I’m slightly apprehensive of writing this blog entry because I certainly don’t want it to attract either controversy or spam. Nevertheless, I think it’s also important to compare marketing that’s smart and respectful to users and marketing which is, frankly, stupid and alienating.

Let me start with the smart one because if we’re going to follow good practice examples………..Always prioritize the smart ones at the top and leave the stupid ones to be the sludge/slag/s*** that collects at the bottom — just like in chemical fractional distillation.

On April Fool’s Day, I received the following email from the slideshare team:

Hi twain,

We’ve noticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting a LOT of views in the last 24 hours. Great job … you must be doing something right.

Why don’t you tweet or blog this? Use the hashtag #bestofslideshare so we can track the conversation.

Congratulations,

-SlideShare Team

Now, I’ve been a user and fan of slideshare for about 3 years; I was one of their first members and within my first two postings Jon Boutelle, the CTO, sent me a connection request. Then Rashmi Sinha, the CEO, voted one of my slides her favorite. Over the years, I’ve followed slideshare’s progress and periodically I watch out for their competitions — recently they did one on the credit crunch:

· http://blog.slideshare.net/2008/11/20/credit-crisis-in-30-slides-results/

Anyway, being someone who tends to verify and cross-verify sources (a habit of due diligence as a banker as well as from being the Editor of e-Intelligence), my immediate thoughts on the “You’re a Slideshare RockStar” email were:

(1.) Ha ha, it must be an April Fool’s.

(2.) Better go and see what’s been happening to my slides on slideshare.net

(3.) It’s plausible………….

You see, Google Knol had recently awarded me another “Top Pick Knol Award” for my “How to LOL” entry:

* http://knol.google.com/k/twain/how-to-lol/31fjy9fjsu1×2/25

Separately, on dipity.com, my first ever timeline attracted 12,000+ views and the CEO is following my content.

* http://www.dipity.com/twain

In any case I checked slideshare.net and, lo and behold, my view counts had miraculously jumped by several hundred thousand. Naturally, my arithmetic skills kicked in and I cross-checked the figures provided for each link where the slides were being viewed (on slideshare itself, on other blogs, on associated sites etc.):

The numbers didn’t add up……………so I knew it must be an April Fool’s.

I then went onto Kosmix (which is now set as my browser homepage instead of Google or Apple or Bloomberg, btw) and searched under the term “#bestofslideshare”. It showed up under the Trending Topics of the Twitter panel, so I clicked the link and this is what I saw:

I LOL’d. It was………A BRILLIANT APRIL FOOL’S JOKE on the personal pride (some may call it narcissism in its extreme forms) of all contributors in the social media sphere and incorporated the uber-posterchild for Internet traffic for the moment — Twitter.

#bestofslideshare was so brilliant and pinpointed every arc on the marketing map that drives Internet + mobile traffic, reciprocity of cross-marketing and the viral effects of fame generation that I nominated it on ‘Huffington Post’ as “Best April Fool’s 2009.”

Who cared about YouTube turning its videos upside-down for the day? Or Google’s CADIE (Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity)? Or any of the others on offer here:

* · http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/01/april-fools-2009-best-pra_n_181568.html

In any case, I swapped a few emails with the slideshare team (CEO, CTO and CFO) to congratulate them on their ingenuity. Here’s some of what I wrote:

The #bestofslideshare campaign didn’t use any profanity, advertise fake pharmaceuticals for certain male hormone drugs or ask/demand us to pay some faux charity or boiler-room scam.

It was strictly and purely about us each promoting our own slides in a way which was different and positive. Not all of slideshare’s N millions of members are going to be able to email their friends and say, “I won the slideshare competition” or “I made 100,000+ views!”

For a one-off event, #bestofslideshare was actually very democratizing and fun at the same time. It enabled people to promote their slides, cross-promote slideshare on twitter etc., ping it back and forth…before laughing at themselves with a Homer Simpson moment, “Doh! I’ve been had. It’s an AF! V. cute!”

Sure, some people may have considered the email of ‘You’re a Slideshare Rockstar’ to be “spam” but actually it was a smart one-off marketing special.

In fact, I hope you do something similar next year!

