My take on P&G Digital Hack night - hated it
Friday, March 13, 2009 at 3:07PM Kevin Doohan I have lots of good friends who participated in the Tide social media night. They include both P&G peeps and agency folk. Looks like they all had fun, that the P&G marketers learned, and that a charity benefitted. That's a win-win-win. And I'm not jealous Peter Kim. I can meet with most of the people who participated anytime I want, especially those that are good friends. I've also been invited to talk with P&G marketers as recently as last week so I'm not feeling left out at all.
That said, I didn't really like the Tide exercise. It ruined the vibe in my social neighborhood for several hours. I resented Tide doing a live experiment that I couldn't escape from without shutting down my social tools. I issued a snarky post, I'll admit it. When I did, I received more than one direct message from friends who were participating advising patience and that it was just an experiment. Seems that even some of the participants knew the exercise was super annoying but they were whoring out their friend lists and networks for the P&G marketing lab anyway. The messaages kind of reminded me of an NPR pledge drive except for the fact that NPR *gives me so much* every day that I don't resent the time needed to solicit pledges at all. P&G wasn't giving me any value here and they haven't built up the daily goodwill and personal connection that I have with NPR. Tide was just sucking up my neighborhoods social bandwidth and filling what was left with offers where I have the opportunity to pay them money to wear the Tide logo and make a tiny contribution to charity.
P&G friends please forgive me but..... I didn't want a Tide t-shirt. I'm all good on charitable contributions and not looking for additional opportunities to give. I was bummed that the quality of the content from people I follow went to zero for several hours during the exercise. I'm glad P&G marketers learned but it left me liking P&G less for doing it. Whether it is for charity or not is immaterial, it's just annoying uninvited brand messaging being thrown at me by typically awesome folks who were temporarily Tidejacked and it makes me less a fan of Tide (and in some ways, the participants) than I would be otherwise.
Kevin Doohan
Check the comments link below for more discussion on what I'm calling the Tidejack. Thanks for reading! Please leave comments of your own if you're inspired.
Digital Hack Night, P&G, marketing, social marketing, tide 
Reader Comments (4)
Good, honest, personal assessment, Kevin. I'm one of the guilty parties, as you know. I did give this a lot of thought before/during/after the exercise - I worried that I was abusing a carefully-crafted network that means more to me and my company than selling a few shirts at a client's event. At the end of the day I felt that readers would either understand or ignore for this one night. You have a couple of interesting angles here; let me try to sway you back a little.
At the end you say that the biggest negative is that the "quality of content" went to zero for several hours. This makes sense, and helps remind me that I'm a "channel" and that people are out there expecting good, quality content. We're like television stations or magazines. But are you angered when you tune into a favorite network late at night and there is an infomercial on? Do you get pissed at the "special advertising sections" that appear in a favorite magazine? Like me, I'd guess you just turn the channel or page. On the other hand, maybe you're expecting a whole lot more from the Twitter channel and personalities, which is great and worthy of more discussion.
Second, you use the analogy of a "neighborhood" above, which is also interesting. To me, our outreach was a little like the neighbor's kid coming over to sell Girl Scout cookies or raffle tickets for the basketball team. These requests are a mix of cute and annoying, but most people chalk it up as a give-and-take of being a good neighbor and buy a box of cookies or a few tickets. We realize that the kids don't like having to go around and knock on doors, either, and we figure it's a small favor in the rainy day bank that we can use when we need to borrow a cup of sugar or snow blower.
The world of Twitter, Facebook, etc. is still evolving, but I hope that social networks can allow for some of this blatant favor trading. I like being a "content channel" but I would rather be a social media neighbor that can give and take personal favors once in a while. That said, I'll admit that maybe the particular cause and loud pleas of this event were over the line. By sharing your reaction you help establish the "norms" in this very new area!
Bob
Bob, thanks for your thoughts and for the time you took sharing them here. I’m not swayed all that much… I know if I was there I would have participated in the Tidejack possibly being swept up by the thrill of competition and team energy. I bet though that I’d feel guilty later when I realized I donated the priceless asset of the attention I’ve earned online over several months or years to P&G for marketing training. I can see how one night stand analogies have come up in other blogs.
I think about individual as channel frequently. This social stuff is *really* personal. I feel like I get to know people over twitter in particular because of the frequency of tweets produced and because they often contain very personal content.
Part of my beef as an observer of the social media Tidejack is that it wasn't authentic and personal. It was a corporate exercise at the core. If you individually asked me to donate to the cause of your choice, something that was important and personally meaningful for you, I would do it immediately. I do it all the time even though, like I said in earlier post, I’m really not looking for more charity opportunities. I would contribute just to be a good friend. The Tidejack teams’ requests for help were issued as part of an enormous cloud of like requests to buy branded tees that happened to include a charity. I bet none of the agency participants would choose Loads of Hope as a primary cause independently. The requests came off as impersonal and hollow as a result.
Regarding behavior in the neighborhood and the girl scout analogy, I’m the dude in the neighborhood who doesn’t answer the door and my house becomes known as “chez cranky bastard” during the sales drive. The good news for me is that when I don’t answer the door, my house is not surrounded by more and more girl scouts. They don’t increase in numbers and start looking in my windows and yelling or holding signs in my front yard so it’s fine. A couple doorbell rings and it’s over. They are easily ignored by a curmudgeon like me. With the Tidejack, all of a sudden I was surrounded by Tide t-shirt messages across all the channels I use and it lasted for hours. So it was considerably more annoying than the occasional girl scout cookie seller’s doorbell ring.
BTW, I realize that part of the reason I was surrounded by t-shirt offers is that I have so many wonderful friends who are part of P&G or connected to P&G in some way. I’m thankful for those friends and I am sharing my thoughts so we can all improve our efforts in the future.
Kevin (@kdoohan)
I helped out on this experiment with gusto, and still don't know how to feel about doing it. I like that a worthy cause benefited from my connections, but I struggle with pimping a corporate effort into my social connections.
I'm reminded of what another agency hack said about facebook's ad experiments: it's like everyone's at the dinner party, having a great time, when someone walks in and starts asking everyone if they'd like to buy his stuff. Everyone goes: "Who invited the asshole?"
Kevin, I think this is coming regardless, and while TV without ads would have been nice for the last 60 years, it wouldn't have enabled the medium's growth.
Perhaps a few ideas on how to do this right:
- Policy: architect the social profiles beforehand to allow solicitation, or not, and from whom
- Announcement: make an obvious disclaimer / warning of solicitation up front to prevent confusion with a voluntary/individual endorsement
- Transparency: disclose incentives for endorsement as a precondition to doing so.
Michael
Cheers,
Maybe the "meta lesson" in social marketing is that you can't treat all of your friends the same way - or risk losing some in the process. We participants used our channel to push a message the same way to everyone, versus picking and choosing among the friends/neighbors who would be most interested.
That could be a way for digital social networks to evolve. Facebook is doing some interesting things with allowing you to "turn down" the number of updates from people who you are not as close to.
One final thought, it's too bad that there is no one central place where this conversation about the P&G event can occur. Many of us are independently blogging, tweeting and commenting, but a central discussion space would be valuable to capture all of these lessons. Maybe an idea for next year's event :)