Authenticity v. Control

There is an excellent article available online from the LA Times that details Jack in the Box's recent forays into the arena of social media. The company's Hang In There Jack campaign was launched on mainstream media (a Super Bowl ad of all things) and told the story of the company's fictional CEO (Jack) slipping into a coma after being struck by a bus. In the months since, consumers have been encouraged to discuss Jack's imminent death (or coming miraculous recovery!) on the campaign's microsite, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, etc. Basically, the whole gamut of Web 2.0 golden children. A few weeks ago, Jack was revived and helped usher in the company's total branding overhaul (which includes the spiffy new logo below).


The author compares JitB's results to the experiences of Skittles during their recent attempts to bring social media and their brand closer together. In each case, the brand's experienced a surge in traffic and generated content, though not always in a positive manner.

For example:

"Alexut from Utah wrote: 'Jack in the Box killed people. They have poor sanitary habits and spread disease across the nation. Plus it's disgusting food.'

And of course a thousand variations of "Jack sucks!," which is a less than optimum take-away from a marketer's perspective.

What's going on here? Call it the search for authenticity."

Both cases highlight the potential and the pitfalls of allowing your brand to be placed in the hands of the public. Sometimes, a marketer can successfully engage with consumers at a level that is more personal, and arguably more meaningful than ever before. And on the other hand, the brand can find itself the victim of online vandalism. It is an issue of control, and willingness to let go. Do you trust the public enough to take care of your brand, or do you need to censor their ability to interact with it?

The problem is that these sort of brand excursions are still a novelty. They attract the masses, yes, but (in many cases) not out of interest for the brand, rather out of the ability to be heard in a non-traditional space. When the novelty of the situation wears off- much like the growing stability of Wikipedia articles -then the trolls that bark out profanity on a candy website will move along to the next venue. The results, luckily, have drawn large enough numbers to encourage an uknown number of brands to follow the JitB and Skittle lead (right now, unseen by us, dozens of marketing teams are drafting replicant ideas), and this growing familarity brings both good and bad. Good, in that the trolls will either be less focused, or less amused by their own actions once these sorts of campaigns become more commonplace. And bad, when the ideas become dampened by me-toos and thus, less astoundingly effective in generating traffic volume.

A Requisite Twitter Post

I would be remiss if I did not mention Twitter at some point. To be perfectly honest, I am no expert on the tool. I know how it works. I have an account. I have even tweeted (twought?) from time to time. But, perhaps due to some deficiency in myself, I cannot seem to grasp what is so darn essential about the bare little updates this application beams out.

I understand the ease of use. I understand the possibility to reaching a large audience. But, I just cannot see where it is all headed (for the moment). Sure, there is the potential to crowdsource instantaneously (I can see the value in that), but as a colleague explained it to me, the marketing future of Twitter lies ability to tweet "I want chewing gum", and instantly receive a handful of tweets concerning the best places to buy chewing gum within your neighbourhood'. As he explained it, advancements are in development that will allow an advertiser to pick out any number of keywords from the massive pool of tweets in their area, and tweet back a customized message.

'Great', I said. 'That sounds a bit like spam.'

Maybe- coming back to Mr. Shirky's point - the problem lies in our proximity to the application's birth. Like he said, the truly world-shaking advancements are impossible to recognize until we have the benefit of five to ten years of reflection. In hindsight, it is easy to say, 'Yes, the internet changed everything', but that statement was maybe a more dubious gamble in 1992. The important point is not to understand Twitter (can you ever fully understand anything?), but to make a conscious effort- with the help of logic and insight -to model and assess it.

Which is exactly what Denis Hancock, and a few others, have been trying to do recently. In a recent article he attempts to compare the different ways various brands seem to be using Twitter to communicate with their prospective customers. He notes that some brands take a very personality-based approach, ensuring the tweets carry a singular, individual voice (maybe of an Executive, or a PR Rep), while others tweet in an expansive brand-voice. Hancock explores the potential strategies behind these early decisions and weighs the possible pros and cons of each. Definitely worth reading.

Courtesy once again of BoingBoing.net, here is a short video for all the confused people out there who doubt the hype. It doesn't offer any insights, but its sort of cute. And cute can be good:

"Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism."

Clay Shirky has written, with much more erudition and clarity than myself, a piece on the familiar topic of the dying newspaper. Rather than suggesting industry-saving answers, or speculating on what will replace the medium were it to ever die off completely, Shirky concedes that he does not know where things are headed. He argues that no one does:

"With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem [...]

The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen."

Please, take some time to read the whole thing. It's witty. Engaging. And surprisingly direct. I had never heard of Mr. Shirky until today, but I will be sure to check out his other (and there appear to be many) articles scattered about the web and housed on his site. Here's another little bite of his philosophy, taken from a speech delivered at SuperNova 2007: