Pringles has a new funny online campaign that skewers folks who “overshare” on Twitter and Facebook.

A key feature of the campaign’s website – http://www.helptheoversharers.com - has a ”Best of” Twitter feed that streams some classics: “My arm is itchy,” “Cleaning the kitchen,” and “New shower gel – hooray!”

Amazing: “hurray” is just the utterance I was planning – too bad P&G got to it first.

So anyway, the website offers tips for recovering oversharers, a plug-in that allows you to “shame a friend with just one click” (very popular, I’m sure) and even an interactive video into which you can drop some of your favorite inane comments.  And you can buy a t-shirt with a dopey tweet on it.  Of your choice.

The site is accompanied by a utility on Facebook that Pringles’ 3 million fans (and anyone else who feels like it) can download and use to label boring Facebook updates.

To me, the campaign feels a wee bit derivative of Burger King’s 2009 ”Whopper Sacrifice Challenge,” which offered a free Whopper to anyone willing to unfriend 10 people on Facebook. That campaign was semi-criticized for being an “anti-social” social campaign – a page that Pringles appears to have torn out of the fast fooder’s playbook. And there have been a number of other brands – like Nestle and Skittles – that have leveraged the riskiness and “nowness” of featuring a live Twitter feed in their promotions.

But so far, this has been a conversation focused on techniques and tools – a plug-in, a feed, interactive videos and custom t-shirts.  I love tools just as much as the next marketer, but… what does the Oversharers campaign have to do with Pringles’ persona and the ultimate goal of selling more product? 

If there’s a second phase of this campaign that ties the downside of oversharing online to oversharing your Pringles (because you want to eat them all yourself?), P&G better get moving. It seems like that’d make sense… but I’m guessing and this connection isn’t made at the moment.

So from a business point of view, I don’t get it.  You’re the Pringles brand manager: what consumer insight led to this campaign? What are you trying to communicate? What differentiation would motivate trial, or make an existing Pringles eater feel good about the brand?

Don’t “overshare” social media tools because they’re cool.  It’s tempting – and I recommend social media experimentation all the time – but all of the standard rules of branding, communications and marketing (and revenue and market share and shelf space) apply.

Last week, I attended Columbia Business School’s Brite Conference 2010. “Brite” stands for brands, innovation and technology, and the event is sponsored annually by the school’s Center on Global Brand Leadership.

The two-day happening gave me enough material for quite a while, but let me start here.

There was a real mix of speakers.  On the first day, one of these presenters was Miky Lee (Mie Kyung Lee), Vice Chairman of CJ Entertainment & Media, the entertainment division of Korea’s CJ Corporation.

I know – I never heard of it, either.*

Ms. Lee carefully read her prepared remarks in English, sprinkling her comments with video clips from Korean films, cable television, games, recording artists and the like. 

While watching what appeared to be the Korean version of American Idol, I began thinking of my grocery list and wondering if the conference organizers had planned the session to seemingly wander off this way.

The Q&As came.  Ms. Lee answered a few questions here and there.  She was gracious and considerate.  Then an audience member asked if CJ was going to try to break into the United States.  The speaker wasn’t nasty or arrogant; he was simply saying that – to be truly successful - CJ would need to access the American culture market.

Ms. Lee stood oddly frozen at the podium until until one of the event moderators jumped in to say that Korea was far – far far far - past the U.S. in terms of digital sophistication and social media in all its forms.  Facebook, for example, is pre-historic news in Korea, where a vastly superior social networking site, Cyworld, has been operating since 2000. 

Clearly relieved, the polite Ms. Lee thanked the moderator for his comments and then proceeded to explain that the U.S. is no longer the center of the cultural universe in Asia.

“Having grown up in the 50s,” Ms. Lee said that she and her friends worshipped American music and celebrities.   American culture was the center of their universe.  No more. Today, Japan is the center of Asian life.  Kids look to Japan for what’s cool, hip and trendy.

At this point, Ms. Lee was on a (respectful) roll.

She shared a few details about Korean’s online lifestyle. Did you know that Korea is #1 in the world for broadband penetration in the home? This 2009 article puts that percentage at 95%. Ms. Lee said 98%.  They’re probably both right.  And the United States? As of 2009, we were 20th with 60%.

