Emoji have become a new, universal communications language. Even if public relations, marketing and other communications professionals don’t yet plan to write in emoji, they’d be wise to keep a close eye on their growing adoption – and determine how emoji may fit into PR and brand communications. Emoji are especially useful in mobile communications and promotions. As a communications tool, they cannot be ignored.
In the latest evidence in the emoji trend, GoDaddy began registering emoji URLs. So far, Coca-Colla and a Norwegian airline have launched promotions with emoji websites, points out Quartz. Browsers automatically translate emoji into text.
Emoji URLs do have some disadvantages and as-yet-unresolved barriers to adoption. Search engines cannot find them. Registering them is difficult. Due to current Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) standards, domain extensions are limited to a few country-level domains like Western Samoa’s .ws and Laos’ .la. Still, GoDaddy urges their adoption, and many people believe their adoption is inevitable.
Get to Know Emoji
“Those of you who thought emojis were a passing fad will have to come to grips with reality now that emoji URLs are coming. While you shouldn’t be registering your emoji domains yet, you should be getting better acquainted with how people are using them,” writes Shel Holtz of Holtz Communication + Technology in his HC+T Update newsletter. “I’m telling clients to ignore anyone who says emojis have no place in the enterprise. If they communicate more effectively in a growing mobile landscape, they belong in business communication as much as anywhere else.”
Emoji offer several important communications advantages. Because they are visual, they are perfect for image-based platforms like Snapchat and Instagram. Since they can easily understood by anyone regardless of their native language, they are ideal for international audiences. They are frequently shared, so propagate brands’ messages well. Emoji and their cousins, emoticons, can soften negative messages, such as rejections, requests, or complaints.
Emoji reveal information about how audiences feel about content. Brands may eventually obtain richer data and insight from social listening, monitoring and analytics tools. By better analyzing data in their dashboards, brands might be able to better understand how consumer reactions correlate to campaign results.
In more signs of their increasing popularity: Apple built an emoji keyboard into its new MacBook Pro. Version 9.0 of the Unicode Standard released this year includes 72 new emoji such as the shrug, facepalm, fingers crossed and selfie. More than 80% of adults in the UK now use emoji in their text messages, while a whopping 40% admit to having created a message composed entirely of emoji, according to the Emoji IQ study by TalkTalk Mobile.
A Compliment, Not a Replacement
“But even with their increasing use, it’s unlikely that we’re going to lose our written language to symbols anytime soon,” says social media consultant Aleksandra Atanasova in a Social Media Today post. “The use of emojis is seen more as a creative form of language. When present in text-based messages, these symbols help us express ourselves better and more imaginatively, a compliment rather than a replacement.”
Other experts advise organizations to first study how their customers use emoji and how other brands incorporate them in their marketing.
“If your customers are using emoji, don’t just jump on the bandwagon,” cautions Gartner Research Director Jennifer Polk in a Gartner blog. “Figure out how you can naturally and appropriately include emoji in content and conversation and gain insight from those interactions.”
Despite their international appeal, the symbols create potential for misunderstanding.
Research by GroupLens Research at the University of Minnesota found that in 25% of the cases people were not sure if an emoji displayed positive, negative or neutral sentiment. There were also huge discrepancies in participants’ opinions on what certain emoji actually indicated. Because the smartphone platforms such as Google and Apple use their own emoji font, the same emoji character can look very different on different smartphones and different social media networks.
Bottom Line: The introduction of emoji URLs highlights the growing popularity of the symbols. More consumers and brands communicate with emoji. They are a communications tool that cannot be ignored. Shrewd organizations will either embrace the symbols or increasingly monitor how their audiences and competitors are using them.
William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.
