Thursday, 5 March 2009
Mashable Twitter Brand Sponsors - A Lousy Idea
Mashable, one of my favourite online social media news blogs has just launched a new Twitter Brand Sponsors program.
The concept as far as I can tell involves various brands signing up to be ‘twitter’ sponsors, having their logos and Twitter profiles displayed with the understanding that this sponsorship will get more users commenting, and twittering about them on twitter. Mashable explains the program as follows:
Every month, Mashable features brands that want to engage with the social media community.
We think companies that speak directly to their communities are the best brands around: we would love for you to Tweet our Twitter Brand Sponsors with your feedback on their products and services…and so would they!
I agree that the brands that speak to their customers are better of than those that ignore them, but is artificially encouraging the Mashable Twitter-user audience to up their ‘twittering’ on these brands the best way to achieve this? I don’t think so.
The whole point of brands actually getting involved in things like twitter is to open up a genuine, frank and transparent dialogue with potential and existing clients. Why would having these ads advertised in this program encourage me to tweet more about them? Should I just make up anything to say about them because they are sponsors?
I’ll twitter about a brand when I feel I have a genuine cause and reason to. I might raise a concern, whine about their service, rave about their new products, but I will not pollute my twitter stream with any old bulls**t just for the sake of it.
For me this idea is a peek into the kinda ‘social ads’ that will be coming our way going forward. To me the term social ad is an oxymoron. If you’re advertising, you’re talking at me, not conversing with me. If you want to open up a dialogue with me, let’s talk, frankly, openly and transparently. If you’re not willing to do that, I’ll treat your ads with the same contempt I have for most online ads and ignore them!
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