Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

I'm making an important point here so listen up!

Over the past few months i have seen numerous online engagement strategies & campaigns talked up, talked down, loved, hated, envangelised & trashed.

Many of the executions have experienced wildly contradictory reviews and caused debate amongst everyone.
We've discussed the positives, the negatives, the right way and the wrong way, the great elements which could have been done better and the fact that some shouldn't have been done at all...

We put our two cents in because we can, because we didn't run the campaign so therefore we're well within our right to criticise, publicise & exercise our opinions.

But i have just one question which i am addressing to everyone (me included):

DO YOU ACTUALLY HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT YOU'RE DOING?

We call ourselves social media experts, digital strategists, engagement planners...the list goes on (and you can find most of the iterations here on a blogpost by @anotheradwanker entitled Help name a social media guy) but do any of us really know how to run a successful 'social media' campaign?

No, we don't.

There is no formula, no handbook, no 'idiots guide to engagement planning' and no right & wrong...
It's all about experimentation, different perspectives, optimisation, try, fail and try again.

To give you examples of what i mean i have collated a few of the discussions i have come across recently surrounding some of the more controversial campaigns:

GIRL WITH THE JACKET:

Anonymous (on Mumbrella article):

While you all have very good points… a particular post caught my eye from Simon - “Ask them if they sold any jackets’
I work at Witchery and we aren’t actually rolling out the men’s range until March.
I think the whole campaign was mainly aimed at creating awarness of the fact that Witchery are doing something new.
Regardless of whether people are actually interested in the product, the campaign resulted in major publicity and has been rather controversial - an outcome significantly more successful than if simple ads were placed in regular medias.
To conclude - they weren’t interested in selling jackets, but instead creating awareness, which by judging from this blog and the media attention recieved, certainly worked!

Paul (on the same Mumbrella article):

Naked are a shameless bunch of no integrity wankers and bullshit artists. Woebetide the dumn clients like Coke and Big Pond who retail them.


SKITTLES WEBSITES (aka SKITTLEGATE)

NextBrett (on Laurel Papworth article):

Hey Laurel,
I agree the widget style branding on top of the page makes the navigation somewhat confusing.
However i like the attempt to integrate social media channels with the parent skittles brand (i.e. twitter, flickr, facebook, youtube etc).
Could probably do with some jump page style message better explaining the idea..
I say good on them for the attempt but probably leaving users confused as it comes across as some kind of stunt.

Excerpt from 'thisisgoingtobebig' blog:

Instead of reaching out into the community and showing up in our spaces, they took our spaces and brought them back to their site. Instead of sending traffic to us, they took our stuff and made it all about them. What's the point, other than generating a lot of chatter about the campaign, rather than about the product?

VIRGIN MOBILE V FEST APP

Excerpt from my blog:

Every single person there (not including freebie tickets of course) had shelled out circa $140 for a ticket which is alot of money, so i don't think i'm alone in thinking that the Festival Buddy service really should have been free for each & every attendee as an added benefit within the ticket cost.

Excerpt from @anotheradwanker blog:

It wasn't about Virgin sucking up to non-customers. It was about Virgin showing the love and saying thanks to their existing customers.All these add-ons made me feel loved by my telco. Not many brands (especially in telecommunications) can pull that off.

And there are thousands of others which you can research yourself such as Tourism Queensland, NAB, Pimp My Kettle etc etc....

My point, if i haven't made it as clear as mud already, is that there is no correct way to enter into an engagement strategy and there are no rules.

What we are doing, what we are ALL doing, is dipping our feet in and having a go!

The success or lack thereof is judged purely on opinion, perspective & objective which differ widely across different groups of people (god forbid that includes the client and the agency themselves!)

Why do you think the success stories we saw at Adtech were decades old? It's not because no one has attempted anything since, it's just that their newest experiments may not have been as triumphant...

So if you think of yourself as a 'social media expert' and believe there is a winning formula to all of this, may i (politely)suggest that you get back in your box and stay there until your ego deflates to a manageable size once again :-)