DASI

Twitter screen shot showing Habitat anger.

Part of my job is to know what’s going on in the giant melting pot that is the digital market place. The beauty of the medium is that news travels fast and if you take the time to look you’ll always find things to talk about, and generally people will listen. Of course the flip side is that if you get something wrong, you’re in for a proverbial shoeing of which this is a classic case in point.

If you didn’t see it last week, Habitat have been roundly slated for spamming people on Twitter by using the fash tags (#) to gatecrash the most popular trending topics. At its very worst this meant that offers for its furniture popped up amongst the discussions around the Iranian election. Unsurprisingly, this caused quite a stir, and is the kind of brand damage that will take more than a 10% voucher to undo.

Habitat sent an official apology to one of the blogs that first picked it up, which read:

“I know people have been waiting for a response tweet from us; we are treating this very seriously and wanted to offer a longer message.

We have been reading everyone’s comments carefully and would like to make a very sincere apology to any Twitter users who were offended.

The top ten trending topics were pasted into hash tags without checking with us and apparently without verifying what all of the tags referred to. This was absolutely not authorised by Habitat. We were shocked when we discovered what happened and are very sorry for the offence that was caused. This is totally against our communications strategy. We never sought to abuse Twitter, have removed the content and will ensure this does not happen again.

It has been really valuable to hear how users would like us to use Twitter and we are determined to do better for the Twitter community.”

Clearly something went seriously wrong somewhere along the chain of command here, and some very valuable lessons have been learnt. There wasn’t anything malicious in what they did, but it was naïve in the
extreme and as a result the very community they were trying to reach has absolutely voiced their negative opinion.

No brand should ever take social media for granted or make short cuts and expect anything more than at best short shrift. Thankfully these types of horror stories are few and far between, and there is nothing to fear in using social media for your brand, providing you do so with respect for the people that use it. There are some fantastically knowledgeable people out there now who can show you the ropes, but it will take some time: just because it’s free does not mean it’s easy.

The IBM Wimbledon campaign is generally one of their flagship online projects of the year. I’ve been involved in a couple of them in a previous role and there’s always a huge amount of effort that goes into them. This year, they’ve done something different, as the video above shows. They’ve developed a nice app for the Google Android phone, which utilises its camera,  internal compass and GPS function in a way which effectively gives the impression of image recognition.  It’s a nice project, and to me it’s just another example of how much the market has shifted in the last 18 months. The 2007 Wimbledon project was a celebration of 3D and rich media; I’m not sure there was any interaction with the users at all.  This couldn’t be further from this year’s focus which is complemented by a range of social media activities.

This shift is something every client needs to be aware of when considering their agency partners, and is an area I’ve been banging on about to anyone who’ll listen (I had a letter printed in Media Week a couple of weeks back on this very subject). Many agencies had to play catch up in terms of staff and structure when the digital land grab really kicked in, and this was an expensive and time consuming process. The problem is that the market has continued to evolve at a frankly mind -blowing rate and those agencies that had invested heavily in being able to offer the high-end microsite and super rich production of 2007 are now potentially again geared incorrectly for today’s world.  The danger to the client is that agencies by their very nature will, on the whole, want to sell what is in their ‘tool kit’  and if their agency of choice is still trying to catch up, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be getting the best solution to your brief.

What this all means to the client is that knowing your potential agency partners inside out is key. It’s a market of incredible choice, so being thorough in terms of research and asking a few probing questions has never been of more importance.

Ford Fiesta First Date from Beto Lopez on Vimeo.

I picked up this story: http://ping.fm/WgHZV  off a tweet from the nice chaps at neoco, and it’s a decent example of how big brands are starting to really go after the social angle. 

In a nutshell, Ford in the US have given 100 people new Ford Fiestas to use in their day to day lives for the 6 months leading up to launch. Each of the ‘agents’ (as they are calling the test drivers) are documenting their adventures through a variety of social networking sites. To keep it more interesting than pictures of boots, sorry, trunks,  full of shopping they all have a range of ‘missions’ to complete – some of which were suggested by the public. The whole thing is packaged in a suitably dramatic title ‘The Fiesta Movement’. 

My personal opinion on this is a little mixed, it does feel a little too ’forced’ to me; the agents in the majority are annoyingly good looking and and it feels a little OTT so I get a slight ‘corporate attempting to be cool’ feel, but that might actually just be the American tone (have a look at the Dodge Ram challenge for another example) which to a Brummie like me is fairly alien.

It is undeniably though, a bold move at an incredibly difficult time for the automotive industry and they should be applauded as such. It wasn’t so long ago that this campaign would have been a very pretty but ultimately identikit full 3D minisite- full of flashy video and loading bars to boot.. 

As a final note, interestingly, Ford now have a ‘head of social media.’ I’d fully expect to see a few more of them in the next few months.