Chado-Design.com

Do you have social networking friends or followers that tend to go into great detail and often share too much information? Everybody knows at least one, a friend who feels the need to tweet about their latest bowel movement or extremely inimate detail of their life. Sometimes funny, sometimes disturbing, but always uncomfortable, these posts are the product of an “Oversharer”. To combat this now common practice of over sharing, and to coin a new internet term, Pringles has launched a new social media campaign. The P&G snack brand asks Facebook users to start naming friends who frequently post too much information on the social networking site using a Pringles-branded tagging button. Similar to the “like” button, this new capability allows users to show their disapproval of the personal information shared and label the user an “Oversharer”. The app allows any user who sees a ridiculous Facebook or Twitter status to notify and shame their contact with one click. Pringles will also host a site, similar to FML or Texts from last night, where posts and updates containing too much information will be showcased.
Along with this social networking campaign, Pringles is also selling “Overshare” branded merchandise and presenting prizes to encourage more people to spread the word about their new campaign and the growing “Oversharer” epidemic.
I think this is a great idea for a campaign. People on Facebook have been demanding a “dislike” button to counter the “like” button since it was introduced and this is the first app to provide similar capabilities. Also, Pringles has the potential to coin a new internet term. Pringles has found a way to integrate their brand into a high demand app. It will be exciting to see what companies follow Pringles example and make more useful apps for social networking platforms.

There has been a recent surge in companies looking to expand their social media presence on outlets like Facebook and Twitter by offering new “fans”, “followers”, and “friends” free products. They offer coupons for free products and similar incentives to consumers for simply becoming online fans of their brand. Einstein Bros. Bagels recently offered digital coupons to users who registered as their friend and gained hundreds of thousands of new fans. TGI Fridays tried a similar campaign last year with dangerous results. They introduced a spokesperson for the brand “Woody” on Facebook who offered free burgers to his first 500,000 fans. They reached the target number of fans weeks ahead of schedule and did not plan to give away so many free burgers.  Facing potential backlash from potential customers the company had to extend the free burger offer to one million friends. Starbucks also ran a campaign to attract fans by offering coupons for free pints of their new ice cream brand. Learning from TGI Friday’s mistakes they put a limit on the free coupons and offered other coupons for a discount to fans who were too late for the free offer.

These tactics have been proven to be very effective in quickly increasing your online followers and social media presence, but are campaigns like this effective in reaching the “right” people. By using these strategies most new “fans” are not necessarily brand loyalists or even interested in the brand for that matter; most are there simply because they want free stuff and could care less about the brand. Are the fans genuinely interested in the brand or are they just taking advantage of a free deal? While Einstein Bros. gained hundreds of thousands of online fans they also gave away over $800,000 worth of free bagels.

For social media campaigns like these to be effective, brands must consider the usefulness of having fans on social media and it is a question of quality vs. quantity; is having more fans better than having loyal fans? Brands can take all their new fans and use social media try to mold them into true brand loyalists over time but what about retention rate? Fans can easily join for a promotion and take themselves off immediately after. Most brands derive value form social media by using it to educate their loyal consumers about new products or happenings in the company to build hype. They are also used to directly communicate with their valuable customers to improve performance or learn more about their target market. Some companies even use social media as another way to reach customers for customer service purposes. While quickly expanding your fan base is a good way to get in front of a large number of people how effective is it when they do not care about the message? It seems more important to be liked that simply popular. Brands can derive great value from using tools like social media but unless they understand why they are using it, understand how to use it, and have tangible goals preferably linked to some sort of return on investment, expensive campaigns like this can be largely ineffective.