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Saturday SXSW '09

Suxorz ’09: The Ten Worst Social Media Campaigns

Saturday, March 14th at 05:00 PM
Presenters:
Henry Copeland – Blogads.com
Zadi Diaz – EPIC FU
Jeff Jarvis – What Would Google Do?
Michael Monello – Campfire
Sara Smith – Wonkette

1. Everybody’s doing it

2. Revenge of the Blogosphere

  • Hasbro Mattel vs. Scrabulous – the product they replaced it with was/is horrible
  • Skittles Twitter Campaign – homepage redirect to twitter/flickr/youtube, inappropriate comments posted. Site stolen from Modernista.
  • KFC Fired Blogger – kfcnation, has a game to kill the chicken. Blogger fired for sexual issues then documented on KFC property.*
  • “Joe the Plumber” Signs – make your own joe the plumber sign. “I am “so horny for” the “nude body of mccain” don’t tax me for working hard. Some of the sign suggestions were inappropriate.

3.  Revenge of the Blogosphere II

  • Belkin – Mike Bayer at Belkin went to Amazon Turk and posted an offer to pay 65 cents to positively review Belkin products. “Perfect storm of sleaze and stupidity”*
  • The Whopper Sacrifice in Facebook – ditch your facebook friends to get a free whopper. People got ditched for a hamburger.
  • Motorola Krave on Gadget Blogs – paid people to go to gadget blogs and astroturf – but they are transparent about it.
  • Rebuild the Party – Truck Nutz for all! Republican suggestion (digg-like) site for how to rebuild the party. There was no moderator for the suggestions.
  • Knocked Out of Pizza Place – Pizza Hut sponsored video for people to order pizza
  • delivered at another pizza place.

* Round Winners

Grand Prize Winner

  • Belkin fake reviews

Questions:
Good social media marketing out there?
Boost Mobile
Digg and Kevin Rose
People who aren’t doing campaigns, but just using it well (@comcastcares)
My Starbucks Idea, suggestions and voting

How do you determine is something sucks?
People who pollute, or willfully act dumb or sleazy

“If people are talking about it, it works” is not always true.

You have to advertise because your product is bad – you should shoot for your product to be your ad, and your customers should advertise your product because they like it.

Ads are a necessary evil, in some cases social chatter works, for some it doesn’t.