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Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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Emoji are here to stay so start figuring out how they fit in your communications

Emoji are here to stay so start figuring out how they fit in your communications

My feeble attempt at a sentence in emojiThe emoji at left is my feeble attempt to pose a question: Is communication better with emoji?

Among my peers, I mostly hear a lot of disdain for these cartoony icons strung together to form a sentence or a thought or to convey an idea or emotion. On his now-defunct Jay Today, Jay Baer asked if marketers should take emoji seriously. Comments to the YouTube post were mostly dismissive, characterized by this one: “I am too old to spend extra time trying to translate what emoji mean. I want words—please.” Jay himself concluded that emoji users should listen to the same advice he offers his children: “Use your words.”

As a writer, I’m sympathetic to Jay’s plea. I’m equally cognizant, though, of the general shift toward visual communication, a trend I continue to urge my clients to follow and about which I speak frequently. The instant I heard Jay say, “Use your words,” I thought, “Isn’t a picture worth a thousand of those?”

Jay likens emoji to cave paintings. That’s an apt comparison, given Mitchell Stephens’ view. Stephens, who teaches at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, says using emoji “gives people something that has been missing in writing for the past five and a half thousand years.” Early writing—hieroglyphics—were all about images. Chinese characters convey more than just the vowels or consonants employed in sounding out a words. Rather, using images in written communications does “what the tone of voice did on the telephone and what gestures, tones, and facial expressions did in interpersonal communication.”

Research has proven that seeing a smiley-face emoticon on a screen can produce the same reaction as seeing one on a real person.

Some emoji enthusiasts devote huge swaths of time crafting complete sentences, paragraphs, and even books in emoji. (You can get the full-color edition of Emoji Dick, the translation of Moby Dick, for a mere $200.) Mostly, though, emoji are used to get across a concept more quickly and succinctly than words can. Need to articulate that you’re feeling sad today before you launch into the substance of a text message? You can spell it out in excruciating detail. Or you can start off with sad emoji] and convey instantly the frame of mind underlying your messages.

McDonald's Italy's emoji messageThat’s potentially powerful, as a lot of emoji users are discovering. They’re finding another advantage to emoji, as well. Consider the message at right from McDonald’s Italy, sent on World Emoji Day. I freely admit that I struggle to read some of the lengthier emoji constructs, but this one is pretty simple, even for a 60-plus guy like me:

“It’s World Emoji Day!”
“That makes me weep with joy.”
“I have a good idea. Want to get a hamburger?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Should we get fries with that?”
“What a great idea!”
“And should we get ice cream with that?”
“That’s a freakin’
awesome idea!”

The fact that this comes from McDonald’s Italy should make my point before I express it: You don’t need to speak a common language to understand emoji. No translation is necessary. Emoji—like so many other images—transcends language barriers.

(World Emoji Day, incidentally, was proclaimed for July 17 because that happens to be the date on the Apple emoji keyboard symbol for a calendar day.)

Brands have taken to emoji like a squirrel to a bird feeder. Household names that have tweeted, Snapchatted, Instagrammed, and otherwise distributed messages containing (or made up entirely of) emoji include Oreo, Bud Light, GE, Taco Bell, Miracle Gro and basic cable station Comedy Central (among hundreds of others). Some brands have produced their own emoji keyboards, including Coca-Cola, Burger King, Ikea, and basic cable channel FX. (I’m particularly fond of the Archer emoji.)

An Oreo spokesperson told Digiday, “We know it’s important to speak the language of our fans. So much meaning can be communicated with a single emoji, and we’ve been able to tap into that by using emojis to share our message of seeing the world with openness and curiosity.”

Of course, it wouldn’t be the first time brands had jumped on a bandwagon in order to ride it for however long it lasts. The fact that Coca-Cola marketed via emoji isn’t necessarily a signal that emoji are here to stay. For that, we need to look at some stats:

  • Almost half the text on Instagram contains emoji, including captions, comments, and a relatively new feature, emoji-capable hashtags. Source
  • Emoji are on their way to replacing a lot of slang. The tears of joy face (the one in the McDonald’s Italy message) is being used in lieu of LOL, LMFAO, and LMAO. The thumbs-up emoji is a stand-in for “that’s great,” “way to go,” “good job,” and “keep it up.” Note the chart from Instagram below, demonstrating the decline in the use of slang and the rise of correspondent emoji:

 

Slang on Instagram
  • The NFL Baltimore Ravens created an emoji keyboard which was downloaded 53,000 times the weekend it was introduced, resulting in just shy of 1 million interactions in which fans used the emoji in their messages.
  • In total, 6 billion emoji are sent every day via smartphone.

If you doubt these numbers, just pay a visit to EmojiTracker and watch the use of each emoji in real time.

It’s no surprise, then, to see companies doing more than just crafting emoji-centric tweets. One company was in talks with British online banks about dumping passwords in favor of an emoji authentication scheme. Sony pictures has announced plans to make a major animated movie based on emoji. And watch this video to learn about the emoji literacy cards available from Domino’s:

There’s more. Chevrolet distributed an entire press release in emoji. A proposal was floated to the Unicode Consortium for emoji that represent food allergies, allowing people who suffer from these allergies to convey their condition in shorthand. The World Wildlife Fund let supporters make donations by tweeting the emoji of endangered animals. A TV production studio has been shopping a game show called The Great Emoji Challenge. Even U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton took a stab at using emoji, though it didn’t go too well.

Businesses are springing up that make sense of emoji data for brands, too. “Measuring the brand value of speaking in cartoons may seem like a mere novelty,” notes AdAge’s Kate Kaye, “but as adoption of this picture parlance grows, agencies recognize the need to figure out how to analyze imagery as though it were text.”

Emoji on a billboard as part of a campaign from Partnership for Drug-Free KidsWhen I hear someone complain that emoji are too hard to learn, I wonder if he’s interested in reaching an audience of people like himself (in which case there’s no need to learn to translate words into emoji) or if the audience is made up of younger consumers who have embraced emoji. If it’s the latter, then communicators either need to suck it up and learn how emoji work or hire someone who does. Otherwise, you’ll never come up with a campaign like the one from the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids (the group behind the popular “Above the Influence” campaign), which features billboards entirely in emoji, like the one at left, which translates into “I want to fit in, but I don’t want to smoke.”

Emoji are no more a fad than their emoticon predecessors, and figuring out where they fit in your own messaging—or your brand’s—is nothing to take lightly.

Are you using emoji personally? Have you integrated emoji into your marketing or communication efforts? Leave a comment and share how you’re using emoji (or why you’re holding back).

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