If a profile picture changes in the newsfeed and no one but your friends see it, does it make a difference?
If you didn’t do it yourself, sometime a couple months back your newsfeed was probably inundated with friends adding rainbow filters their profile pictures in support of same-sex marriage following the Supreme Court ruling that made it legal nationwide in the USA. Enabled by a photo-editing tool that Facebook launched, the company estimates over 26M changed their profiles globally, receiving more than a billion likes and comments. Big numbers, but have you ever wondered if changing all those profile pictures makes any difference at all?
Profile picture change campaigns are nothing new (and they’re probably as popular now as sneezing panda videos) but are almost entirely for ‘worthy’ causes; there were green filters for Iranian protesters in 2009, purple filters for LGBT anti-bullying in 2011, yellow ribbons for Hong Kong in 2014 and pink ribbons every October for breast cancer awareness.
I don’t think anyone is under the illusion that simply changing their profile picture is going to have a direct influence on the people who actually determine the outcomes of such struggles. So why do these campaigns keep coming back and why do so many people get behind them?
We think it’s all about ‘Framing’ (although most people taking part don’t realise this).
Framing is a cognitive heuristic in which diverging results tend to be produced from the same choice problem depending on how it is described. In other words, people will respond differently to a situation based on the surrounding information that ‘frames’ it. E.g. you might happily pay $50 for shampoo in high-end hairdresser’s, yet baulk at that price for the exact same product in a supermarket.
Framing, specifically shifting the ‘what’s normal’ frame of reference, is at the core of driving social change. And as it’s the people closest to us that have the biggest influence on our frames of reference, it makes sense to conclude that if we want to get someone to change their mind or behaviour about something, a highly effective way to do that would be to get everyone they know to demonstrate what they think is the proper, ‘normal’ response.
That’s highly likely to work for groups where the connections are ‘strong’ and people actually know each other, but what about a mass platform like Facebook that is built on a lot of ‘weak’ connections between people who may never see each other in real life? Can Facebook actually reframe ‘normal’?
Probably, to a limited extent. The flood of profile picture changes in support of gay marriage no doubt had a positive impact by framing support as ‘normal’, making expressing support easier and detracting more difficult. But this effect is probably only played out within the ‘strongly connected’ groups who already think along fairly similar lines and is unlikely to really cause attitude change in people ‘weakly connected’ to those changing their profile pictures.
So while it certainly won’t harm a cause, it’s unlikely to actually cause change beyond emboldening those already on board to be more vocal, and perhaps discouraging those against from dissenting. However, it might be more powerful if Facebook put framing on steroids and built an interface that showed both the total level of support in a community (the social norm) as well as the personal connections an individual had within the supporter base (the ‘strong connection’ frame of reference).
So if changing profile pictures can have limited, positive effects on social causes, what about commercial campaigns (we are in the advertising business after all)?
A few have tried; Nescafe Dolce Gusto’s #MiniMe campaign allowed their Facebook fans to create personalised coffee portraits and Universal brought what every Despicable Me fan dreamed of, posing with your favourite yellow sidekicks via an Insta-Minion photo app. The keyword here...’fans’. Like social change, these campaigns tend to engage Facebook fans who are already ‘strongly connected’ with the brand (or characters) rather than re-frame what’s cool or funny to a broader network of friends.
The takeout for commercial campaigns is that profile change campaigns only really talk to consumers already on-board with your brand – those most likely to go to the effort of changing their profile picture with something they’ve already ‘bought into’. Whilst the opportunity to attract new consumers is limited, profile picture change can be a great way of keeping fans engaged with your brand but be mindful in the selfie era we want quick, simple ways to show something interesting or entertaining about us enabled by the brands we ‘like’.