Social Updates as a Marketing Medium: Part 1
15 Jan
Part 1: Facebook Status Updates for Awareness
For years now users have been hooked on Facebook app games. The miracle somehow occurred that developers and marketers teamed up from the beginning with the bright idea to utilize all of their faithful gamers’ Facebook status as a marketing medium by blasting brand messaging via status update everytime their cow takes a poop or their fish dies.
Facebook is a place for me to keep up on what my friends and whats on their mind when I can’t see or talk to them everyday – what they scored on Bejeweled is a little more than I care to know about their day-to-day.
Dealing with the Problem
I happily discovered the “HIDE” button and I no longer am subject to the flood of app updates. Problem solved. For a while anyway.
Hiding these apps has worked for some time, but marketers are sneaky little buggers, and are always looking to find some workaround to ensure they don’t waste an opportunity to blast their marketing messages to a captive audience of potential customers. I get it, really. I’m in advertising and sometimes thats just what it takes. But simply preying on a blatant loophole that technology hasn’t caught up with – thats just not cool. Not to mention a very short-term strategy. The latest workaround is definitely one of these – and I sure hope its short-lived.
Some Guerrilla Campaigns are Well-Played
Who noticed the other day when everyone and their mother had a color as their status update? It was everywhere. In terms of Guerrilla marketing, it really was quite clever. People really stuck to the plan and only stated a color (their bra color), but not why or what it meant.
And God forbid you be the only one not knowing whats going on, so everyone made sure to go find out what all the color updates were about, commenting to ask others to make sure they are also in the know. By the day’s end I doubt there was a single user who didn’t notice the takeover and make sure to find out what was going on. Its in our nature as human beings to be curious, and in our nature as Facebook users to always want to know what everyone is talking about.
This guerrilla campaign didn’t actually bother me though. I bring it up because it is an innovative way to utilize the technology to generate a buzz. It isn’t in your face and it leaves it up to you to find out what its all about.
And Some Campaigns Just Plain Stink
However, the new trend of posting updates such as “Put this in your status for an HOUR if you know someone who has AUTISM. Let our children’s voices be heard. Here’s to 2010 increasing awareness, research, and proactively finding answers” is neither innovative nor clever. It may be a nice thought, but not when you see 50 friends report it. Then it becomes in your face and just annoying. Its purely a guilt trip is what it is. Not to mention – I can’t copy and paste from within the Facebook mobile app on my IPhone anyway.
Its taking advantage of a captive audience with no means of filtering out such information since noone wants to just block every friend who does it. And its taking advantage of nice people who can’t help but repost it for fear of going to hell for ignoring it.
It doesn’t educate, it doesn’t raise money, it doesn’t do anything really. It might be called an awareness campaign, but its really a bastardized version and is becoming much too commonplace to have any real impact.
Instead…
Post a link. Share your thoughts. Let me make up my own mind on what I want to do – but for goodness sake, don’t bring crappy chain letters that tell me what I should do to my Facebook news stream. Be clever. We innovative. But don’t copy others’ once innovative idea and think its still clever.
And hopefully Facebook will come up with some way for me to filter this crap out soon so the trend stops before the rest of the herd jumps on board and even those guilty of participating now start to get annoyed.
