The Social Media Conundrum
What is the buzz phrase of the year? If you even thought about that for a millisecond before mumbling to yourself that I was a jackass for asking that question when the answer is right in the title, then you lose. Good day sir.
Social media has been on the tip of every executive’s tongue since the stock market took a serious dump in August of 2008.”Free media? Hell yeah, I’ll take free media any day.” And this has been really great for social media in general. The media coverage of Twitter has made tweeting a social necessity, and Facebook seems to be breaking away from it’s social media brethren, transforming in to the beautiful platform butterfly that MySpace was only able to achieve with music.
But with great success comes great responsibility (or power, or whatever – not really interested in Spidermanisms). We’ve finally got what we asked for – we being the public relations agencies, the ad agencies and the “social media experts” that have been harping on our clients about the merits of social media since late 2006. We’re like dogs who finally caught the car. We’ve got a general idea of how social media campaigns work, and we’ve seen personal brands flourish. But what happens when your brand wants to become social?
I read a really interesting post from the Search Insider on MediaPost a few weeks ago (I’m a closet SEM-er, btw). It was entitled “You Don’t Deserve #1″ written by Todd Friesen. The main idea is that even though your clients want to rank first on search results pages, most of the time, they really don’t deserve it. He talks about (in so many words) the arrogance that clients have about their brands – and rightly so. If your brand managers aren’t passionate about their brands, then who will be?
But sometimes those brand managers become somewhat delusional about what they’re owed. Seriously, does a small shoe company that just opened their doors really deserve to rank for a competitive term like “Nike Shoes” when their customer service is shit and their prices aren’t exceptionally competitive?
For social media, the same rules apply, but the tables are turned. We’re not raising our hands when the customers come looking for us. Now, we’re trying to get our customers to recognize that we’re raising our hands by hanging outside their windows.
The same question remains. Do clients really deserve the attention? Sometimes, they genuinely do. I gladly accepted that a few of my friends “unfriended” me for the glorious taste of a Whopper. I also enjoyed following Jack Box through his tumultuous bus accident and subsequent recovery.
But there have also been countless social media campaigns that have gotten much more ink than they’re worth. Take Woody, the TGI Fridays spokes-douche. I mean, really? Be my fan and I’ll give you a burger? This vaguely sounds like a scene out of Menace 2 Society. “C’mon man, I got these cheeseburgers, man!!!”
Take away the free cheeseburger, and are you really going to be Woody’s friend? Do you really give a shit about what TGI Friday’s is doing?
I think the honeymoon is over, and social media is maturing in to the Gimmick phase. Consumers are no longer awestruck that their favorite brand responded to them on Twitter. In fact, they demand it. The whole idea of “the conversation is going to happen whether you’re there or not” is moot. Consumers are only going to have a conversation about you because A) you fucked up or B) you spent a ton of money working to get their attention (ok, ok, if you do something noteworthy, they’ll talk too, but that’s A LOT harder than it seems). Sounds a lot like advertising to me.
So the next time the client wakes up and asks you for a scope of work on a social media campaign, think twice about recommending something unless it’s a good first step or it is truly buzz-worthy. There is a fine line between being innovative and being annoying. I’m looking at you, Woody.