What are the best and worst possible outcomes of your social media activities? Success and failure in the socio-sphere are hard to express in figures, but this week the internet has given us a convenient matched pair of real life high and low performance benchmarks, courtesy of (respectively) the Old Spice Guy and Gillian McKeith.
Yesterday, former You Are What You Eat presenter McKeith (or whoever manages her Twitter account) referred to Bad Science – a book that raises questions about her qualifications, expertise and methods – as "lies". When Dr Ben Goldacre, the author of the book, politely asked her to retract the comment, McKeith (or her people) deleted the offending tweets (without apologising), removed the Twitter link from her website and started claiming that @gillianmckeith was not her official Twitter account.
Oh dear. What's said can't be unsaid, what's read can't be unread, and there is no undo button for the internet. According to Jack of Kent, a legal blog, Dr Goldacre would be well within his rights to sue McKeith for libel. I'm sure you'll agree that being sued for libel is one of the worst possible outcomes of a social media strategy.
While all this was happening, the Old Spice Guy (real name Isaiah Mustafa) was standing topless in a shower room, recording personalised videos for social media users that had written about or otherwise engaged with Old Spice online. He compared Perez Hilton's blog to Mt. Everest on top of a skyscraper, flirted with Alyssa Milano and even proposed to one Twitter user's girlfriend for him (she said yes).
Old Spice already had viral credo. Soon the internet was talking about nothing else.
The strategy targeted a healthy mix of influential bloggers and more casual social media users, rewarding them materially for interacting with Old Spice, but not ramming the brand down anyone's throat. Will Old Spice sell any more shower gel as a result? We'll see – but the whole Old Spice Guy campaign has done wonders for their brand perception.
So how about from now on, instead of inventing metrics like 'Klout', we just aspire to 'do an Old Spice' while studiously avoiding 'doing a McKeith'?
15 July 2010
The libellous tweet and the topless man
What are the best and worst possible outcomes of your social media activities? Success and failure in the socio-sphere are hard to express in figures, but this week the internet has given us a convenient matched pair of real life high and low performance benchmarks, courtesy of (respectively) the Old Spice Guy and Gillian McKeith.
Yesterday, former You Are What You Eat presenter McKeith (or whoever manages her Twitter account) referred to Bad Science – a book that raises questions about her qualifications, expertise and methods – as "lies". When Dr Ben Goldacre, the author of the book, politely asked her to retract the comment, McKeith (or her people) deleted the offending tweets (without apologising), removed the Twitter link from her website and started claiming that @gillianmckeith was not her official Twitter account.
Oh dear. What's said can't be unsaid, what's read can't be unread, and there is no undo button for the internet. According to Jack of Kent, a legal blog, Dr Goldacre would be well within his rights to sue McKeith for libel. I'm sure you'll agree that being sued for libel is one of the worst possible outcomes of a social media strategy.
While all this was happening, the Old Spice Guy (real name Isaiah Mustafa) was standing topless in a shower room, recording personalised videos for social media users that had written about or otherwise engaged with Old Spice online. He compared Perez Hilton's blog to Mt. Everest on top of a skyscraper, flirted with Alyssa Milano and even proposed to one Twitter user's girlfriend for him (she said yes).
Old Spice already had viral credo. Soon the internet was talking about nothing else.
The strategy targeted a healthy mix of influential bloggers and more casual social media users, rewarding them materially for interacting with Old Spice, but not ramming the brand down anyone's throat. Will Old Spice sell any more shower gel as a result? We'll see – but the whole Old Spice Guy campaign has done wonders for their brand perception.
So how about from now on, instead of inventing metrics like 'Klout', we just aspire to 'do an Old Spice' while studiously avoiding 'doing a McKeith'?
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