge of the brief creators can respond to, and you can include caveats about what to include or exclude from the video, including logo files, hashtags to include, and anything else. Getting this right is important, because it is not nice to give a vague brief that creators respond to, only for you to then deny them payment because you had something else in mind.
You can then invite specific creators to respond to your brief or just put it out into the world and hope someone responds. The latter is not recommended, at least not right now. TikTok One is in its infancy in Australia, and there just aren’t enough creators just sitting around waiting for briefs… at least not outside FMCG.
Brand considerations
Once you’ve found someone to create your content, you can choose whether the resulting collaboration will appear on their profile or yours.
Once the creator films a video you can take a look at the draft and make suggestions or edits.
You should definitely feel free to ask the creator to try to explain the references or jokes you don’t understand, or even ask for a do-over if they’ve referenced something that sets off alarm bells. In one collaboration, a creator said something like “luckily I didn’t have any issues because I worked for a large company” and I had to encourage them to rethink the assumptions in that statement!
My hot tip, however, is that this creator knows their audience better than you do, and they have reason to be protective of their personal brand. The jokes might not make sense to you (because you’re 20 years older than your target audience), and it might not be the straight-to-camera delivery you had imagined, but take a leaf from Bob Katter and let a thousand roses bloom. The reason this creator is able to reach the people you can’t is because their content is so different from the slick branded videos your comms team churns out.
Be aware, as well, that this person is probably responding to your brief outside their regular job, and they are not your employee. If your critique of their work gets too pointed they will likely give up and walk away from the project. Trust me, managing artists is a specialist skill.
OK but does this actually work?
No!
At least, it’s not as simple as it sounds. I started using TikTok One in February and I didn’t get anywhere with my briefs until about May.
For one thing, I was trying to reach migrant workers in various language groups. TikTok One was annoyingly insistent that “No silly, in Australia people speak English!” and wouldn’t let me create briefs that specifically asked for content in language. I had to work around this, creating an English-language brief and then directly asking creators who responded to create content in their own language. This limited me to creators whose English was good enough to read the brief in the first place.
TikTok also auto-rejected all my briefs on the grounds that they were political, and… oh boy. These ads were about compliance with laws that already exist, so they were about as apolitical as union campaigns get. Luckily the process for contesting these auto-rejections is fast and efficient, and the manual review consistently found in my favour.
It is, in other words, a bit more of a faff around than you’ve probably got time for internally… probably something you could hire me to worry about for you.
TikTok One is free to sign up for, and you only pay for the creator videos you accept.
Reaching across the divide
My favourite thing about TikTok One is that the creator search gives you access to the “wrong” side of TikTok. Even if you have no plans to use the platform to create ads, you should start looking at the truly bizarre and horrifying content in the social commentary category.
I first wrote about the dangers of algorithms narrowing our worlds 15 years ago in an article that speaks to a simpler time, when we at least hoped that our news and opinions might stretch across the yawning divide of politics. These days we accept implicitly that the news and entertainment environment we consume is entirely separate from that of our fellow citizens.
It’s up to us to use the tools at our disposal to try and bridge this gap, reach outside our own echo chambers, and expand the reach and influence of the union movement.
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