I'm Talkathon: Why Some Marketers Have Such a Hard Time Doing Altruism

As you can probably tell by my low profile I am deep into book -cranking mode, but to tide you over here's a tidbit on a recent new development in Chapter 7, which covers social media's impact on society:

The folks at Microsoft , having done some research on the impact of altruism on the marketing value of a company's brand, decided recently to do a nice thing: they decided that for a limited time they would donate to charity a portion of the ad revenue every time someone used their Windows Live Messenger instant messaging product or their Windows Live Hotmail webmail service The basic concept: the more messages you send, the more Microsoft would give to charities. Microsoft called this product promotion the I'm Talkathon, an effort that seemed to be hitting all of the right buttons. Microsoft was honest about what they were trying to accomplish ultimately (promote their products and services), all you really had to do was to register at the event Web site to have your messages count towards the charitable goal. So far, so good - people like to do the right thing, and a fund-raiser was a concept more likely to generate use of the products than any sort of small rebate or other direct financial incentive would provide.

And then came Parker.

Parker appeared as the author of a weblog associated with the I'm talkathon campaign, saying in a note on the home page of the weblog, "I’m just a guy with a computer and good intentions. A couple of months ago, I found out about the i’m Initiative...I hope you join me. Thanks for checking out the Talkathon!" Parker's blog entries had links to his pages on major social media outlets, the ability to post comments, embedded videos - all the things that one would expect from an enthusiast's weblog.

There was just one problem. Parker was fake, an actor hired to play the role of a blogger along with "friends" who would appear in videos. A disclaimer at the very bottom of the weblog notes: "If you’re reading this, your BS detector is chirping like a smoke detector with a dicey 9-volt. As you’ve probably guessed, this blog is fictional, but the causes, and the i’m Initiative most certainly are not. The purpose of this blog is to raise awareness of the i’m Initiative and the worthy causes it helps. If we rubbed you the wrong way in the process that wasn’t our intention, so “sorry, our bad.” The alternate was something called an 'e-mail blast.' But, believe us that’s not nearly as exciting as it sounds." Funny in its own way, perhaps, and probably acceptable to many people used to staged "reality" television shows - but words that came no doubt from McCann Worldgroup, an advertising agency hired to develop and to promote the fund-raiser. The weblog was received for what it was - a promotion that was entertaining, but not real - but the weblog received few comments and its YouTube videos were viewed by a small handful of people. The link to Facebook and to other social media Web sites connected to dummy accounts; no person, real or otherwise, was there to respond.

Promoting charities is a good idea for marketers, but if your aim is to position your company's brands in the marketplace as being more sincere and in touch with your customers, why would you use a pretend spokesperson instead of a real person? If altruism in social media is about allowing yourself to become vulnerable enough to offer something to a community who will give back to you social rewards, why would you be afraid to put someone out in front of the public as a spokesperson who was real? Why use a medium that's all about genuine conversations to promote a cause based on genuine conversations by using social media to provide fake conversations? And most importantly, why go out of your way to pretend to be linked in to other social media networks and then allow people to see that these were fake presences?

People accept that companies are trying to use social media for their own marketing and people accept that actors can be entertaining, even in social media outlets. But it's probably a mistake to try to create something that's supposed to be promoting altruism with an actor pretending to be a person doing something for purely altruistic reasons. It may be an indication of how much some companies struggle to engage a public that has grown cynical from mass marketing in general, but it's also an indication of how hard it is for some people to accept that altruism is truly about getting benefits back from society as a whole where and when society as a whole is able to give them.

Content Nation Social Rule #12: It's possible to mix your own commercial goals with social goals through social media, but pretending to be sincere about social goals is not a good way to go about it.

P.S. - Late-breaking edit - If you'd like to see a good way to do altrusitic marketing without a Fake Parker to spoil the party, check out the WikiAnswers Answerthon , coming up July 26th-27th.