20th.  That’s 2-o-th.  Behind Singapore (88%), Taiwan (81%), the Netherlands (85) and others.  Estonia has higher in-home broadband penetration than we do (62%). Did you know that Estonia, a country with a population the size of Idaho’s, has an extremely sophisticated information technology sector?  I didn’t.  How about the fact that the creators of both Kazaa and Skype came from Estonia? Nope, ‘hasn’t come up in the line at Starbucks recently. 

I do know, however, that a moving van showed up at Sandra Bullock’s and Jesse James’ marital home last weekend. Whooo-eee! Come back later: my brain is full.

Anyway, Ms. Lee went on to explain how Korea has leapfrogged everyone else in the world with respect to broadband and mobile usage. Downloading full-length feature films at home or playing games and watching TV on a cell phone are run-of-the-mill activities. And then there’s Cyworld, that social network owned by SK Telecom, Korea’s largest wireless provider.  Ms. Lee described Cyworld as essentially a millionth generation of the sites we use in the U.S.: a sort-of Facebook meets MySpace meets Flickr meets IMing meets Blogger. Characterized by CNN as “a license to print money,” Cyworld is used by 90% of all Koreans in their 20s (but also across all age categories) and produces 3x the revenue per user as does MySpace.

And although perhaps she had a right to be, Ms. Lee wasn’t smarmy, or poke-America-in-the eye arrogant: her remarks came across as a 100% sincere call for us to get our *** out of our *** and realize that the U.S is no longer the singular epicenter of cultural or technological innovation.  Seek out what’s happening in Japanese culture, she told us, as well as several other sophisticated countries, including her own. Learn. See. Question.

So - wow. I was intrigued. Who was this woman who read awkwardly from prepared comments and seemed uneasy on stage? (You know what’s coming, right?)

I’m going to make this short so it’s not too painful: Lee received her MA from Harvard in 1986, and served as a teaching fellow there for three years. CJ Corporation – the parent company of CJ Entertainment – built the first and largest multiplex chain in Korea. It also operates the country’s #1 cable network. And CJ’s Mnet Media is the leader in cable music television, music distribution and live concerts.  Variety considers Ms. Lee to be one of the world’s leading film industry executives, and she was the recipient of the CEO of the Year Award from a prestigious business association in her country.  Prior to joining CJ, Ms. Lee was a director or cultural and educational projects at Samsung America. In perhaps her spare time (?), Ms. Lee managed to establish the Parsons School of Design in Seoul and likes to chit-chat with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen (two CJ partners) about their mutual love of movies.

Oh, and of course there’s also the fact that she’s the first grandchild of B.C. Lee, the founder of Samsung Group, the LARGEST CONGLOMERATE IN THE WORLD by revenue ($173.4 billion in 2008), and owner of Samsung Electronics, one of the top 20 most valuable brands in the universe and the world’s largest manufacturer of electronics. CJ, you see, was originally a part of the Samsung world, although it specialized in some sort of foodstuffs before Lee and her brother transformed it into a media juggernaut.

This woman has seen, accomplished, hungered for and achieved things that only a tiny fraction of the world’s citizens ever will.

I… have no real end for this post, other to say that I’m still cringing a week later.  The world isn’t hanging on our every word and - in many arenas – has already pulled way out in front of the United States. 

And we’re going to use this to recognize that we must be more curious, more open, more interested in seeking out worlds other than our own, right? Right?

A new study released by Q Interactive indicates that – while women may be flocking to social networking – they’re not yakking about the favorite baby food or burgers.  While 52% of 1,000 women said that they’d become a “friend” or “fan” of at least one brand, 75% of women in the study overall say that social networks do not influence what they buy.

I had to smile when Q’s president scrambled to make sure that marketers (with money) didn’t interpret the results in a negative way: Q calls the “disconnect” a “huge opportunity” for marketers and says that brands need to catch up to the needs of women online. 

If I were an agency relying on clients, I’d say the same thing!

But what if that’s not true? What if the social media frenzy that’s been whipped up among advertisers is…  overhyped?  What if we find out that women love discovering new ideas and interacting with new people and new communities, but the commercial promise in these interactions isn’t there? What if online engagement doesn’t lead to sales?  What if talking just leads to… talking?

