WTF JC Penney!
What did brands learn from the Motrin Mom fiasco? Obviously nothing! JC Penney’s attempt at using social media to tap consumers’ interest, specifically the female shopping, is yet another fumble by big brands.
Smartblogs post on brands social media campaign at SXSW, pointed out JC Penney’s “Doghouse” video went viral to the point of servers crashing. Some will argue bad PR is better then no PR, but I disagree.
What did JC Penney and Motrin do wrong with social media?
Advertising has and always will play off of stereotypes and social generalizations. It’s never really ok. JC Penney and Motrin social media campaigns took stereotyping to the extreme. It went from playful joking (which is never innocent) of men trying to find the best gift for their female counterpart to bashing male intelligence. More specifically, here’s what’s wrong with the video:
Stereotype 1: Folding laundry and household chores are forms of male punishment. I know many dual working families who split the household chores. I know many men who are better at folding laundry and cleaning then their female spouse. Does this belittle a man’s intelligence? If household chores are form of “punishment”, then what where woman in the 1940’s being punished for? I highly doubt single men or single dad’s view the laundry as punishment for not meeting a woman’s demands.
Stereotype 2: Woman make all the rules, men are only there to please. Thank you Saatchi and Saatchi for making it appear that all woman’s liberation did was form a band of demanding, spiteful, man hating woman. I am so proud of one of the top American advertising agency’s can portray woman in such an insightful and intelligent role as a bitch.
Stereotype 3: Men have no idea how to buy gifts or make a woman happy. The joke of a man never buying the right gift is overrated and not funny. In fact, men and woman a like have problems gift buying in general. If the woman in the video walked around all day whining about the size of her thighs and on a constant diet, a thigh master would seem perfectly acceptable gift. Why wouldn’t it? I don’t see men jumping over joy to get a wrench for Christmas, it just means more work for them to do.
What JC Penney Should Have Done
JC Penney most likely approached Saatchi and Saatchi to create a social media campaign which would reach out to female buyers. The problem is Saatchi and Saatchi didn’t look at the campaign from positive generalizations or stereotypes. There are a dozen softer ways to play on the stereotype of gender based gift buying. The video could have depicted a man commanding his entire family on a secret mission to discover what mom wants for Mother’s day. Using product placement of JC Penney towels, apparel, fitness equipment, or cookware. For Saatchi and Saatchi, it shows limited creativity and consumer insight of their marketing team.
JC Penney has always been viewed as the family department store. Where a family together can get everything they need or want. This campaign contributes nothing positive to the JC Penney brand. Instead, it has hindered the brand from being the all American family store.
Copyblogging SUCKS!
Shannon Paul’s post on Ghostblogging found it’s way into my in box last week. As a person who has done an itty bitty “ghostblogging” work, I can both argue in favor and against her points.
One of Shannon’s strongest points, and one I agree wholeheartedly with, is the lack of authenticity with ghostblogging. Blogging is seen as the open door to someone’s mind. It’s personal branding yourself - whether you are a CEO, consultant, journalist, or student. Handing the blogging job off to someone else completely, looses that authenticity. There’s several things a ghostblogger cannot do for a client:
1) Be controversial: Some of the best ways to get your blog noticed, is to make bring a little controversial thought to the table. No matter how close your ghostblogger is to the organization, they will never have the authority nor the guts to make a profound statement. Blog posts will always stick to the general idea, staying to the safe side of the playground. Potentially loosing really great conversations.
2) Be the client: I don’t care how much you listen, read, or copy from a client’s “writing” style. Much like a fingerprint, each person has their own writing style. I will never write like Shannon Paul or Chris Brogan. Nor, will they ever write (or probably ever want to!!) like me. Blogging has personality to it, and so does your writing.
On the flip-side, reader expectations of blogs are getting out of hand. In order for a blog to even be visible, they have to appear on Google, Digg, Alltop, StumbleUpon, or any other of hundreds of social bookmarking sites. That requires CONTENT. Content takes TIME. Especially QUALITY. Chris Brogan can pop out three blog posts in a day but they are not high quality posts with well thought out arguments. Just conversation starters.
Social Media junkies scream for more corporate blogs. CEO’s, CMO’s, and COO’s do have to work you know? In general, it is unrealistic to expect CEO’s and leadership to take time out to blog. Did it make a sale? Did it increase workforce productivity? Sure, it’s cheap marketing. But then again, most CEO’s don’t control traditional PAID marketing. It’s delegated.
So if social media and blogging is part of the marketing component, then CEO’s should be able to hand it off like every other marketing tool. P&G has done a great job at social media, but they have front runner as their representative. David Knox is NOT the CEO of P&G.
