Human Botnets And Twitnets: Procter And Gamble Social Media Charity Experiment Leaves Sour, Soapy Taste
By Tom Foremski - March 12, 2009
The problem with social media is that if you try to manipulate it for marketing purposes it can blow up in your face and bite you in the butt (mashup metaphor #32).
Take a look at the Procter and Gamble experiment to sell "Tide" t-shirts. Brian Morrissey, Digital Editor at Adweek describes what happened:
This is what was going on last night at the P&G Digital Hack Night, when P&G got a bunch of agency types, media execs and others to troop to Cincy to perform for it. The idea: use social media to get people to buy Tide t-shirts –- some of the proceeds going to Feed America -- with an emphasis on "use." It was cooked up as a marketing exercise for the CPG giant’s army of brand managers to see the true power of social media.
@bmorrissey: The feel-good social marketing bribe
P&G asked people to use a hashtag on Twitter so that they could follow how this campaign developed and then develop marketing methods for using Twitter and other social media to promote hundreds of everyday products.
How did it go? More than 2,000 shirts were sold at $20 each by about 150 "media and marketing people."
Mr Morrissey reports: "This was a marketing exercise, nothing more, yet I wonder if it’s going in the wrong direction."
A lot of people agree. Nick, commenter on @bmorrissey wrote:
150 determined salespeople sold 2000 shirts in four hours? That's 13 each. I've seen better results from bake sales.
Further, I can only imagine most T-shirt buyers will feel suckered pretty quickly, knowing their interest and $20 was converted into a case study for the social media minds they diligently pander to.
But the bigger issue, for me, is the education issue. Clients still don't understand the fundamentals of digital. I hear it time and time again from frustrated companies. It's great P&G wants to help employees understand. But, as a learning exercise, you put 40 invitees into crisis mode to sell T-shirts for four hours? Is frenzied Tweeting the behavior you want to impress on clients as how you work for them?
At least everyone gets to post self-congratulatory blog entries about it.
Foremski's Take:
This is the conundrum facing PR and marketing people on social media. There are lots of PR and marketing gurus on social media. They do very well and they have lots of friends and followers. And they do well because they give out a lot of value. They give out lots of tips and links to information that helps others do their job.
But what happens if you try to convert that audience into an army of followers who are retweeting and blogging commercial messages on the behalf of paying clients? It's like the hackers that create botnets of thousands of infected PCs and then use them to broadcast millions of spam messages. Can you create a human botnet army? Or a Twitnet army?
No you can't, it won't work. And so here we have the conundrum of social media. Yes, you can rapidly gain a large number of "friends" and build a large Twitter following. But if you try to to sell access to that network to commercial enterprises you will run into trouble.
These days many PR firms advise their clients to hire them to build a large Facebook friends or Twitter following. This is not good advice, imho.
Corporations might have the status of an individual person in US law, such as freedom of speech, but in a social media context they will be seen as being in it for themselves with little to share except coupons and discount codes. That's value enough but it's not much more than is already available.
There is clearly value in creating a personal brand in social media but you can only do it by providing lots of value, and do it consistently. You cannot buy a personal brand. So what is the future for commercial brands in social media? What is the future for corporations wanting to buy a social presence?
For example, on Facebook, Seagate asked me to be its friend, to join its fan page etc. It might work if it was Hugo Boss but I'm pretty sure I don't want a social relationship with my hard drive. And I'm pretty sure other people feel the same way.
Commercial brands have to tread carefully in the social media space because missteps get magnified tremendously. I wonder how much the P&G experiment has left a sour, soapy taste in the mouths of many people.
(Hat tip to Gumshoo) Here is a Gumshoo 'toon.'
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Comments (5)
Social Media: an open-air market located at the intersection of voyeurism and narcissism, where the currency exchanged is cultural in nature and often has no value outside the borders of this odd collection of shops and huts.
The Tide effort was social media at its worst.
Posted: March 13, 2009 5:12 AM
Is this for real? Nobody is going to buy a $20 Tshirt in a recession no matter how it is marketed. They would have had at least a modicum of a chance for success if the offer was substantial, a year's supply of Tide for $100, $75 going to Feed America. Even that feels sleazy to me, but when you consider that trade show T-shirts end up at Goodwill within hours, their idea really needed a thorough washing before showing it in public.
Posted: March 13, 2009 10:09 AM
Tom--
I was at the P&G event the other night. I agree with your take that Seagate is going to have a tough time acquiring friends in Facebook, and those friends aren't exactly friends anyway.
But I don't think that was point of the Digital Hack Night, nor its take-away. For those who don't know the background, the event took the shape of game to raise money for charity -- use social networking tools to sell Tide t-shirts where all the profits went to charity.
Most interesting to me was this. A link to the charity went up on the front door of My Space; My Space has lots of visitors, but few would consider themselves "friends of My Space." At the same time, Dave Armano (who works at an ad agency, Critical Mass) has 15,000 followers in Twitter. They're not all his friends, per se, but they have a personal connection to him at some level through the human back-and-forth that the Twitter platform enables. Armano's much, much smaller -- but more deeply connected -- group bought more shirts for charity than the much, much, much larger group who visit My Space.
This isn't to say Armano or other high-influence personalities should be shilling products. They shouldn't and they risk squandering their influence if they do. (Though I'm all for them shilling charities!). But it does suggest that marketers will gain greater efficiency if they learn to be as smart at niche marketing as they are at mass marketing.
Posted: March 13, 2009 1:26 PM
Thanks Chas. But I still don't get the point of selling Tide shirts for charity why not give the charity all the money as some have pointed out.
I think P&G and others have learned some important lessons. One of them is that using charities to promote brands is becoming distasteful to many people, and I'm in that group.
Let brands support social media through traditional methods such as advertising or sponsorship. That's much more honest, imho.
Posted: March 13, 2009 2:56 PM
Lois:
I'm one of those people who bought a couple tee shirts. But it wasn't through Twitter or MySpace, but because a friend of mine at a research company emailed me the promotion and the timetable and I'm all for helping worthy charities at this difficult time.
I'm an agency person (but not for P&G) and we certainly agree that companies should never abuse social media for nefarious purposes. But I guess I'm not seeing the abuse here. If P&G used it to educate its people and, at the same time, give money to a good cause like Katrina victims, I'm okay with that. Am I missing something? Is the money not going to charity, as promised?
Posted: March 16, 2009 12:41 PM