I’m going to watch for new news and information about how women are interacting with social media because – if Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter and all the other social sites do not turn out to be a brand bonanza for advertisers, we could see a major reset in expectations, involvement and, most importantly, dollars.

Well, my Tappening idols – Mark DiMassimo and Eric Yaverbaum – are back with a new campaign that got a big write-up in The New York Times yesterday.  Boo-yah!

As you may know, Tappening is a grass-roots effort DiMassimo and Yaverbaum started together as a laboratory for a social world marketing experiment focused on the negatives associated with bottled water (which – outside of convenience - turns out to be pretty much everything about bottled water).  I first interviewed them nearly two years ago about the initiative and covered their first ad campaign back in March of this year.  To date, Tappening has sold about $5 million worth of re-usable BPA-free plastic and stainless steel bottles, much of which is plowed back into the effort.

The team’s second campaign turns up the heat.  “Lying in Advertising” includes several treatments featuring such claims as “Bottled water causes blindness in puppies” and “Bottled water is the primary cause of Restless Leg Syndrome.” If you cannot see the posters below, click HERE and check out the bottom of the page.

The new campaign has a dedicated website at www.startalie.com from which you can easily ”spread” your lie about bottled water via email, Digg, Twitter and Facebook (a nice touch).  My first contribution was “Ben Bernanke says that bottled water caused the global recession.”

Hey, it could happen…

I have no idea if they’ll sell even one tampon, but P&G’s Tampax is the stealth sponsor of a series of viral videos that tell the story of a 16-year-old boy who wakes up with – uh – “girl parts.” And at least from an art point of view… they’re good. Click HERE if you do not see the ad below.

Leo Burnett created the campaign at Zack16.com.  Its big link to the brand thus far is when our hero, Zack, gets his first period in French class and sneaks into the girl’s bathroom looking for a Tampax vending machine.

P&G calls it “a learning lab out on the net” that’s “not very heavily branded at all.”  Hmm.  And so far the videos aren’t a huge hit, with about 10,000 views in the past week on YouTube and elsewhere. 

I really wanted to dislike this campaign and - if I were a P&G stockholder - I probably would.  I also wonder if the best way to pitch tampons to young women is with stories about young men baking brownies, but what do I know? I hope it sells something. 

In the meantime, I’m enjoying the work of a good copywriter and have started following Zack on Twitter at @ZackJohnson16.  He appears to be trying to figure out how to manage menstruating while at soccer camp.

 Note: the “hovers like a UFO” comment is from the Day 3 video.  Really – these are pretty humorous.

I just feel like I need to mark the occasion:  I got my 500th follower on Twitter today!

That means that 500 people have elected to see everything I tweet on their home page, ever day.  Day after day.  All the time.  Who are these people??

Actually I know who they are, and anyone can see for him/herself at www.twitter.com/stephfierman.  It’s an eclectic group of digital, business, marketing, PR, advertising, social media, non-profit and strategy folks… and I thank every one.

And I’m learning more and more about how Twitter works every day, too.  If you want someone to follow you, for example, start retweeting their tweets until they notice.  They’ll check you out, decide they’re interested in what you have to say and voilà! your favorite ad agency or magazine decides to follow you.

I’ve mentioned him before, but Kent Huffman is doing an incredible job on Twitter, transforming simple but great ideas into an ever-widening community that’s good for him and everyone else.  He started with the most popular CMOs on Twitter and has now created a list of the top marketing authors.  He gives a shout-out to everyone on these lists, they pick up followers, positive karma comes back to Kent and on it goes.  Brilliant.

There are also new automatic tools that are supposed to help you with Twitter arriving every day.  Some are helpful, some are not.  One that I tested this weekend puts supposedly like-minding people onto your “Followers” list automatically.  One of these new follower’s business pages involved the words “live s*x” – I kid you not – so there’s spam and garbage on Twitter just like everywhere else on the Web.  But TweetDeck, Seesmic and Tweetie for Mac and iPhone all have fans.

So thank you, Carol Phillips, for being my 500th follower.  Carol is a professor at Notre Dame and an expert on millenials marketing.  The chance of me “meeting” Carol and hearing her ideas (because now I’m following her) without Twitter?  Quite close to zero.  So that’s pretty great.

