My companies Twitter page: twitter.com/macbethaust hosts treasure hunts all around the country via twitter and the people who follow us love it. Gets the followers hyped and keen to find our products hidden around the place, when they do they brag about it and also have great time doing so. After its all done we have directly hit our audience we wanted to and makes more people to want to be apart of it.

Nike is a good example of someone who gets it and is invited into social networks by communities of interest.

Many brands try to muscle in on the social networking conversations thinking there is a commercial return. This results in resentment – a bit like the bore at a party.

As is normal in any new media, a dramatic lack of insight into who uses it and how they use it, often results in clumsy brand interference.

Most Brands are just not cool, no matter how much we wish they were.

Careless social networking campaigns can actually damage a brand’s image.

Do we want our brand to look like the sleazy forty year old at the schoolies event?

Youth culture is as insular as it is because it is exactly that…. youth. Any effort to target this market must not be seen to talk down or patronise or risk negative effects that far outweigh the potential benefits. A upcoming brand must seriously consider the risks when moving into the social media arena.

On the other hand, i have a suprisingly large amount of friends and contacts who are memebers of hte youth culture and do NOT engage in social media activities such as facebook and myspace. These tools are increasingly becoming blase, with twitter comments becoming more and more inane and facebook becoming cluttered and impersonal. Mass media can still be effective in reaching a younger audience if it is focused, well thought out and appeals to this disenfranchised group.

cheap doesn’t mean good, look no further than spam to see the usefulness of free email executed badly.

clients that sit down in briefings asking agencies to deliver viral for example are as bad as the self-interested peddlers of the latest new thing.

the best new media/marketing tools in the world are of no use if you don’t have an engaging and relevant idea.

i suppose while we have an industry that is increasingly fragmented (just like our consumer markets) with various specialists who have only their narrow area to push then this debate will be with us indefinitely, creating a heap of confused clients and a bunch of poorly thought through campaigns

Sounds like it would have been an interesting debate.

In terms of Mr McShanes comment; “People tend to get a bit lazy. They come up with these new media options as a way of saving money rather than as the right answer to a problem.” – I’d have to say that I probably partially agree.

There are heaps of digital/social marketing professionals worldwide (including myself) that will argue that many marketers/agencies are probably going about implementing social strategy the wrong way. From what I can take from your summary above, this seems to be the flavour of the discussion at the AMI debate today.

I think what many marketers/agencies tend to do is pick the social ‘technologies’ first – ie like the Facebook fan pages or the Twitter feeds – instead of focusing on what they actually want their social strategy to accomplish or achieve.

Forrester Inc. wrote a bloody fantastic whitepaper back in Sept/Oct 2007 on the value of understanding ‘social profiles’, then setting measurable ‘social objectives’ and then – and only then – implementing well thought out ‘social strategies’ before the actual ‘social technologies’ are actually deployed.

Given that social media is still relatively (and is the flavour of the moment) many marketers or clients assume that setting up a Facebook fan page, a MySpace page or a Twitter profile allows them to tick the “social media box” on the marketing plan. But any communications delivery without a well thought out stratetgy (online or offline) will fail (der!) because there was no defined objective, or the attempt was not suited to the actual social needs of customers or audiences.

In addition, I think many people hear the words “Social Media” and automatically think Facebook/Myspace/Twitter. Whereas ‘social media’ when used correctly (and as part of a well thought out social strategic approach) will use technologies like forums, wiki’s, social sites, widgets, user-generated-content, community-generated-content, online- video-channels, IPTV, podcasting, social gaming, blogs/micro-blogs, mobile apps, email marketing, reviews & opinion sites, IM (instant messaging), picture-sharing, wall-postings, music-sharing, virtual reality, social-content-aggregation… god, the list is almost bloody endless! And the line is very blurry!

There is a massive opportunity and place for social media strategy, but like any other communications channel (again, offline or online) – it (social) needs to part of a well planned, strategic integrated marketing approach.

If you want to read the Forrester whitepaper let me know and I’ll see if I can dig it out the name of it as I think you can buy it online. It was really, really good.

So thats my two cents!

Cheers Tim and hope you’re well.

Sime

i like your point… but what a bullshit artist.

Also, social media isn’t appropriate for all brands/products either. i agree with some of the comments expressed above about “cool kids” – there’s a lot of consumers/potential target market that are NOT using social media. So u have to make sure you have marketing invested into print, tv, radio, etc… as well

Social media is just that – social.