Imagine you work in the marketing department of a noodle company. Your corporation provides “quick, easy and healthy meal solutions with broad consumer appeal” (even Don Watson would be proud of that corporate philosophy). Your job is to sell more noodles. You’ve made a name for yourself flogging rice crackers to the female snacking demographic and word from management is the ‘poor male uni student demographic’ is untapped. Your research tells you that they like MTV and they respond to online, so there’s no possible chance you’re going to be able to launch a campaign unless there’s some sort of social media marketing component. You and management don’t really understand how the whole social networking thing works, but you know it’s cool and everyone else is doing it (not to mention the competition), so you do some research and decide to give it a shot.

After months and months of collaboration with the big-name advertising agency, some sizeable cheques, a few prayers, plenty of late-night meal solutions, and some rapturous applause, you come up with Pimp My Kettle. Everyone tells you it’s a great idea, people can watch episodes of a pretend TV show based on the MTV hit and then they can join the site and create a profile to get information about how they can participate in a charity auction to buy kettles pimped by celebrities, all the while being exposed to your brand. You can even get the dude from Mythbusters to do the voiceover; how could the demographic possibly NOT identify and respond! You love it, the agency is proud of it, the boss is happy. It looks great and people are saying the art direction is brilliant. The launch party is a hit and gee-whiz, those pimped out kettles look great in the foyer of company HQ, almost like, gasp, trophies, in a cabinet. The agency is even talking about entering it at Cannes for a Cyber Lion!

The launch date comes, the tech guys do their thing and Pimp My Kettle goes live. You sit back and wait for the sales figures to start going through the roof and update your LinkedIn profile (you learnt about that one in the social networking crash-course the agency gave you) to make sure it’s easy for the headhunters from Nestle to come knocking, but not so easy that management from your company knows what you’re up to.

Two weeks go by, nothing… A few friends of the creative team at the agency and a couple of your cousins have joined up to the site, but it’s been a bit quieter than you thought it would be. No matter, Google alerts (another thing you picked up from an online marketing blog) are telling you that people are starting to talk about your campaign, it’ll all be good, surely. Just a bit of lag time until it all kicks in.

A couple more weeks go by and critics start pointing out that the whole idea was ripped-off a YouTube rip-off of a rip-off. Out there in the blogosphere the demographic is yawning; people are saying that the whole ‘pimp-my’ thing has like, so been done before. Orders from Woolies and Coles are up, but word from sales is that product isn’t exactly flying off the shelves and word at the pub is that the guys over at Maggi are about to launch a TV campaign with a bunch of Olympic stars who claim that their noodles are the key to their success in Beijing; you hate those fuckers ’cause they have enough cash to pull stunts like that all year, but you only had enough budget to run Pimp My Kettle in prime-time for two months.

But that’s the brilliant thing see, even though your brand can’t afford the TV spend throughout the whole year, the website is going to keep working for you for at least the next 12 months, that’s the POWER of social media. In fact, you don’t even NEED TV because the Gen Y doesn’t even watch TV anymore anyway (that Forrester Research survey confirmed it).

Jeez, imagine if it really took off and became a fad, like the ‘Will it Blend‘ stuff. It could SO happen! The focus groups loved the content, it even made your mum laugh and she doesn’t laugh at anything, imagine if you started a whole new trend in kettle-pimping, it could take off around the world and imagine what that would do for the brand! The reach would be phenomenal and everyone would know it was your baby.

OK, LOL, so that probably won’t happen, but man, you’re using social media in a real proper tie-in campaign, you should be super-proud. In fact, you probably should put that on your resume; ‘implemented social media marketing campaign to boost product sales by X%’. No wait, better make it ‘XX%’! Screw that, make it ‘XXX%’ you can fill in the exact figures later, when you find out what they are. They’ll be three figures for sure - that’s the power of social media! There’s just no way this could possibly go wrong.