It seems as though there is no win - win situation. Either corporations have an in house staff to control the social media content of the marketing mix, or they should just forget it. It’s unrealistic to expect top leadership who already manage a career and family to add blogging into their mix. Unless you love to blog like you love to run, ghostblogging is here to stay.
Why Copy / Ghostblogging SUCKS!
If your blogging for anything other then yourself, it sucks. Here’s why:
1) Better be a journalist or english major. Blogging doesn’t require a journalism degree, but your damned if you write less than par. Ironically, there a tons of blogs (Egos ones too!) who use horrible sentance structure and make no clear point. I don’t know how many times I have read a blog post by some egocentric big shot, and said “WTF did he just say?”.
Yet, if you are hired to blog, there is the expectation to write like a journalist.
2) Not all subjects are your forte: You may get stuck with finding and formulating opinions on subjects that are not within your expertise. Not being an english major, I can’t give you the definition of an adverb, but how many english majors can explain command line of sight and wavelength modulation. Until you really familiar with a subject, your post will lack substance.
3) Creativity killer: If you are constantly producing, producing, and more producing, creativity dies. Over abundance of blogging is like competing in multiple bodybuilding competitions, without adequate recovery time. Eventually your muscles (mind) becomes exhausted and worthless.
Everyone participating in social media needs to have a clear direction of their goals. If it is corporate marketing, then realize it’s going to take a team of people to be successful. Allocate adequate funds to support the mission.
If it’s personal branding, then decide if blogging 3 - 4x per week is something you want to dedicate to. Personal branding cannot be outsourced.
I Blog. Therefore I am a SuperHero!
You’re an industry success. You are an expert within the field. You’ve personal branded yourself in the “real” world. Everyone knows you, but not in social media. You start a blog to share your knowledge with others. You’re a SUPER HERO in the social media world!
How many times have we heard of professionals or industry experts have the expectation they will be another golden child of social media just by having a blog? To much of their frustration and dismay, they aren’t handed the crown immediately by social media junkies. They start to ask, “What am I doing wrong? I don’t get this Twitter thing. I have knowledge but why aren’t they listening?”
Social media experts come back with instructional blog posts of “How to use Twitter”, “Personal Branding”, and “Get a LinkedIn account”. Everyone listens, and sign up for all these accounts. What do they do: nothing. They sit there staring at it like Twitter gives you measles.
Real World vs. Social Media World
For lack of better terminology, let’s call people in corporate America who gains revenue from everything besides social media, as the “Real World”. “Social Media World” is the professionals who are building businesses centered around either developing social media platforms, evangelizing it, or as a consultant. Chris Brogan, Guy Kawasaki, Neenz, and Mark Zuckerb fall into this category.
What is extremely interesting is the number of real world professionals that try to cross over and expect immediate success. It just doesn’t happen. Regardless of how many bloggers and social media experts scream “Conversation” is the key, newbies still have the idea blogging once a week will equal instant success.
Pattern Of Social Media Immersion
There is a behavioral pattern of people entering social media. It typically starts with “I have a blog. Hear me roar!”. Great. Everyone has a blog including the neighbors’s pets. Realizing they are writing but no one is reading, they start searching out answers on how to have social media success.
They stumble upon Guy or Chris’s blog. Two of most successful social media professionals. They quickly get a Twitter account, LinkedIn, Facebook, and continue to blog. “I have a blog. I am Superhero!”. Again, they are lost because instead of looking at social media as a niche market, they just shove their blog posts at everyone.
Real world professionals don’t understand what it takes to have their success be transparent in the social media world. Why aren’t people engaging them? They get frustrated and pick one of the following paths:
1) Stick their nose up at social media and move back to real revenue making actions.
2) Hire a social media expert.
3) Keep blogging regardless if anyone is listening.
For the ones who have hired a social media expert, they probably are looking for someone to get their page views up. Beyond Hubspot’s king plan of meta tags, Google site maps, etc, there is the heart of what social media is about: conversation.
Professionals immersing themselves into the social media world, should treat it like it is a niche market. That’s all social media is. It is a niche market that maintains their own group values, decision making patterns, lifestyle similarities, morals, and behavioral patterns.
Traditional niche market groups require an outside agency to conduct research and population sampling to understand what drives the market. Social Media niche is putting it right out there in the open for you. You just have to listen and do it.
