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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.

Update on Saturday, March 14, 2009 at 6:39AM by 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.