In short, #bestofslideshare was a celebration of its users and their content. It appealed to their personal pride in a good way. It re-affirmed their valuable contributions, it directed traffic to the slideshare.net site and then propagated it across the wider social media sphere, e.g. Twitter.

It was oriented from a win-win-win position which is why it’s brilliant marketing.

THE WORST WEB3.0 MARKETING EVER

Now for the opposite end of the strategic marketing spectrum: the lose-lose-lose. Readers are probably aware that one particular Web 3.0 offering, which I won’t pollute my blog by even naming, launched with a tacky and senseless “We organize that s***” video.

That marketing mistake (amongst the company’s persistent and many strategic faux pas) was extremely disappointing and alienating towards users — particularly since those users had spent months seeding interesting content, nurturing the growth of quality interactions and sharing their harvested gold nuggets with others on threads (including the company and particularly with the CEO).

Therefore, for the company to then launch with a piece of unprofessional, gutter-quality and narcissistic tripe was unbelievable.

It was not the use of s*** that was offensive.

It was the vanity and arrogance of the claim that it’s the company that organizes anything. Actually, it’s the core members who organize and prioritize the content. They separate the wheat from the chaff.

It was also the fact that after watching the video, people were no better informed about what the system actually does nor about the types of people who use the site or the quality of interactions they produce on the site.

The company can’t organize s***.

Left to their own devices, they don’t even know how to make their UI easy-to-use, functionally smart and speedy. They don’t know it’s important to provide user guides, despite being in beta for an entire year. They don’t know it’s vital to have open user feedback channels. They don’t know their system is attracting tons of spam and fake user sign-ups. They don’t know comment moderation matters to users. They don’t know what online democracy is and how to nurture it. Instead they decimate users’ content, breach user privacy and engage in all manner of policies that frustrate and annoy their core users — the very people who have patiently championed them and given them chance after chance.

Worst of all their marketing, which consistently insults users’ intelligence, doesn’t position their Web 3.0 offering as a smart solution at all.

It’s a tragedy and their problem to resolve.

MARKETING IS AS SMART AS THE PEOPLE WHO STRATEGIZE IT

I’m also going to share this observation about truly smart and strategic marketing, using Apple as the example.

A few years’ ago I met MT Rainey, who worked on several of Apple’s marketing campaigns during the 1980s. Subsequently, she established one of the UK’s largest independent advertising agencies and more recently has created an online social venture which offers mentoring services to new businesses and individuals about their careers as well as their lifestyles. Separately, in the past I’ve also swapped emails with Guy Kawasaki, one of the Apple Fellows (which includes Alan Kay amongst its luminaries) and one of the geniuses responsible for proselytizing Apple and imbuing the company with distinctive and positive brand values which have successfully transmitted through the generations.

Now, if we look at the LISA campaign of the 1980s and more recently the ‘He’s a PC’ one what we see from Apple is a consistent message spanning decades:

· faster than the competition

· smarter than the competition

· sleeker and cooler than the competition

Not once has Apple (or any of the tech brands which have stood the tests of time and fickleness of consumer tastes) ever allowed s*** / unprofessional / gutter-quality marketing to be associated with itself.

It’s not hip or avant-garde or smart to do so. Only stupid people would want to or go about sabotaging their own company by allowing it to be tagged with s*** in SEO engines and then attracting like-for-like s*** to their own sites.

Smart marketing is when the company appeals to the users’ better aspects. Like when slideshare encourages people to blog about the achievement of their exponential view counts and celebrates their content contributions — even if it is an April Fools.

More than anything, smart marketing is when the users are IN on the joke (and realize they’re perpetrators of the joke) rather than when the marketing is such that users are perceived to be the butt of the joke — like any explicit association of or reference to their content as s*** that the company has to organize.

Would-be marketers need to look at the best practices of brands like Apple, Google, Coca-Cola, Nike, Nokia, GE and others to realize a simple truth:

PEOPLE LIKE TO FEEL GOOD ABOUT THEMSELVES, OTHERS AND THEIR CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE WORLD.

Tags: #bestofslideshare, April Fools, best practice marketing, Huffington Post, Twitter

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 3:19 pm and is filed under Strategic marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.