Hi all -

This morning I read a blog posting on MediaPost.com that really resonated and I wanted to pass along to you. It was particularly interesting to me, because like another blog post I read written by Michael Margolis, it dealt with motive.

Email Diva’s column today talked about how, as marketers, we’re often forced to involve our clients (and become involved on their behalf) in social networking because, well, that’s what needs to happen for them to keep up with their competition. After all, isn’t everybody doing it?

But those aren’t necessarily the right reasons. It’s true - so many marketers and corporations do it, but they only do it for competitive advantage. Not because they truly believe it enhances the world as a whole, or the customer experience for that matter. And, like companies that try to exploit sustainability and get figured out, consumers are hip to what they’re trying to do.

Diva gives a great example of how to avoid this customer backlash–tie it in to a charitable and/or righteous cause. Orange Element did this recently when we were tasked with building a Myspace page for the 2007 Solar Decathalon. I’ll talk more about the Solar Decathalon in another post, but the bottom line is that we created a social network that was built around saving the Earth’s resources through a solar-power building competition. Pretty noble, huh?

Here’s a link to Email Diva’s blog post from today: http://blogs.mediapost.com/email_insider/?p=525. It’s a great read.

Garret Ohm
www.orange-element.com

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 at 6:26 pm and is filed under Blog Posts. 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.