Social Network With You? But I Don't Know You
Why advertisers shouldn't try to be your Friend
By Richard Whittaker, 12:17PM, Sat. Mar. 8, 2008
What were the shittiest social networking campaigns in recent memory? That's what the panel and audience at the The Suxorz were trying to work out.
2007 was a fabulous year for suckage: the "big ad" (which ClickZ Network's Rebecca Lieb called a great little movie, but a terrible ad, because no-one remembers what the product is. Carlsberg? Carlton? Carleson? Molson?); and Agency.com's horrible effort to get Subway's ad contract with a terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE attempt to bid a viral push for their business-to-business negotiations.
Everyone seemed to hate the idea of selling out blogging and other real networking sites for corporate. There was the horror of pay-per-post, where bloggers schill for corporations and sell out their souls in the name of spammage (Hewlett Packard won for doing this); Molson's desperate attempt to piggy-back off Facebook; the particular horror of the WalMarting across America blog; Whole Food's John Mackey posting on competitor's blogs and talk-back boards; and Cisco making their own Wikipedia entry about their "Human Network" brand (as Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine noted, the Wikipedia community corrected this "weeping sore.") Special props for Rudy Giuliani for not allowing friends on his MySpace page. Genius.
But wait: if this is a bunch of strangers sitting around and bonding over failed social networking strategies, isn't this panel social networking? Gah! Snake eating its own tail! Gah!
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