Chris Peterson

This is a story of a company which created an absolutely terrific viral marketing campaign, only to squander it horribly before they could even capitalize on it.

Meet Ulf, and his liquid mountaineers:

This video is beautiful. It is indistinguishable from the hundreds of thousands of amateur extreme sports films out there – vaguely European men, beautiful exotic locations, some amazing and unimaginable feat of feet. It’s ridiculous enough to make you want to try it, but not so ridiculous that you lose the thread of belief that it might be real.

Of course, a bit of Googling reveals this:

In which the creators of the video – a shoe-manufacturing company – reveals that the whole thing was a big stunt to market their shoes.

Now, the first video achieved this goal almost perfectly. It doesn’t come across like a shoe commercial. They only briefly mention the shoes, and the fact that they are wearing company jackets and hats is hardly noticeable (and wouldn’t be weird, because that’s par for the course when it comes to extreme sports partnership deals).

Had Hi-Tec (the company behind all this) simply left up the original video and, in the description section, posted something along the lines of

Update!! If you want to try this on your own here are the shoes we use:

Those sales would’ve gone through the roof.

Instead, Hi-Tec released the explanation video. And it is terrible.

Mostly, it is terrible because no one is going to buy their shoes just because they liked the first video and thought “o HO!! that was clever.” And it’s not clear why they released the video. It certainly isn’t prominently linked on the first one, which would seem like a prerequisite if you were concerned about lawsuits and so forth.

But it’s also terrible because of the way they do it. In the “Making Of” video, Hi-Tec explicitly, if gently, mocks the idea that its viewers wanted to believe in something beautiful and amazing, which is why the video was so powerful. And you don’t win customers to your side by making them feel gullible, or by forthrightly revealing them to be targets of your conscious gamesmanship and trickery.

Their press release is more or less the same thing.

I don’t write a lot about branding / advertising / etc here, because my primary interest in social media is scholarly, social, and critical in the academic sense of the term.

But I also do social media (broadly) for a living, and also did brand evangelism for Apple before my current gig. So this whole mishap was almost physically painful for me.

I can almost guarantee that this was a failure for Hi-Tec. They got millions of YouTube views, yeah – but it would shock me if their sales went up after they ‘came clean.’

So if you measure success by generated buzz – it was terrific.

If you measure success by generated sales – I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts it was a miserable failure.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s Small Change, published in last week’s New Yorker, the author (essentially) argues that social media is not only different from “true” social activism, it’s actually irrelevant to and perhaps hurting it.

My response – sadly unsolicited by either Gladwell or TNY, but sent as a letter to the latter nonetheless – is below:

In “Small Change”, Malcolm Gladwell made what has become a fashionably contrarian claim: that social media’s contribution to activism has amounted to little more than “helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teen-age girls.”

And in some respects he’s right. Gladwell correctly identifies the “Twitter Revolutions” of Iran and Moldova as nothing of the kind. There is scant evidence that Twitter actually helped folks inside Iran or Moldova, as opposed to simply give CNN something to talk about. Closer to home, the unhappy truth is that millions of teenagers sending texts and $10 to Obama didn’t transform him into a latter-day F.D.R.

On the other hand, Gladwell ignores examples from Shirky’s book (which he cites for the phone example) that weaken his argument. Kate Hanni’s use of social media to organize disparate dissatisfied passengers into the collective FlyersRights.org was a driving force behind the Passenger’s Bill of Rights. Voice of the Faithful, the organization of lay Catholics which drove the torrid response to the 2002 sex abuse cases, relied on social media to expand beyond its Boston origins. And Wikicrimes, a site which began mapping experienced crimes and police corruption in Fortaleza, Brazil, allowed its citizens to challenge local authority and evade police brutality as they couldn’t before.

Gladwell is right that we shouldn’t confuse texts and tweets with boycotts and sit-ins. But the two need not be mutually exclusive. Two million people texting may not be as effective as two hundred people sitting at a counter – but if, out of the two million texts, two hundred people sit at a counter where they would not have done so before, nothing has been lost. Social media need not be a substitute for real activism – the two can, and do, complement each other.

Gladwell’s argument holds true only if they do, in fact, become substitutes – if nascent activists content themselves with sending a text when they would otherwise be demonstrating. That is a real danger, and it may even be true. But it’s also a point Gladwell didn’t attempt to prove – or, truth be told, even care to make.

