People vs the Algorithm: The Story So Far
Round I
In mid June in New York, Cindy Gallop posted about her loss of reach on LinkedIn, her posts were only being shown to a fraction of her 137,000 LinkedIn followers. ​
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Around the same time in London, Jane Evans was launching her new business and almost none of her 16,000 followers heard anything about it. But when Jane started reposting Cindy's posts she received up to 30,000 impressions compared to Cindy's 43.
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When other women (and men in DEI) started posting that they too were screaming into the abyss, Jane and the team at the 7th Tribe put their motto of 'Don't Moan. Fix it' into action and started some fast and furious creative experimentation to see what was going on and what we could do about it.​
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A few weeks later, Matt Lawton in Australia messaged Cindy and Jane asking if it would be an idea to test content to see if a man posting made any difference. He brought a colleague on board, Stephen McGinnis from Los Angeles. The 7th Tribe team quickly created a test post and Jane, Cindy, Matt and Steven all posted at the same time in their time zone. It came up with a result that required a lot more questioning.
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A Post Questioning Cindy's Loss Of Reach Using Every Word Banned On US Government Websites.
One we prepared earlier.
We didn't expect men supporting women would get such an uptick in engagement. When compiling the results we added a two week old post from Jane where she promoted a Black businessman.
If you want to see all of the 7th Tribes experiments with tips and tricks that work, you can watch the two Wrangling The Algorithm Webinars and download the decks for £10 here:
Round II
Do opposites attract reach?
In our tiny unscientific test, women posting about women got nowhere. Men posting about women went through the roof. And it's not just women feeling left out of the algorithm, many marginalised humans are feeling silenced.
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So we are did a bigger test to ask the question, Does Allyship Increase Reach? We had people al over the world posting as an ally. The algorithm caught up with us pretty quickly. So have designed a test it won't be able to see...
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Round III
Allyship in Action
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​In experiment II, the figures from London (before the algo caught on to what we were doing) still had some troubling findings. So we've designed a test the machines can't see. This time we're asking everyone to find a buddy of the opposite gender with a similar follower count, decide on a post you can both share then post at the same time and report your analytics after 24 hours.
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If this sounds like a fun way to find out if the algorithm is silencing voices please click below for full instructions and to join in.
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