I also wanted to say that I enjoyed your post and the subsequent comments with Tom.

Also welcome your post in the Digital Marketing Inner Circle community (http://www.sinotechblog.com.cn).

BTW- you heading to ad:tech Beijing in Nov?

Cheers
Matt

I’d love to post your Big Brand blog there, or invite you to join and post it yourself. I think the audience would benefit from reading your insights.

Cheers,
Mike Crosson
Publisher

Yes, I very much agree with your “centers of excellence” approach.

You are right that “me too” programs are the result of people who are more concerned about an easy execution than trying something new.

I think these efforts will really be self-defeating and more so than advertising.

If you see an ok ad in a publication, you will grunt and move on. If you experience a repeated tactic as a consumer in social media, you could well turn negative against the brand.

Looking forward to that beer!

Tom

You guys did great work on this and I think the case study will be a good wake up call to the power of social media when used correctly.

As far as cookie cutter and “me to” – it is already happening. I did not mean to imply that your team will be doing this but we both know that as this gets out it will inspire brand managers around the world to reach out to anyone who says they are a social media consultant to try and replicate your work.

I have seen his with search marketing at companies like P&G, Unilever, IBM and others where they took a test case that was successful then used people or agencies in other countries to try and replicate the program only to have to come and clean it up.

This is exactly why I have been advocating the deployment of Social Media Centers of Excellence be deployed before we have a big mess and reputation nightmare to clean up. http://whunt.com/centers-of-excellence-are-critical-for-success-in-search-and-social-media

The same was true with reputation management programs. I was doing them before there was a public term and then PR teams believed they could replicate our work as part of their PR remit and that resulted in a bunch of bad press since they tried to rush it and made dozens of mistakes along the way that I again had to clean up.

I hope to be back in Asia after the first of the year and would love to site down for a beer and discuss how we can keep big companies and less focused consultants from screwing this brilliant opportunity to interact with our consumers.

Thanks for taking the time to write at such length about the article regarding our work in Asia Pacific with Unilever. I run Ogilvy’s 360 DI team here in APAC.

I agree with your concerns about Social Media (“me too” projects and blaming the medium for bad products) but I don’t think that will come as a result of big brands getting involved in Social Media. I think it is nature of a maturing medium.

Here at Ogilvy aim to avoid cookie-cutter approaches for a number of reasons:

1- Cookie-cutter approaches are less effective than campaigns tailored to a specific need in a specific market. This is true of APAC more than anywhere else in the world. We have wildly diverse Social Media ecosystems:
http://www.thomascrampton.com/social-media/social-networks-media-friendster-southeast-asia-facebook/

2- Cookie-cutter approaches are boring for consumers. Hard to get people to get involved in something they’ve seen a hundred times before.

3- Cookie-cutter approaches will be boring for us to execute. We enjoy pushing the envelope as Social Media evolves. That is part of the fun of working in this field!

I do hope to connect next time you come through Asia!

Tom

This post was mentioned on Twitter by Karen O’Keefe: RT @tweetmeme Will big brands be the death of social media? http://bit.ly/3PTkob...