Virgin Fails At Social Marketing
You would think that companies would learn from the social media marketing mistakes that Wal-Mart and GMC have made. But obviously the marketing department at Virgin Money does not read this blog.
The PR Place points out that Virgin Money had approached the social network site b3ta.com about having its members come up with designs for a new marketing campaign. Conceptually this was not a bad idea, the problem is that b3ta.com is a social network known for its sick humor. Way to understand your target audience Virgin.
As you can imagine, the campaign did not meet the goals of Virgin Money and they ended the contest prematurely. In writing about the contest, b3ta.com founder, Rob posted:
virgin on the ridiculous
• Yep, they pulled the challenge
• Yep, they were told before they opened it exactly how it would play out
• Yep, they asked us to delete it
• Yep, I think think the whole thing is funny
- rob
I am sure that someone at Virgin Money is walking around saying I told that social media web sites are bad. The problem here was that Virgin did not research and understand the target audience of b3ta.com. Not all social media communities are the same. They all attract different audiences and communities. If you want to be successful marketing to the social communities you need to understand who is in the neighborhood that you are targeting.
Filed under Brand Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (0) : Nov 9th, 2006
