Category Archives: social media-ising

promoting, social media-ising, social networking

Facebook’s betrayal: why Westfield’s $10,000 promotion may come back to bite the hand it so fleetingly fed

Westfield_promotion_facebook
with the dust settling on Westfield's controversial Facebook application and the weekend drawing nigh, it's perhaps time to reflect – once again – on the trials, perils and pitfalls of brands rushing in to enter the social media spaces that angels fear to tread.

to recap.  last weekend saw Westfield launch a promotion on Facebook which offered a place in a $10,000 prize draw to anyone who updated their Facebook status using the Westfield Gift Card Application.  controversy and criticism soon grew however.

rumors that the promo was a hoax, suggestions that opened your Book to spam and viruses, difficult to find T&Cs and the cluttering of many a newsfeed led to the creation of dozens of anti groups and finally yesterday to the shutting down of the promotion.  three observations…

one, mission accomplished.  if the brief was to get into and make some noise in the space owned by people rather than on-to-many media then its a job well done and M&C Saatchi and Ikon Communications should be congratulated.  we can only assume that the brief was such – any requirement to build brand credibility or improve perceptions of Westfield couldn't, or certainly shouldn't, have resulted in such a maverick solution.  which brings me to…

two, it does appear to be the most invasive of promotions.  the application essentially allows Westfield to spam peoples' Facebook friends with auto status updates saying, "All I want for Christmas is a Westfield gift card".  more than a couple of them in my news feed would have taken me to the brink.  not that it bothered University student Kristy Bell.  the Courier Mail reports that she didn't think twice about adding the application…  "I don't care that it can pull details from your profile – pretty much all Facebook applications can" she said.  a point well made Kristy, but most pretty much all applications on Facebook do so to add utility (that mantra again) to your online / social / life experience.

three, and most importantly.  digi strategist Tom Kelshaw posted that the competition appears to be breaking Facebook's rather strict terms and conditions, which state that:

4.2 In the rules of the promotion, or otherwise, you will not condition entry to the promotion upon taking any action on Facebook, for example, updating a status, posting on a profile or Page, or uploading a photo.

but in a statement earlier this week Westfield claimed that "its Christmas Gift Card promotion on Facebook is a registered promotion. Westfield worked closely with Facebook to develop the competition and Westfield has legal advice that the promotion does not breach the Spam Act."

if this statement is to be believed, Facebook actively participated in the development of an invasive and controversial application that contravened its own terms and conditions.  this is important for a whole load of reasons, not least because it undermines trust in Facebook – the media brand around which many of us choose to organise social activities, communicate with friends and share things that interest, intrigue or amuse us.

Westfield, M&C Saatchi and Ikon Communications can walk away from this with a short term hit and learnings for next time.  but a few more of these and Facebook may find its not brands but users that are walking away from the social network that sold them out for a quick buck from a brand that thought that an invasive land grab into people's personal media space was the smart let alone the right thing to do.

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managing, pitching, social media-ising, social networking

Live Pitching and the Economics of Free: the genius, tragedy and slippery slope of Toyota Yaris’ social media pitch

so you're a car brand that's after a social media agency.  what to do?  hold a pitch of course.  but rather than waste time getting lots of agencies into your office and getting them to pitch their ideas with some creds and test out the chemistry, why not just get them to do the work and put it out there in the real world.  see which ideas work the best and appoint that agency.  my favourite – for the record – is Iris' effort above.

genius…

you get to see how real ideas work in the real world – the most important metrics are how ideas actually translate into buzz and conversations, you get to measure these live in real time.  there's no or minimal media budget and production costs are low, so for not a load of investment you get a load of exposure.  you get feedback thru comments and posts, not from a focus group paid to tell you what they think you want them to think, but from real people fitting your brand into their busy lives.

its a genuinely innovative, real and interesting approach to take in both developing work for a brand and for establishing with which agencies you would like to work.  you get to judge agencies on what they produce, not what they promise.  our industry is the better for it.

tragedy…

its an irrelevance that each of the pitching agencies was given $15,000 to produce and deploy their work.  the fact is that this approach undermines the two most precious commodities in our industry; ideas and people.  you ask people to come up with ideas for free; OK, that's the nature of a pitch.  but then you ask them to create and deploy those ideas for free; in ways that will build and grow your brand, for free.

you may very well get an architect to pitch a building design for
free, you wouldn't get them to build you one gratis.  I could pitch a
movie idea to a Hollywood executive but I'd have to explain that I'd be
hard-pressed to make it for free.  I might choose a restaurant based on
its menu, but I wouldn't expect a chef to make my a meal for free (nb
I'd have a boyfriend for that).  in each case asking for product for free undermines the professionalism, expertise and product of the individuals that create it.

