The Tendo View

Social media.

The phrase should evoke some kind of nervous sweat if you’re one of the legions of marketers looking to boost your Web 2.0 savvy. That’s because there are nearly as many ways to engage an audience online as there are essays, tip lists, and best practices for doing so. Pocket that idea—you could make a fortune creating the latest social network for wannabe social networking gurus.

I digress.

It’s difficult to conjure up a list of tips and techniques for social media because each engagement is just a little bit different from anything you’ve ever encountered. Yet there are real ways to interact with modern social networks. There are ways to deliver your message without looking like a shill. There are ways to engage with these new hubs of Web activity without spending a fortune. But these practices are muddled by a litany of bad advice that gets tossed around as a de facto standard for social media involvement. So check out these examples of social media flops, and use their stories to influence your own original ideas.

Liar, Liar, Social Network on Fire

In late 2008 online editors began to notice a peculiar trend appearing in the comments of their gadget- and tech-related blogs. A number of users were referencing just how awesome the new Motorola Krave handset was; only, they were doing so in a suspicious way. It’s hard to define exactly how these comments were suspicious. But just like the Supreme Court’s definition of pornography, you’d know them if you saw them.

And these online editors sure saw them. What began as a social marketing campaign ended up becoming a giant egg on the face for Motorola. Instead of currying favor amongst the readers of these top gadget sites, the biased comments attracted editors’ attentions for the wrong reasons. They, in turn, ran stories blasting Motorola for its patent astroturfing.

Keep Your Fans Close—and Your Competitors Closer

Once upon a time, there was an online application called Scrabulous. It allowed Facebook users to challenge each other to a tile-based word game that had an uncanny similarity to Hasbro’s popular Scrabble title. After the app amassed more than 500,000 users, Hasbro decided to launch an “official” version of Scrabble on Facebook. Oh, and they also decided to sue the pants off the Scrabulous creators for copyright infringement.

Scrabble is still competing against Scrabulous, now rebranded as “Lexulous,” with both running neck-and-neck at roughly 550,000 monthly active users. Instead of working together to create a one-shop approach to this popular game, both companies are now stuck competing for a diluted pool of Scrabble enthusiasts. Keeping in touch with how your fans are engaging with and promoting your product is important, but if you need to escalate the situation, at least consider a scenario that unites—not divides—your customers.

The Power of Proactive Pizza

Time and time again, a corporate disaster plays out over the social networks and the companies involved are chastised for their lack of response. And as they scramble to fix the damage, the flames turn into a forest fire. Take Domino’s Pizza: In mid-April, the Internet found out about a series of videos featuring two Domino’s employees mixing bodily functions and unsanitary practices with the normal day-to-day life of their pizza franchise.

Even though Domino’s fired the employees and began a top-to-bottom evaluation of the store’s sanitary efforts, the company didn’t bother discussing its response on the very social networks that were aligning around the news.

That plan lasted a single day.

Two days after the original video starting burning its way across the Web, Domino’s had established a new Twitter account and YouTube apology video in an attempt to mitigate the damage to its brand. Although a lot can be said about the company’s ability to control an out-of-control PR nightmare, the better point is that this is the kind of activity that Domino’s should have already been watching.

All it takes is a cursory Google News Alert to discover an impending Internet explosion against your brand. From there, it’s important to get a new message out clearly and succinctly, but personally. Nobody wants to hear corporate-speak when they feel they’ve been slighted; they want to hear a real explanation from a real human being, and they want this resource in the places where they’ve been reading the information. That said, treating social media as a messaging tool after the fact is the surest way to dilute the power of what you’re trying to say. A Web presence can’t be built in a day, especially if you lack the clout of a national pizza chain.

Number of views of Domino’s YouTube apology at the time of this article’s writing: 43,358.

Number of views on a single Web site featuring a video of Domino’s employees putting peppers in their noses: >130,000.

Social Media != Advertising

For the non-geeks, “!= ” means “does not equal,” in that social networks are not acceptable breeding grounds for one-sided conversations. Here’s looking at you, Aquafina MySpace. And you, Facebook “Ford Drives U.”

You can’t have a conversation with a car. You can’t talk about the latest movie with a bottle of water. An audience of users doesn’t sign up for a social network stream just to be bombarded with a series of promotional messages or thinly veiled advertisements. But that’s exactly what’s happening on landing pages like Aquafina’s bottled water MySpace and Ford’s… well… whatever Ford happens to be pitching on its Facebook page.

And it’s worse when entities like PepsiCo and Ford create these online presences and leave them to rot. Although the former has 9,728 fans and the latter 7,148, there’s absolutely no continued engagement. For all the work that was put into the admittedly meager network, there’s no follow-through whatsoever. Even having a water bottle talking to you is better than a water bottle that doesn’t want to be your friend after it has extended its hand/cap/label.

Social networks are a means for interacting with customers and building your brand while you tangentially engage in discussions that might not relate to your brand in the slightest. That’s why these bottled water and car pages just aren’t cutting it in the digital world. There’s no conversation, just advertising, and social media is not a new advertising medium. At least, not explicitly…

So what about the success stories?

You’ve read a lot! Stew on it. Research some funny marketing failures yourself. Chat about them with your friends. Avoid them in your business life. We’ll be back next week to show you a few examples of companies that rocked the social marketing space harder than a late ’90s music video.