What might you find on Twitter?

So yes, this is another post about Twitter.  What can I say?  It’s the fastest growing, probably weirdest social media phenom thus far, and I’ve been sucked in.

One of today’s interesting tweety tidbits is a quite lengthy email that Rupert Murdoch – sorry, I meant the Deputy Managing Editor at The Wall Street Journal – recently sent to employees outlining “do’s” and “don’ts” for employees on Twitter or otherwise engaged on the “social Web.”

It’s sort of a doozy.

Don’t ”friend” confidential sources, don’t criticize colleagues, and my favorite (verbatim): “Don’t engage in any impolite dialogue with those who may challenge your work — no matter how rude or provocative they may seem.”

Employees may cite (but not push) their own reporting and – well, that seems to be pretty much all they can do.  And even that rule, as you can see, comes with a murky qualification.

Some of the restrictions make perfect sense, such as not detailing how an article was edited.  Others are ripe for wrongful discharge lawsuits, such as the “don’t” that says you mustn’t recruit family or friends to promote your work.

In most instances, this particular restriction would be nearly impossible to dissect and prove.  If I retweet comments from a former colleague who then talks up my work, did I solicit that positive feedback?  And, I’m sorry:  if my mom claims that I’m just the cleverest person ever ever ever, there’s nothing I can do about it.

So I was thinking that the whole thing seemed very 1984… until I spotted a blog post detailing real tweets that some knuckleheads have posted on Twitter.  A sample (with all grammar errors intact):
- “I just got to work (Oracle) and I am doing as little as possible”
- “Huh, with my boss on twitter, maaaybe I should take down that sexy picture of her… but her reaction will be priceless!”
- “hate my job!! i want to tell my bosses how dumb they are and how meaningless this job is, then quit, and be happy!”
- “Workin… This job sucks worse then [sic] the economy!”

The title of this blog post? “TwitterFired: The Top Ten Tweets to Get You Fired.”

Huh.  Maybe The Wall Street Journal Twitter police knows what it’s doing.

Kent Huffman, Chief Marketing Officer at BearCom Wireless, a published author and all around smart, nice guy is doing something so smart on Twitter.

He’s publishing and frequently updating a list of the “top” CMOs on Twitter – those with the largest number of followers.  So what does this mean?

–  It makes Kent a leader in the marketing community on Twitter.  It makes his “personal brand” stand out in a positive way among friends and colleagues with shared interests.
–  It’s likely that many on the list will retweet the post but, just as importantly, they’ll send it to others outside of Twitter (Hey Mom, look at this list I’m on!).  This exposes Kent and his work to an ever-widening, friendly crowd on the Web.
–  It connects everyone on the list to one another.
–  It gives Kent fresh content to create meaningful tweets over time.  Not always easy.
–  It drives traffic to not only Kent’s Twitter page, but also his own website, which is where he posts the list.
– Each time he posts an update, everyone on the list has their names, their brands and their Twitter addresses repeated, thus making it likely that they’ll get even more followers, and giving the search engines yet another page to crawl for their name. 
– And of course, each new update can potentially bring changes to the list, thus given a new CMO a fresh spotlight and creating renewed interest as everyone checks the list anew.

Kent leveraged his profession – which any of us could have done but didn’t – into its own mini-phenomenon that spreads learning and excitement across the Web, simply by calling attention to a community in which he’s already a member.  It’s a marvelous example of social media marketing at its best.

I’m proud to be on Kent’s list (#30 with a bullet!). For those of you on Twitter, take a quick look at the list:  you may want to follow someone who is the CMO of a brand you care about.  At #1 is Best Buy ’s Barry Judge (with more than 6,800 followers!) and it goes from there.

Twitter.  Twitter.  Twitter.  I am twittering… but I’m getting a headache, too.

Nielsen has recently fielded a survey about the top 5 fastest growing “community destinations” and anyone who now(unwillingly) knows where all their friends are at all times coulda have predicted that the winner would be Twitter.

And regardless of what you might think of the service, you’ve got to respect this kind of insane growth:

One of the most remarkable tidbits from the survey is that Twitter’s largest demographic is users between 35 and 49 years old.  So Facebook may have invited us oldies in, but Twitter has captured our hearts.  And our hearts are captured, on average, 14 times a month for an average of 7 minutes per session.

