By Doug Lacombe, MBA
The landscape of digital marketing is littered with road-kill. Companies who thought they were doing good, clever, creative things, but, like rubes at the ball, were completely unaware of their social media gaffes until it was too late.
Digital marketer and social media author Darren Barefoot, principal at Capulet Communications, delighted the sold-out CMA crowd with tales of woe from the realm of social media marketing.
Like the classic Cardinal Sins (you know, from the Bible), Sloth, Envy, and so on, these “Seven Deadly Sins of Social Media Marketing” are best avoided unless you hope to roast in that special hot place for bad marketers.
The examples cited by Barefoot are enough to make a marketer get down on his knees and repent. Sinful acts like bragging about a social media campaign, but not really doing it; lesson? Show, don’t tell. Or the Motrin “baby-wearing” campaign, the backlash to which became known as “Motrin Moms” – the lesson being, watch your tone. Or how about those press-release spammers blocked and called out by journalists Chris Anderson (editor in chief of Wired Magazine) and Gina Trapani (founding editor of Lifehacker.com, a leading tech blog)?
The hit list goes on to cover failures to monitor the social web (blew up in Dominos face in a recent crisis where employees did bad things to food on YouTube), bad shepherds leading to bad or boring communities, social media communities abandoned or starved of resources and creating digital ghost towns (Toyota’s Facebook fan page for example), and finally, the granddaddy of all sins, deceit, exemplified by falsified product reviews and “astro-turfing” (phony grassroots organizations created by lobby groups or agencies).
Barefoot’s upcoming social media marketing book “Friends With Benefits” (co-written with partner Julie Szabo) will detail the flipside – what you can and should do in social media marketing. And Capulet’s Social Media Marketing Boot Camps are a good solid day of training on the do’s and don’ts of digital marketing.
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Doug Lacombe is President of communicatto, a digital marketing and PR agency that helps companies meld traditional and digital media. More on Doug can be found at http://www.communicatto.com.
