Advertise Space - Blog Avertising » The Worst Ten Social Media Advertising Campaigns of 2007

I was at a great session at SXSW last week called “The Worst Ten Social Media Ad Campaigns of 2007″ and although I didn’t agree with all of their choices, (I thought the beer ad rocked :) I completely agreed with the overall message of the session; that you need to tread lightly when planning a ‘viral’ campaign as it can badly backfire and that you can’t force a conversation down someone’s throat if they are not listening to you.

The funniest one and the overall winner was a campaign gone wrong from HP where they had a women get her kids to take a actual hammer to the competitions camera and smash it. The kids were both toddlers which made the brainwashing even more horrifying.

My favourite (or least favourite) and also the runner up, was the Cisco ‘human network’ campaign. I’m really glad they chose this one, as I thought it was a painfully forced attempt at getting the blogosphere and Wikipedia users to want to talk about a slogan.

The panel consisted of Henry Copland, Steve Hall, Jeff Jarvis, Rebecca Lieb, and Charlotte Selles.I think they did an excellent job on this panel. It was funny, insightful and interactive and it was also refreshing that they actually brought and showed all the examples that they references. There is nothing worse than have someone go, “you remember that viral video, the one from Dove”, or” the one where that chick cut off her hair” and half the audience going’ huh’?

Stay tuned for my next blog post. “Social Media Advertising - Why big companies just don’t get it”