Digital Focus: Shining the light of truth

It's so easy for marketers to come up with jargonistic digital strategies, but be prepared to be exposed by social media.

Netface, Getglue, Fastbox ... if you're not up to speed with these social media phenomena, then you're also unlikely to be looking out for Twitter-sponsored Olympics merchandise over the next few weeks in the form of Twadges, Twibbons, Twee-shirts and Twandanas.

Worried that you're being left behind? You should be: you've missed a great piece of BBC programming in which Twenty Twelve's head of brand, Siobhan Sharpe, explains the strategy for the digital legacy of the Games. [see the full video below]

Sharpe reveals her deliciously super-smart thinking thus: "My hope is that what we're creating is something that means, in years to come, people have forgotten the Games and that this is what they remember."

Although genius satire, the indecipherable, jargonistic gobbledegook with which she explains her digital strategy is only about as impenetrable as some marketers would, in reality, like their social media strategy to be.

It makes sense. If the company you work for doesn't have a way of working, thinking and decision-making that stands up to rigorous scrutiny, why would you want to shine the mega-watt searchlight that is Twitter and the like on it?

"It's scary and complicated," Martha Lane Fox said when I asked her about the main challenges facing marketers tackling social media. The Government's digital tsar and non-executive director of Marks & Spencer knows that visibility can be a most unwelcome thing.

The way around it, according to Lane Fox, is to "use it" - to get personally embedded in the social media sphere.

So, however farcical Sharpe's strategy is, at least she's all over Netface.

Suzanne Bidlake, consultant editor, Campaign.

See what our essay writers from Dare, goviral, JWT, MBA and We are Social had to say about social below.

 

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