The fireworks business

Something that's been doing the rounds on marketing blogs recently is this edit of a speech by blogger and agency boss Joseph Jaffe. It concerns what he sees as the ham-fisted efforts of a number of multinationals to employ social media marketing.

In his talk he highlights five ways brands get it wrong including fakery, manipulation (including fake blogs), control (such as T-mobile parent Deutsche Telekom suing over the use of the colour magenta), dominating the conversation and avoiding the debate.

In conclusion, Jaffe says many of us are essentially still in the "fireworks business" where everything is front loaded to the launch and the big bang.

"As quickly as the sky bursts into colours, it returns to darkness and you can hear the crickets chirping. We go dark on our consumers. The fireworks display in many instances is your media plan."

In other words, we've taken the way we've always done things - our fancy diagrams, our brand bibles, our ways of working, our tried and tested template tactics - and just transplanted them wholesale to social media. We treat it as simply another medium alongside TV, radio and print.

Hence you get brands selling virtual goods to virtual world citizens who don't really want them. Thousands of unused Facebook widgets waiting to find a home on user's profile pages. And expensive brand micro-sites, when a lot of consumers are having more fun looking at each other's Bebo profiles or scanning through YouTube videos.

Of course as we know, it's not only the medium, but the whole way you talk to consumers through it, which is changed.

So who is responsible for some of these mis-steps? Jaffe mentions a number of large corporations by name in his talk, but really, it's those of us in agency life who shoulder a lot of the blame.

The truth is, light bulbs have gone on in agency minds everywhere that this an area brand and marketing managers are starting to get to grips with - and are willing to spend money on.

Advertising, PR, experiential consultancies, we're all in on it. Go to an inter-agency meeting and everyone has come to the table with thoughts on how to exploit this new fangled social media thing. Every week I see a full page ad in the trade from this or that consultancy about how they can "educate" clients and "help them make sense" of social networking.

Some are offering genuinely innovative campaigns that get results. Others are offering the equivalent of Victorian snake oil and telling brand managers what they think they want to hear.

Just one example - a competitor who I've come across before touts a solution to target bloggers and measure opinion (hitting the hot buttons of 'reach' and 'measurement'), that I don't think is that far removed from spamming them....which brings me onto the subject of my next post, targeting bloggers!

Photo -Perth fireworks by Hobbesken, taken under a creative commons license.