Niche Market Patterns
What is the key to breaking into the social media niche? Conversation. You can blog all day long, but if you are not joining the conversation on other blogs, Twitter, or LinkedIn, you will forever be invisible. Building a loyal customer, excuse me…readership base, is more than just keywords and meta tags. You have to go out like a street walker and talk to your customers…I mean readers. Engage them, entice them, yell profanities at them….Get their attention.
It takes a lot of work to stand on a street corner and start engaging. People like Chris Brogan make a CAREER of it. For the average real world professional, they struggle with work / social media balance. The social media niche really doesn’t care if you are sealing a multi-million dollar real estate deal today…they just care about the conversation on Twitter. Conversation is the key.
Get their attention, converse with them (OMG, actually reply on Twitter…REALLY!), and slowly start to build a presence. It is very hard for a real world professional to dominate the social media space since there are niche market experts who engage 24/7. Regardless, real world professionals have a wealth of information and knowledge to share. They can still have a substantial presence with some work and effort to join the conversation.
“Every substance is negatively electric to that which stands above it in the chemical tables,positively to that which stands below it” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
On the other side of the Social Media curve
Newsflash: Social Media is BIG.
Your response to that was probably less then ecstatic and more like “Um, ya. No Shit.” Because if you read this blog which is not SEO optimized, you probably have a blog of your own, Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, and YouTube account. You know what social media is, and you are engulfed in it everyday.
While working with several clients who cannot get their head around social media, I have noticed several trends. First, there is the social media in crowd and then there’s the “new-bees”.
Social media has become a virtual trade association. It’s a massive free networking event for social media users. If you weren’t blogging 5 years ago, didn’t get on Twitter in the first round, then you are not apart of the “inner” circle. Those who did, are deemed gurus or experts.
Sometimes I feel I am on the other side of the curve, trying to play catch up. If you read most of the web expert’s resumes or bio, they started blogging years ago, headed straight into web development, PR, or communications straight out of the gate from college. Now at the ripe age of 25-35, they are gods of social media. Like many others, I took a different route. My gate release was straight into the military. So while many of the social media “oldies” where blogging or working on web development during Sept 11th, I was apart of a 24 hour operations in support of OEF. Regardless of if I was there at the “beginning”, I am a user and player now. There are many like me, to which the social media cliches are failing to network with.
A virtual world built on minimal ROEs, now is inundated with social media acceptable web behavior. From how to effectively use Facebook, to what is the right way to use Twitter (who the fuck is in charge of the manual? You? FU! ), to what is a good “blog” and what is not, the rules of engagement of social media are growing exponentially. Sure they all started as suggestions, but now they are getting flung out there as rules. Chris Brogan hand slapped Twitter users from using auto reply messages.
Bloggers and Twitter users must now be careful not to seem to “self-seeking” but authentic. How is networking your skills using social media not authentic? Some people don’t want to share pictures of their kid’s dirty diapers on Flickr to portray “humanness”. Would you whip out the wallet pics at a trade show? Social media is nothing more than a big trade show for networking.
To the disbelief of most web savvy, there is a “real” world out that that doesn’t’ engage in social media. Even though more and more corporations are making a presence on the web, the majority of industry’s (with REAL skills) don’t need social media to survive. It’s about bricks and mortar. Making the sale, closing the deal, delivering product, following up, etc. Um, no where does social media help the average business in doing those fundamental business tasks. Those who started out from the beginning with Web 2.0, may want to be a bit more friendly to the new-bees. When it comes push to shove, the more people using social media, the more successful you are. Right? Might want to rethink the hand slapping instead embrace. Otherwise, people will quickly get turned off, and the CEO of Merck might just say FU.
If I asked who’s Pete Chasmore on Twitter, I would get an overwhelming response back. If I walk into the mall and asked, most people would provide a blank stare back. The web is still somewhat disconnected from mainstream society. It is still an industry, niche, and market. It does not reach everyone or all of us equally. Simultaneously, the young Gen Y or teens are growing up immersed in the web. They are the growing users of Facebook and YouTube. They will also change the web and how it is used. The social media experts of today won’t be old school news in 10 years. It’s a short term fame as developers create something new and in five years all the twenty somethings are using it, but the old school web 2.0 people aren’t. There will either be a shift in skill to move with the trends, develop your own platform (not just be a user), or embrace that one day you won’t be the guru but the learner instead.
To understand social media and how it is all interconnected doesn’t take a mechanical engineering degree. It’s as simple as making a presence, keeping a presence, and engaging in others. There’s no real brick being made by any one on the web except by the developers. Being a user doesn’t require much skill or intelligence. Amanda Chapel Tweets it best every time there is another news release of more layoffs “Company X just created 500 more full time bloggers.”