From my experience, a lot of people are spending a lot more time on the site than this – too much time, in some cases, as captured by this funny  video:



So tweet on, my friends.  But please stop saying “Good morning,” “Good night,” and “Mmmm, coffee,” ok? If your spouse or best friend would give you a dirty look if you bothered them at work with a comment… a good standard, perhaps, to keep in mind when bugging the rest of us.

To follow me on Twitter, go to www.twitter.com/stephfierman and click “Follow.”  I promise not to share anything about my lunch.

I follow Jeffry Pilcher’s TheFinancialBrand.com on Twitter and have enjoyed his insights.

Recently, Jeffry caught something that tells us just how bad the financial situation is.

Yes folks, these institutions are so upset, and have become so unstable, that they are literally peeing their own metaphorical pants.  And their grammar stinks.  Oh, I know:  it’s shocking!

Jeffry points out something that shouldn’t be a surprise, however:  anything that represents a financial company today that is viewed or experienced by the public – even signage in a local branch - deserves additional scrutiny.  The smallest failure in personal service can undermine costly efforts elsewhere.

Did I mention that this sign was posted on the door of a credit union inside the U.S. Capitol Building?

Jeffry_Pilcher TheFinancialBrand.com Politico.com

Did you see the Oscars telecast this past weekend?  Third worst-rated show in history.  Just painful.  I adore Hugh Jackman (duh), so I watched his interview with Barbara Walters before the ceremony started.  The first-time host told Barbara that he would indeed perform and that he felt the awards needed “more show, less business.”  I think we just needed less of everything.

Aside from Kate Winslet, “best performance” has to go to Glam Media, the women-focused vertical network boasting over 75 million users and 700 publishers.  comScore has named Glam one of the top 10 media properties on the Web.

While the likes of ABC (who did not stream the broadcast!), Twitter and Facebook wandered around trying to figure out how to make money on online Oscar conversations – celebs in the audience and at the parties were twittering, for cryin’ out loud – Glam just went ahead and hosted its own Twitter widget.  Glam then offered advertisers the opportunity to sponsor an edited version of the tweet stream during the telecast. 

Glam hand-selected which tweets appeared in the stream, thereby making it safer for brand advertisers who are always (and understandably) concerned about appearing alongside a conversation that veers into unacceptable subjects.

Aveeno sponsored the Twitter widget, and Glam says it will introduce widgets for both FriendFeed and Facebook streams running during future shows and other events. 

Poaching on other sites’ turf to generate ad dollars, when those sites haven’t figured it out themselves?   Nicely done!

Last night, the first annual Shorty Awards gala took place in Brooklyn.  The Shorty Awards honor the best producers of Twitter content (tweets) in 26 categories including Advertising, Brand and Social Media.

And, Mon Dieu! - the drama!  Accusations of ballot box stuffing, paying for votes and other forms of cheating are rampant!  One of the biggest controversies has focused on the winner of the Advertising category, a woman named Carri Bugbee who tweets in character as Peggy Olson (@peggyolson) from the AMC TV series “Mad Men.”  When she won, a fellow Twitterer who owns a real ad agency actually got mad and spammed Bugbee with endless pop-ups of a Rick Astley music video (so random…).  He had hoped to capture the nation’s attention by winning the award, he said.  “She’s not real,” he cried!  Yeah, we get that.  But she’s good. Better luck next year.

In a charming twist, each winner used a tweet (all 140 characters of it) as his or her acceptance speech.  Maybe the Oscars should try that.

Should you be on Twitter?  There’s no concrete answer here, of course – and I’m speaking only about individuals at this point, not companies.  If you are interested in keeping up with and participating in the changing social media environment, you might give it a whirl. If you think you have something to say and can tweet 3-4 tweets a day (which is considered a decent volume and frequency) I’d say go for it.  And another huge advantage is that you can “follow” other Twitterers whose opinions you’ll see on your own page each day.  Just beware those who believe “Hmmm. Coffee!” is a good tweet. 

Fortunately, Twitter makes “unfollowing” easy, too.

Twitter @peggyolson