Ramstad: Suni Lee and Tim Walz made it look easier than it is to master the attention algorithm

Out in cyberspace, Minnesotans are winning.

In the nine days since Gov. Tim Walz was picked as a vice presidential candidate, his social media posts have been discovered by people across the country and remixed into new messages, or memes, that amplify and exaggerate his Carhartt-wearing, Midwestern dadness.

Without knowing that they were doing it, Walz and his staff gave his new fans plenty to work with by creating hundreds of posts over the last six years. For a couple of days last week, the video of Walz’s insistence to his vegetarian daughter that turkey wasn’t meat in Minnesota seemed to be everywhere.

And then the other Minnesotan in the world spotlight, gymnast Suni Lee, won more hearts and fans by joining the social media craze in which people made videos of themselves artlessly imitating Olympic athletes captioned “Unfortunately I was not selected for the Olympics.”

After falling from the balance beam in her last competition in Paris, Lee spoofed this trend by placing a video of the stumble on TikTok with the caption, “unfortunately I was selected for the Olympics.”

Exceptionally talented and coming back so strongly after illness, Lee is “one of the best sports stories in the history of our state,” as Jim Souhan wrote in the Star Tribune last week.

She’s also got the magic touch of the mid-2020s, the ability to authentically connect with people over their digital devices and platforms.

It is all the more amazing because, as many businesses are discovering, digital marketing and platforms have turned so complex that it’s getting harder for anyone to reach the people they desire.

Haseon Park, a communications professor at the University of Minnesota who researches how consumer brands use social media, said the platforms themselves are making algorithms — the formulas to determine how content should be customized for people — mind-bendingly complicated.

The algorithms are being reshaped by all the data marketers get whenever a person engages with their ads or sites — and sometimes when a person is doing other things on their digital device.

“We leave all these different types of digital traces, not just online shopping activities, but also your mobile app usage or purchase histories, or where you’re located, or if you’re interacting with your messaging at a location,” Park said. “All these little different types of pieces of data really changed the entire game of digital marketing.”

For content creators, a term that now applies to anyone seeking to get a message across to an audience, Park said, “You can’t really plan how to word things, how to post in a way that is perfectly designed to hit the algorithms.”

She and other researchers try experiments where they post similar content in the same series of steps, and often see vastly different outcomes.

“In consumer targeting, they can’t really find out that dominant algorithmic formula to target a group of similar consumers,” Park said. “They need to have much more detailed information about their customers, and each of those consumers within the same segmentation might get different content.”

It seems possible to me that some of the promise of digital marketing, that it will allow advertisers to reach customers more precisely and cheaply than advertising in the old mass market way, is breaking down.

Park wasn’t ready to agree, though she said, “I can’t even see how industry people keep up with it. This week is different from last week.”

When I recently interviewed Sharon McMahon, the former schoolteacher in Duluth who now makes social media posts, online essays, newsletters and podcasts about American history, she mentioned other media producers and marketers frequently suggest ideas that are more extreme or sensational to reach more people.

She turns them all down. Her business began with short posts on Instagram during the pandemic that were meant to counter misinformation, and she says one of the problems of social media is what she called “the rise of the fake expert economy.”

“It’s hard to make an educated decision if you have no education on a topic. That’s the lens I view what I do through,” McMahon said. “I ask, ‘Am I in the position to provide history and context on this important topic for you?’ Even though I have diversified what I do, what I offer and where I meet people, it’s important to me that I also stay in my lane of expertise.”

The presidential campaign this fall, Park said, will give marketers in all fields and researchers like her a lot of new information about digital messaging. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris appeal to voters’ emotions in their social media in completely different ways, she said.

“What evokes more arousal in theory would be negative news because that’s what people look for first, and then they kind of feel relief when they have the good news coming,” Park said. “Trump’s messaging may land first, but Harris’ might last longer in people’s minds.”