Welcome to Social Studies.

Today….

• If you like Social Studies, you’ll like…

• Duolingo’s approval process

If you like Social Studies, you’ll like…

Duolingo's approval process

Zaria Parvez recently posted a masterclass on what a social media approval/collaboration process should look like.

I want to double click on it and outline why I think it works so well.

For this, I’ll alternate between what Zaria said in her recent post and my thoughts on what she’s saying.

Zaria’s words will look like this.

Mine will look like this.

When TikTok was being banned, the only approval we needed for our post was “did we translate this correctly in Mandarin?” Our posts were up within 3 hours.

When Duolingo took over Charli XCX's opening night, Kelsey Dempsey pitched an idea and got approval for excess budget within a day.

This is interesting. She notes to different kids of approval. One is post approval. Can this content go live?

The second is budgetary approval. The two types of approval often (but don’t always) go hand in hand. When leadership really understands organic social, they’ll be more apt to let the subject matter experts act as subject matter experts AND to allow them to responsibly use financial resources to make it happen.

When a learner posted their kid wanting the owl to prove he goes to sleep too, Roy Park and Karen Buchanan pitched an idea to each other and posted within an hour. I found out later after checking my phone.

This is the best. I’ve had the same experience seeing a post on the feed and thinking to myself, “That’s awesome who posted it?” only to find out it was someone on the team.

Obviously there needs to be some boundaries. When content is going from idea to live in under an hour, the chances of mistakes go up. But the chances of viralitiy (and ROI) also go up.

📚We arm our team with knowledge: they know our brand limits, they know what leadership cares about and what to avoid, and they know where to go when they’re unsure - with guaranteed fast response. They know our work is a priority because it leads to new users and all teams will treat it as such: legal, senior leadership, and standards and practices.

This. ☝️ 

Read that last sentence again though… How does the legal team and senior leadership know that organic social is a priority because it leads to new users? Because Zaria and team have made it clear! This is what separates a great social media content creator from a true social media marketing professional. Far more people can create viral content than can succinctly and effectively explain it to leadership and tie it in to business objectives.

🚅 We run with speed - understanding the risks that can be posed. However, every strategy has pros and cons and the amount of new learners social brings with rapid response is not worth the con of waiting for every inch of approval.

Most of the time, we’ve come out on top. And, the times we haven’t, we learned from our mistakes and integrated them deeper into our brand guidelines. Whether we like it or not, the internet moves on fast from our wins and our losses.

One of my favorite books is Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. The premise is basically, operate your life as if everything that happens is your fault. I love this approach because of how empowering it is. When things go wrong, you own up to it and face it head on. This doesn’t just do a better job at solving the problem, it builds trust and fosters relationships.

"Fear is expensive. Fear and growth cannot co-exist." - Layla Shaikley

We are not afraid of messing up. We are not afraid of having to have tough conversations. We are not afraid of Legal. We are not afraid of our senior leadership team. We've spent the past 5 years fostering this mindset, these relationships because it is far too expensive to not do so. It costs more time & resources for less user acquisition to sit on the sidelines waiting.

I love a good meme that makes fun of the legal team. But at the end of the day we’re all on the same team. We want the business to succeed. We’re just viewing it from different angles. Viewing internal teams as adversaries is a shortcut to nowhere. The sooner social teams can get on board with this approach, the quicker their posts will go out, and the better their content will be.

Every single person on our short-form content team knows how to ideate & create a short-form video... and has made multiple viral hits.

You can tell pretty early on in an interview process who is used to making their work and who's had others make their work for them.

In fact, Kelsey Dempsey, Karen Buchanan and Melissa Yeung hold the trophy for most viral Duolingo TikTok ever. We’ve struggled to find agencies that do the work as well as we do, so we’ve invested in a team that can roll their sleeves up & make the work happen. Our most impactful moments at Duolingo have been done by L1s and L2s!

There are a ton of ways to structure a social team… You can break it down by skills (design, editing, strategy) or you can break it down by platform (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn).

Regardless, I love this approach of any person on the team knows the ropes. This is especially true in a world where social is moving so fast. People get sick, people get busy, people get new jobs.

It pays massive dividends to have a team where you know that everybody can get the job done.

The people creating the content are the approvers. The buck stops with the social team. This culture is so ingrained now at Duolingo, that if I even ask our PR team or Senior Leadership if they want to approve a certain post, they always look at me like I’m crazy. They trust us to do our job.

That literally means I approve my own posts & my teams posts. If we want to gut check a risk, we always flag it with our broader brand marketing team, but the decision always comes back to social.

We run on these basic assumptions.

1. We are all stewards of the brand - the social team wants the brand to go viral and gain new users without sacrificing brand love.

2. SLT trusts that social is not trying to destroy the brand.

3. Social owns social channels (…shocker!). Unless something is highly illegal or a huge no no, we decide what goes live. We are the final decision makers.

4. Our users are not a monolith. Just because they’re seeing spicy personality on Duolingo's TikTok does not mean they think Duo is incapable of teaching languages. In fact, the human connection of it all makes them trust us more.

5. We will not be liked by everyone and that’s ok. Our duty is to new users, not marketers. We disagree and commit.

As a social media pro, it’s tempting to think “Oh wow they’re so lucky to have such a great environment.” But read those bullet points again. What an incredibly mature perspective coming from the social team. They realize that they need to operate inside the law. The realize that there are guardrails that you need to play within.

They also put the customer first (which in turn puts the brand first). There is trust because there are mutual values. When everyone sees the goal clearly, there’s more flexibility on tactics.

Read Zaria’s full newsletter here.