The Illusion of Creating “Awesomeness” in Social Media

Red Bull, Coke Zero and Pringles have all launched a similar social media marketing campaign: Creating an xtreme community. Success has yet to come.

In September 2008 Red Bull launched a mobile community. This year Coca-Cola Zero started a marketing campaign to get people to post and rate videos on the Coke Zero Website . The newest xtreme community marketing campaign comes from Pringles (The domain was created on the 19th of April).  All brands have a similar concept: Motivating people to post videos and have them commented and/or rated by the participating users. The attempt seeks to develop a community around the brand. All marketing campaigns have an additional similarity: The absence of success.

The oldest and probably most successful marketing campaign mentioned here is the mobile community of Red Bull. The community was first launched in Austria and further expanded to Switzerland. With an own mobile price plan the idea and potential for a prospering marketing campaign is clearly given. The price plan is highly competitive (in Austria – not so much in Switzerland) and additional features for the cell phone user, such as free Red Bull TV and free access to the community, offer good reasons to switch to Red Bull Mobile. Even though the potential for massive interaction is given, the community sees only limited usage. The most successful clip of all time received a mere 7’400 clicks during 400 days. 18 clicks per day. A YouTube movie of Slipknot received more attention. While critique is easily spoken, the reasons for the failure are hard to evaluate. As I’ve not been able to test the mobile version, it seems as if the community lacks a certain incentive to participate.  The competition of YouTube and Facebook seem to crush the users will to participate in any other community.

The Pringles marketing takes a good step by not trying to compete with Facebook but draw people from the social networking community. The campaign launched in August has already drawn some attention and both the incentives (You can win an iPad or 5’000 Euro) and the companies involvement ( The official bloggers have already posted over 140 videos, both boosting engagement and content) is how a campaign should be managed. The downside of the campaign is that even though there seems to be a great deal of people uploading videos (due to the official bloggers uploading videos), there are no people who actually have submitted content yet.  The simple reason for this deficit is: You can’t. Now, I don’t know if this was intended by Pringles but the possibility of uploading content simply doesn’t exist (even though there is a link, which indicates this possibility). The intentionally great campaign comes to an abrupt halt caused by a simple flaw in the programming.

Last, and in this case least, is the campaign set up by Coke Zero. The campaign follows basically the same idea as the Pringles Xtreme TV. Submit a video and have it rated by users. The campaign is live since the 17th of May and has generated a mass of submitted (grab your seat) videos: four  (Ok to be fair, three videos have been posted by what seems to be Coke employees – and we only took a look at the Swiss page even though the campaign is represent on a global scale). Same as the Pringles campaign it’s simply not possible to post videos due to a failure in the programming of the site. I tried for several hours to submit a video but got stuck at the same place every time (see picture – Login through Facebook Connect). This might be a reason for the lack of success. Other than the Pringles page, the coke employees are not as active and therefore the site looks more or less deserted (which really is not the best way of getting people to interact). Once again a good idea not working due to some small programming deficits.

The marketing campaigns in their theoretical foundation are great concepts (and have proven to work as this example can show). The pages are extremely elegant (I think a bit heavy in terms of loading time) and campaigns on Facebook and other channels are worked out OK. It’s a shame if a small programming mistake destroys the entity of the concept, weakens the brand and devours millions of precious marketing dollars. At least they’re not spending my money.