I hate being the guy that complains about South African attempts to “get” social media. I mean in a country with around 5 million Internet users it’s great that agencies are even bothering to target social media when in-fact a T.V. or radio advert is going to reach more people. However, it seems that locally being attached in some way to social media is reason enough to issue a press release. Apparently these days, if a bank has a Twitter account then it’s worthy of some form of hullabaloo. The problem is, while it’s great that the channels are being monitored, there is still the same mediocre customer service. However, the point of this post is not to bitch about the banks (more than enough space is wasted on that) but rather to look at small mistakes and pick on them with alacrity.
While leafing through this months Car Magazine there was a pullout poster of the new Golf 6. Now on that pullout there are “links” with arrows going towards the car. The problem with these links is that they’re “www.flickr.com/photos/363blahblah”. Now I’m a fairly advanced web user and I would never go to my PC and type in those long links. How hard would it be for the company that put this together to either use Tinyurl or create a custom Flickr url rather than individual pictures that have a random alphanumeric code?
It gets worse with the link to Youtube. The actual address they’ve printed on paper is “www.youtube.com/watch?v=IO6NynptJs8″. Yes, you read that correctly. All I’m saying is that the agency that put this together could have used Zoopy and had one of their short addresses or even better, paid for a Youtube channel account that would have been shorter and branded.
I don’t like being a “hater” but all this shows is that an attempt at social media is amateurish. In the same way that a Chef puts the extra finishing touches on a meal, the same should apply to social media. I’m not going to go brand this post: “How not to use social media links” but I do think it’s something to be aware of.
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Wow that’s almost unbelievable, surely even the creatives working on this must have thought “no one will remember this as they flip through the magazine”.
Perhaps they’d have been better of ensuring online traffic was captured via a great online campaign with real content relating to the Golf 6 across various e-media channels.
I’ve seen a similar campaign run for Volkswagen internationally, it was entitled the night drive and it allowed users to submit their experience of driving alone at night in their golf – it gave me goosebumps because it was so damned authentic and clearly based on rich insight from consumers.
Hey Saul,
Think you could make that Youtube link clickable? I had to copy & paste it myself.
K thx bai.
Yeah that is just bad ideas. You can customize a tiny url… Maybe they tried to make it look “edgy and hip” by making the URL complicated on purpose?
As in “young people would know what is going on here —->”.
Marketers are sometimes not as smart as they think.
What is demonstrates is a clear lack of understanding by agencies of the digital environment.
This is a major bone of contention for me as we see it day in and day out. It’s time for these agencies to step up to the plate, acknowledge their shortcomings and use people who are skilled and understand how to use the digital arena effectively.