Now that it seems we get to live another day and the world continues to plough its mundane furrow in the anticlimactic penumbra of the conspicuously absent cataclysm promised by the Mayans, and the face-clenching blasts from the subarctic are passing at last, I am free once again to continue my peregrinations in and around the dark and occasionally moist terrain of planet social media.
Like so many of you out there on the 2nd January, I was guilted into involving myself in some puritanical health regimen to rejuvenate my battered alimentary tract and curtail my ever expanding girth. As ever, my efforts were short-lived and I was up to my fetlocks in value burgers before you could say neigh.
Now, as a raging carnivore and the sworn enemy of vocally-muscular vegetable folk, I wasn’t as outraged as some over the recent horse-in-burger-gate debacle, but Tesco inadvertently fell at the first fence when they failed to check on their scheduled content updates on Twitter. The innocuous ‘hit the hay’ metaphor would have been perfectly harmless if their burgers had contained traces of haddock, but alas it was the much-loved ungulate mammal so popular with descendants of the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha line, Clare Balding and the charming John McCririck. So, if you regularly schedule content, remember to keep on top of breaking news stories and always double check (before you trot off to bed, perhaps?) that contextually, your scheduled tweets aren’t going to make anyone bridle in disgust. Tesco were back in the saddle in no time and subsequently apologised, but it was really a case of shutting the stable door after the…haddock had bolted.
Once, or perhaps twice a generation, we are gifted with a truly inspirational songwriter who captures the zeitgeist and enriches the fabric of people’s lives. Their genius fires the imagination and spurs (no horse pun intended) the aspiring youth to emulate their hero and further extend the boundaries of high culture – but enough about me; The legendary, quasi-chameleonic and studiedly enigmatic music leviathan David Bowie, has pulled off something of a coup this month by managing to keep the recording and release of his new album and single a secret for over two years.
By employing a phalanx of deeply trusted confidants as his key personnel and utilising NDAs for the riskier parties, the whole project was conducted behind closed doors, including the eventual release of the single Where Are We Now. It’s a daring strategy and shows that not every huge product release necessarily needs to be processed via the tried and tested marketing machinery. As a caveat, it could also be the case that the element of surprise used here is perhaps something that only a mega-artist like Bowie can pull off, when he’s safe in the knowledge that he has a legion of die-hard fans in a constant frisson of expectation for his next exhalation. More predictably, Bowie’s cloak and dagger subterfuge only lasted as long as it took for Harry Hill to get his hands on the video for his new single:
IRN-BRU employed a similarly Bowie-esque approach when they launched their very amusing ‘Fanny’ campaign to little or no fanfare. Their agency Blonde released the video to a solitary Twitter user and asked them to go forth and multiply; within a month, the video had racked-up over a million views. The tracking methods used also threw up some very interesting results, especially the reach comparison between the use of Twitter in isolation and then with the addition of a couple of accompanying prime-time TV promotions.
Once again, it shows that content is king and as long as your raw materials are imaginative and well executed, Twitter will do the legwork for you without having to throw huge sums of money at what can end up being peripheral promotional material.
In other news, Yahoo! OMG were more likely to be crying Boohoo! FML, at the end of last year when in a supremely misjudged tweet, they requested that people share their condolences with Peter Andre after a family bereavement, by asking them to ‘like’ the status.
Although well-intentioned, this request unsurprisingly caused a certain amount of outrage, due to users being asked directly to attach a positive sentiment to Peter Andre’s personal tragedy. In essence, this unfortunate moment of embarrassment is down to a combination of the limitations of the current social media lexicon and lack of forethought from the person who posted the content. To their credit, Yahoo! OMG apologised very quickly and subsequently deleted it and the furore eventually subsided; but it’s certainly worth bearing in mind for charitable organisations and other brands dealing with sensitive and often upsetting calls to action in their social media campaigns, to review what they are asking people to ‘like’ and how they are asking people to engage with them.
To bring this month’s portion of sickening verbosity to a close, I wanted to mention something an esteemed colleague, craft beer connoisseur and erstwhile portraitist brought to my attention this week: During a period of well deserved R&R he happened to watch a repeat of a Family Guy episode first aired in 2011:
A few minutes after this clip, Stewie looks at his phone and says, ‘Aw man, Everyone’s already saying “Stewie just said that” on Twitter’. A quick scan of social media channels later, it was evident that Stewie wasn’t wrong and Twitter was awash with tweets linked to this episode. It’s interesting to see that the blind faith in the predicted behaviour of social-mediaphiles, and a clear understanding of how it all works was (and is) being used to great effect in such mainstream entertainment. As content producers steer their strategic vessels ever closer to complete social entertainment services, this is surely the tip of the iceberg.
Tempero on Google+
