The five deadly sins of social media…a few more

Jul 1, 2008 by Dirk Singer

Last week we talked about Joseph Jaffe’s five sins of social media and how brands and agencies often get it wrong by trying to take a traditional marketing template and apply it online. Our previous post is here, but in summary his five deadly sins were faking, manipulating, controlling, dominating and avoiding.

The online marketer has added two more:

Greediness: The Associated Press recently tried to charge bloggers for quoting AP articles in their posts – even if they used the odd sentence.

This caused a huge amount of stink online and very soon the AP was forced to pull back from its hardline stance.

The mistake the AP made was to think that they could a) control their online brand in the same way as their offline one and b) to imagine they could charge for something that actually does them a lot of good (people quoting them as a news authority):

“In the era of Google juice, link love, and a wealth of online information, the AP chose the path of restriction, as though this greediness would result in keeping all of the information under their roof.

“They had the opportunity to engage their readership, even empower the bloggers and other outlets who were distributing their content free of charge, but they trotted out the lawyers instead.”

Cowardice – Something which happened while I recently was in the States and which horrified me was the speed in which Dunkin Donuts caved into right wing blogger Michelle Malkin by yanking an ad. Malkin thought that US food personality Rachael Ray wore what she thought looked like a ‘jihadist’ scarf in the commercial.

“Instead of giving their customers some credit or engaging in a conversation about the merits of their arguments (or the absurdity of their opponent’s)…a conversation was passed up in favor of tucking tail and running.”

I’d like to add another another if I may!

Laziness: Bloggers are “pyjama clad geeks” with a ton of time on their hands and with space to fill. They’d like nothing better to write about our brand and print the release verbatim!

Virtual world citizens have had to put up with cr*p goods manufactured by amateurs, they can’t wait to get their computer generated hands on those familiar products they’ve grown to love!

People love messing around with their Facebook pages. It’s going to be cool to give them a whole load of widgets that ultimately get them to buy our wares!

Wrong, wrong and wrong. The assumption by some brands (encouraged by agencies trying to get their mitts on the cash) is that online targeting is easy. The opposite is of course true.

Bloggers can be very sensitive to any kind of approach, let alone one that’s akin to spam. Gamers in worlds such as Second Life are loyal to their home grown brands and see real world ones as intruders. And people have enough fun on social networks as it is – they don’t need brand created content to brighten up their days.

You can’t take people for granted online. Far from it, as thanks to the Internet they can kick up a huge fuss if they don’t like what you are doing.

That makes eight ‘deadly sins.’ Anyone care to chip in and add two more?!

Image – From the Online Marketer (who having posted about the sin of greediness, hopefully won’t sue me for lifting his picture!)