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If you google a few terms like Sony Viral Video Backlash you’ll find out what happens when marketers try to use the participants of a social network, instead of just trying to harness the network.
I once organized a charity Walk-a-Thon on Facebook, and I got to see what happens when you use a network, instead of its participants.
What’s the difference? Transparency. Participation implies consent, and when marketers try to trick people into doing their advertising for them, bad things ensue.
Sony, the company that everyone loves to hate, has screwed up a holiday viral marketing campaign for the PlayStation Portable (PSP).
The campaign, “all i want for xmas is a psp”, is a horribly set up imitation of an actual user who would want a PSP. The number of mistakes are numerous, the most obvious reason for them being that the marketing firm, Zipatoni, is obviously out of touch with their target market.
Sony has had a horrendous 2006. Their DRM rootkit crippled millions of computers and alerted the general public to the concept of DRM (a major no-no). The PS3 received a mild reaction from early adopters and strong competition from the Wii and XBOX 360. On the advertising front, their ads are incohesive and often unrelated to the product - a terrible problem if you’re trying to convert consumers to your platform.
As one commenter at Kotaku’s coverage of this debacle pointed out, this is a “complete failure of PR and marketing”. I don’t want to stretch too far from the general YouMakeMedia topic range here - but I’d go further to say that this is a failure at every level of Sony. Sony, more than any company I’m acquainted with, is crippled by a painfully slow moving corporate bureaucracy. It’s lack of transparency (likely due to the cut throat environment that rises out of age-old honor comittments) forces deals to be cumbersome and riddled with complications. Unfortunately for Sony, this marketing deal with Zipatoni leaked into the public conscious rather quickly.
And now, if you wish, click past the jump for a list of the obvious mistakes made in Sony’s marketing scheme:
