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Is authenticity in social media an infallible truth?
May 1st, 2008 • 1 comment Uncategorized
Tags: authenticity, glossblog, transparency
There’s a great discussion going on over at glossblog.ca about the marketing for the film Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
The campaign includes a phony blog, in which one of the characters in the film writes about how Sarah Marshall has broken his heart.
Rayanne Langdon, who works with us here at com.motion, wrote a post on glossblog, where she gave the campaign a thumbs up because it raises awareness and gets people talking.
That post generated a comment from Mary-Margaret Jones of Thornley Fallis’ PR Girls blog, who strongly disagreed. Mary-Margaret said the campaign was “inauthentic from the get go” because it wasn’t clear that it was a character blog. In the realm of social media marketing, she wrote, that “hurts.”
To be sure, the No. 1 rule in social media marketing is that transparency and authenticity must prevail. But once you know the rules, isn’t it okay to break them once in a while?
Take this example of a completely non-transparent social media campaign that worked. Millions have watched this YouTube video of Australian party boy Corey Delaney:
After Corey became a worldwide bad-boy celeb, the Aussie blog Random Brainwave set up a MySpace page pretending to be Corey. Media called seeking interviews; the Random Brainwave guys complied; and their website got loads of attention and (presumably) loads of new readers.
No, they weren’t transparent. No, they weren’t authentic. But as a fringe website, they could get away with it where a big brand, like say, Wal-Mart, could not. I’m usually the guy telling my clients that authenticity is critical. And 99.9 per cent of the time, it’s the absolute truth. But aren’t we still too early in the evolution of social media marketing to be talking about indisputable truths?
With more than 15 years of digital communications experience, I've delivered award-winning and sophisticated marketing solutions for Fortune 500 corporations, major government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and household-name consumer brands. I ensure the successful execution of digital and social media business strategies to build profitability and grow market share on behalf of our clients. I stay abreast of relevant new technologies in the Web 2.0/social media space in order to contribute a point of view while remaining focused on ROI to drive the right message to the right people at the right time.
I’ve been working in or around the social media revolution since 2005 and I am grateful to be exploring this new media landscape with com.motion’s clients. As managing director, my role is to guide our clients through the use of new technologies and to provide innovative ways to engage their stakeholders online. Shiny new Web 2.0 toys are great to play with but our recommendations are always strategic and focused on reaching the right people, with the right message across the right channels.
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