We’re about to launch a major new campaign/initiative for a client of ours, if all goes well it’ll get a bit of national press and we should get a few hundred thousand people involved. The press, if we get it, will be nice, but I’m far more excited about actually helping this particular organisation get back in touch with its customers, take on board some feedback, create a community of users, and at the end of the day, make some money.

What we’re doing is social media #101, but the funny thing is, you’d be hard pressed to recognise it as such. You see, the client won’t be starting a Twitter account, they won’t be blogging about their experience, they won’t have a Facebook page, no photos will appear on Flickr, we won’t touch the company Wikipedia article and YouTube won’t play a part. In fact, there isn’t a scrap of traditional social media involved in this social media campaign, and you know what, I think we’ve come far enough down the digital highway for that statement to not be an oxymoron. I feel a bit like those particular sites are stepping stones on the social media path, tourist attractions if you will, the big bananas of the digital world. Politicians and interested surfers with too much time on their hands use them as pit-stops on the information super-highway because they’re there, because they think they have too, even if, like Anna Bligh, they end up with 14-year-olds on their MySpace leaving such poignant messages as: “its good ur trying 2 reach the next generation of voters and all but you really need 2 get more friends. just a heads up.”

Sure, MySpace still has lots of users and everyone’s on Twitter or Facebook these days, I’m not saying those sites are so far past their prime they’re irrelevant, but they just weren’t the right tools to help this particular client engage their audience and treat their customers like friends, so fuck ‘em.

DP Dialogue is a member of the American Word of Mouth Marketing Association - it means we get a little logo to put in places, but more importantly, we get access to lots of cool articles and resources related to word of mouth and social media marketing. This morning their daily newsletter threw up this little gem about the most valuable and under-used social media strategy - customer reviews; in particular, negative ones. It’s worth a read, and quite timely I think. We’re certainly putting it into practice.

What about you?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 at 11:29 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.