Marketing Handy

The Camry Effect= Spam?

So the brilliant folks over at Saatchi and Saatchi LA decided to parade their highest profile client (Toyota) through the mud. Today Toyota (via Saatchi and Saatchi) ran one of the highest profile examples of what not to do strategically on Twitter.

Since everything has been pulled down and protected I will highlight what happened.

The strategy (It started to go wrong here)

Step 1: Get 10 twitter accounts for the Camry Effect verified by twitter (fine, awkward, expensive but ok.) verifications have been pulled but tweets about it still exist.

Step 2: Create a Sweepstakes that encouraged people to engage their friends and get them registered. (there are different schools of thoughts on this, I am ok with it… and this part was actually done well)

Step 3: Where it goes horribly wrong… Send the same message to thousands of people using the ‘@’ mention to let them know about the contest… Maxing out Twitter’s limits on Ten accounts.

Sub problem- The software tool they used (not naming because I refuse to tell people how to spam) didn’t allow for engagement.

Strategically they should have considered a few basic things

#1 Twitter has limits for a reason, and it isn’t because they are ideal… they aren’t.

#2 Users don’t want to be spammed even a cold mention can be off course

#3 Engagement is the foundation of Social media… its called Social for a reason

So how they should have gone after twitter:

Find every tweet about a Toyota product (with actual people reading them)
Engage the user specifically about that tweet in a way that shows it was read
If they engage back continue the conversation
Work in the Camry Effect into the conversation
Sub objective should be to solve customer service problems whenever possible…

Its not rocket science and, it was pretty easy to not mess this up. In short this is inexcusable. (This incident actually means I wont consider buying a Toyota until they dont make errors like this…Toyota could learn a lot from Ford)

Finally: Why I think Saatchi and Saatchi did this…

Their Super Bowl ad isn’t shareable… its good just not viral
Media measures success of an ad biased on Volume of social media posts
They thought they could force Social Media users to talk about their ad
They wanted to pad the numbers by using the same tactics as “Viral” videos for youtube. (That is another blog)

This highlights the problem with Ad Agencies that “do” Social Media for clients…In short they are not focused on customer service… PR folks have different but similar problems. There are ways to do this but the brand must be aware of the limitations and possible pitfalls. Each group has their own bend…