First the Skittles stunt. And now this.
At this rate, aggressively ignorant brands who don’t care about honest two-way conversation but really only care only about reach and revenue will have whored out and exploited the platform within a few months. Based on last night’s Twitter blitz of social media spam, manipulative, hamfisted, and shameful hawking, ego-driven backslapping, and abuse of trust, I give Twitter six months tops before it becomes a real-time spamming medium.
Making this situation even worse is that the whole stunt was enabled by those who are supposed to be at the forefront of social media — our “gatekeepers” and “influentials”. Shameful. Proctor & Gamble may have come up with the stunt idea but it could only have been executed like this with the complicity of the digerati. It’s amazing how easily these knowledgeable folks allowed P&G to feed their egos and desire to add a case study to their personal portfolios by having them do the heavy lifting for a stunt that only serves P&G’s business and branding. I’m sure more than a handful also thought they could gin up some new business from one of the world’s largest brands. Who knew it was this easy to dupe the sophisticated?
Should P&G be lauded for tossing in $50,000 for charity? Not really when you consider that amount equals .000007% of their annual $7 billion marketing & advertising spend. And definitely not when you consider that the hyped overtly-branded Tide t-shirt and multiple Tide sites were messaged more than the charity. The coverage alone was worth more than that.
Here are some ideas for P&G. How about instead of using cheap charity appeals to get your brand talked about online you actually get in the trenches, engage in discussion about your brands people love, and develop a voice and following over time? How about if you want to raise money for charity you don’t cheapen the good work by branding yourself all over it? How about instead of co-opting many of the leading digital voices, you allow your own team to become that voice? How about learning from the examples of JetBlue, Zappos, and Comcast and take off your corporate armor and hang out with the unwashed masses? How about you do some learning on your own time and not at the expense of the medium and users?
Problem is that all of the above ideas take time, honesty, and integrity. And many big companies like P&G don’t want to invest time, honesty, or integrity into nurturing something as fragile as social media. They allow their market share, history, and ego to buy their way in. They want it now. Period.
Well, only we — the public — can keep them at bay. Tell them to go back and earn our respect. It will pay off in greater spades than any short-term stunts that bought-and-owned digerati tell you will work.
P&G needs to go home and work like the everyone else at developing a social media profile and engaging in conversation. Do that and you’ll gain our trust. Don’t do this and you’ll just be using push tactics in a pull world. There really are no shortcuts with social media.
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Do we really expect anything different from Corporations? They can not invest what they do not possess.
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