there's a strong counter argument to this – one which I am very much aware that I have made in the past – that people (who don't work in planning, advertising, ideas or comms agencies) are out there creating and deploying stuff on your behalf.  and that not only should brands acknowledge that but they should actively encourage it.  in fact there's an interesting model which is that everyone works on a project basis and ideas live or die on their own merit.  payment by performance taken to the logical extreme.

but the slippery slope is clear.  there's a conflict between the academic theory of the evolution of media and communications, and the agency model that underpins much of the work upon which brands – and brand equity – is built.  in the near future, agencies will all have to get used to and embrace the fact that our agency ideas increasingly exist in an ecology with others that came from somewhere – anywhere, everywhere – else.  but in that future we have to ensure that we nurture the people and ideas upon which brands in that future will be built.

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advertising, planning, social media-ising, social networking

Emperor’s New Clothes, Meerkats and who clients should trust: dispatches from the edge of the social media debate

IPA_social
IPA publish and broadcast thoughts on social media.  "that's not very social" said some socially-minded planning types.  "no its not is it?!" replied the IPA, "let's change that" …so it was that last night the IPA Social Media group hosted the most social of evenings to debate and discuss the ongoing evolution of all things socially media…

the always lovely Mark Earls kicked us off with five principles that outline the big picture:

  1. connecting people allows them to behave less independently
  2. connectivity makes things more volatile
  3. connectivity disrupts existing and established power relationships
  4. its not about what technology does but what it enables
  5. technology allows people to spend more time with other people

well worth a read of Mark's full text here

Neil Perkins then took us through ten principles – thought starters and jumping-off points for discussion and debate on all things social media.  they and their authors are thus…

  1. People not consumers – Mark Earls
  2. Social agenda not business agenda – Le’Nise Brothers
  3. Continuous conversation not campaigning – John V Willshire
  4. Long term impacts not quick fixes – Faris Yakob
  5. Marketing with people not to people – Katy Lindemann
  6. Being authentic not persuasive – Neil Perkin
  7. Perpetual beta – Jamie Coomber
  8. Technology changes, people don’t – Amelia Torode
  9. Change will never be this slow again – Graeme Wood
  10. Measurement – Asi Sharabi

Neil finished his section with a quote by John Dodds that really got me thinking…  “Are we actually talking about social media or has the advent of the internet simply revealed that the advertising emperor had no clothes and should have obeyed the the principles all along?”

I Tweeted at the time to "be wary of John Dodds [you quote you understand not John per se – sure there's no need to be wary of him] …Advertising is not the enemy, the too-narrow concept of the ad is. Fireworks are part of the solution"

the point I was making was that its easy and dangerous to treat social media as though its going to usurp the crass, unrefined and unsophisticated concept that is advertising.  which is just plain wrong.  a point made more than eloquently when Amelia Torode presented a case study of VCCP's Meerkat for Compare the Market…

Amelia was very keen to make the point that the Meerkat campaign wasn't a 'social media' campaign but a 'social' campaign.  but I think this misses the point…  Meerket isn't a social media or even a social campaign.  Meerkat is an advertising campaign, an advertising campaign that has made the most brilliant use of social media to extend the scope, levels of engagement and fame of the ad.

great advertising is John's Fireworks that get ooohs and ahhhs from people.  this is how one-to-many broadcasting advertising works.  its brilliant, but let's not pretend that its social-led.

Meerkat

we then had a break out session on which type of agency is best placed to plan social media…

there are echos of the "who owns communications planning?" debate here. the easy answer is that comms planning is owned by everyone and no one. the harder answer is that you have to understand the role of communications in conjunction with the capabilities of a given client.

great social media planning needs generalists who can understand the role that social media plays in a wider strategy and balance the weight of effort across different behaviours accordingly. but it also needs brilliant specialists who can bring the latest technologies and activities to bear on those strategies.

social media calls for new specialist agencies, but at the same time it calls upon all of us – no matter what our discipline – to understand the role it can play and how it might affect and change how we do what we do.

who should clients trust with their social media strategies?  they should trust the people most closely aligned to the role for communications…

  • are you looking to use social media to tackle head-on negative brand perceptions? …trust your PR agency
  • social media to actively create sales opportunities? trust your media / direct agencies
  • or to improve customer service? …that'd be the call centre

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all in all an awesome night, but its only the start…  join in the debate via the facebook group, on twitter, or via Social on the IPA website.  and finally a big thanks to everyone who helped organise the evening…

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