Social Media Bait is Here

For years Internet marketing has talked about link bait. You know; the “Best of” posts. The “Top 10” of this and “5 Worst” of that. You probably have a favorite or two that you either remember or created yourself. Some of them were actually really good and quite fun. One that I recently enjoyed was from David Berkowitz of 360i and his “We Have Sinned” list of social media shortcomings that plague the space currently.

So I think we may be entering a new age of “Social Media Bait”. I wrote about a situation involving Pepsi. For full disclosure here, I am an AVID Coke brand loyalist (to the point of near sickness but that’s my issue not yours) so it pains me to promote Pepsi and play into their little charade here it goes. The 30,000 foot fly over on this is as follows. Pepsi’s Amp Energy brand was given an iPhone app by the agency working for Pepsi. Some have found the app offensive and there has been some back and forth in the social media circles about the validity of this deal.

I posted over at Marketing Pilgrim on the details and the original article can be found here. The gist of the app? Categorize women and supply appropriate pick up lines for the stereotype. Not my style personally but it is what it is. My take is this though. The bottom line is that Pepsi saw the downloads make a hockey stick shaped jump from 150 downloads to over 17,000 once the ‘controversy’ hit.

Then followed the #pepsifail hashtag on Twitter and the ‘dragging in’ of other Pepsi brands like Mountain Dew that are possibly being besmirched by their indirect connection to the controversial app. Now this is where the rubber meets the road. Pepsi is not pulling the app off the AppStore (not yet at least) so it appears as if there is no real moral or ethical conundrum here. In fact, it looks like the attention it is getting is just fine with Pepsi. I am not making any moral judgment here, I am just stating a fact.

So what’s the social media bait? I think they have created a situation that the social media press and industry types will look at and pick apart as to whether it was a brilliant move or a huge gaffe. They are getting attention for their energy drink to an actual market segment that might be a real target: social marketers! While this sounds kinda “conspiracy theorist’ to a degree I think that even if this was not planned it draws attention to the ability to manipulate social media in a way that can serve to get a real boost around an unreal situation and see ROI.

What’s that mean? Who the heck knows? I just know that I am looking at every action done by any agency or brand that smells of being apologetic with a skeptics eye. Isn’t it better to create a controlled “screw up” and then look contrite so everyone can pat you on the back as being responsible?

Nice job, Pepsi but I am not buying it. Oh and I am certainly not buying your products. I am waiting for Coke to pull a stunt on me so I can make them look like the corporate “do-gooder” and feel good about myself as I enjoy the real thing .