A few days ago I posted about the new Facebook privacy “features”.

One of them – “Groups” – Facebook had described as such:

With Groups, users can essentially partition their interactions (passive or active) with Facebook and create multiple, customized Facebook experiences. For example, a user who participates in a “neighborhood” group can – with one click – view a newsfeed that is visible only to members of that group, post status messages that only members of the group can see, and peruse a list of profiles that includes only group members. This new functionality will make it much easier for groups (lowercase “g”) of friends to keep in touch and will likely accelerate the use of Facebook as a platform for organizing everything from bake sales to protests.

And I said this seemed “inoffensive enough.”

Well –

Facebook is being battered by critics who say the popular social network made a big mistake in failing to let people opt-in by default to its new feature that lets people form private groups around a particular interest.

The controversy reached a head on Thursday when a person created a group called NAMBLA, the name for a nefarious pro-pedophile organization, and started adding friends.

One of the person’s added to the group was well-known tech blogger Michael Arrington, who in turn added Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, Chester Wisniewski, a senior security adviser for security firm Sophos, reported on the company’s blog.

While not actually from NAMBLA, the group was formed to make the point that Facebook was wrong in choosing to let people automatically add their “friends,” and leaving it up to the added person to opt-out of the group.

via InformationWeek.

So Facebook can’t even let users click “yes, please let my friend add me to this group” before doing it.

How can one company fail at variations on the same thing so many times?

(cynic: because it is their intent to fail)

Grimmelmann passed along the EFF’s take on the Facebook privacy changed I blogged about yesterday. The EFF had a much better breakdown, critique, and set of recommendations – it’s a good read.

It’s been a month or so, so Facebook has announced some new privacy changes. CDT has the breakdown:
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From Ariely et al, in an HBS paper describing perceived vs ideal vs actual distributions of wealth by income quintile.

Takeaway graph:

Bottom line: no matter what your income or political affiliation, you a) think the wealth gap is lower than it is and b) would prefer it to be lower than it is.

This is your annual reminder that it is Banned Books Week 2010, from 9/25-10/2.

Visit the Banned Books Week website to see events in your area, learn more information, and the map of book challenges.

In any case, I wish you all a wonderful week celebrating your godforsaken, moral-decaying, valueless art and literature!

Just discovered this 1973 letter from Vonnegut to the chairman of a school board that had taken to burning his books because they found them offensive.

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Must admit that my blood boiled a bit on the very first page of the CQR white paper at this:

“The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly” because of the dominance of social network sites — where people use their real names — and the extent to which information is now shared online, said Zuckerberg. That’s good, he said, because “having two identities for your- self is an example of a lack of integrity.”

(emphasis mine)

When I was in high school, I once gave a presentation on the Watergate scandal, in which I referred to Nixon as “for lack of a better word, a scumbag.” A few conservative teachers on the panel mildly reprimanded me, arguing that, whatever shortcomings Nixon may have had as a human being and political leader, surely there must be better, more precise, and more meaningful words than scumbag.

But sometimes, you have to call a spade a spade, and a scumbag a scumbag. And Mark Zuckerberg, for lack of a better word, is a scumbag. There are perhaps better, more precise, more meaningful ways to describe someone who, after citing as justification the evisceration of privacy of which he is the prime butcher, has the nerve to say that those who wish to keep their contexts intact have a “lack of integrity.”

I could go on, for some time, for how conceptually incorrect this is (but I think I’ve written enough about that in Losing Face), and for how absolutely richly pathetic it is for someone whose fame and fortune derives from a stolen business (itself founded in order to take petty potshots at a girl with the good sense to turn him down for a date) to accuse others of a “lack of integrity.”

But brevity is the key to writing as well as wit, and so I’ll happily settle to call him a scumbag.

I was (fairly extensively) interviewed for the CQ Researcher’s newly-published white paper on privacy and social network sites, authored by the inestimable Marcia Clemmitt. Unfortunately, it’s behind a serious paywall, so I can’t post it here – but there’s good stuff in there from the usual crowd, and hopefully it will serve as a useful guide to the sorts of folks who subscribe to CQR.

Which leads me to…