This guy from Company X was asking me if my team would be interested to sign up for a 3-day social media event in March. He didn’t explain very clearly what it was, but I figured it was a workshop where marketing professionals can sit around and share best practices on how they use social media.

He did it all wrong though.

First, when you cold call someone to get some business, you should have some rudimentary idea what the potential customer is doing. Doing some background research doesn’t take up a lot of time.

But he had no idea what my Xbox team was doing on platforms like Facebook (we’ve got a fanpage that’s about 8500 people strong) or Twitter. A simple online search for terms like “xbox”, “singapore” and “twitter” would throw up immediate results of where we’re at in cyberspace.

Then he told me the cost of the event and I nearly fell off my chair – over S$2,000 per individual.

(At this point, I was wondering if he’d even attempt to offer a group discount or early-bird discount, but that didn’t happen. He was a really lousy salesman.)

The phone call ended there because I told him we weren’t interested. And if the call had gone on any longer, I’d have given him a piece of my mind, which is:

You shouldn’t have to pay to find out about social media. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you do, social media is free to use (most of the time) and is free to learn.

If you want to get someone else to do social media marketing for you, I’ve got no issue with that and it is often a viable solution.

But pay over two grand to listen to people tell you how to use a common feature on the Internet? That’s like paying someone to teach me how to send email or use instant messaging.

Of course, I’m sure there will be marketers who would gladly love to pay for this workshop and figure out what this social media thingy that everyone is talking about all the time.

How does it work? What wonders can it do for me? Can I save thousands of dollars with social media?

Unfortunately, if you need to pay to find out about social media, you might not really know what you’re doing. How can you be in marketing or communications if you do not take the time to find out about the constantly changing online landscape? How much will it cost you to set up a Facebook account? And WHY aren’t you on Facebook by now?

This also reminds me about a senior print journalist who wrote a commentary about how she’ll never be on Facebook. When print media moves into the next phase, I’d like to see how she copes. 

So if you’ve signed up for such a social media session already, I’d suggest you do the following.

1. Sign up for Facebook or Twitter now, the two most common social media platforms.

2. Add friends on this platform. Unless you have no friends that is…if so, skip to step 4.

3. Interact with friends on these platforms. See how people live, breathe and generally get overdosed on navel-gazing updates from anyone and everyone. Join fanpages or lists to see how others do it.

4. Search online for “social media marketing”. Plenty of articles to read there.

5. Voila, you’ve saved yourself or your company two grand and you’d know a lot more about what’s going on. 

Whether or not you want to get an agency or hire someone to carry out your social media strategy, remember that LEARNING in this area is FREE. My advice here is FREE too, even though I pay about $150 annually to maintain this site!

Don’t get suckered into paying for it and, might I add that many best practices that people share are also available for FREE online.

Edelman Singapore recently organized such a sharing session with IT industry folks too last Friday evening, and we had a good time sharing our successes or horror stories. It cost nothing to participants but was probably more useful than any 3-day session run by an agency with a clueless sales guy.

Oh yes, pssst – blogs and bloggers are social media too, but that’s a whole different kettle of fish. 

Related posts:

1. Mixed Media
2. The Age of Too Much Info
3. Henry Jenkins and the old media

 Real artists painting over the “vandalized” postboxes. Picture from ST.

Looks like SingPost did a nice turnaround by getting real (ie. talented) artists to paint over the “vandalized” postboxes (actually I should remove the apostrophes as I do consider the postboxes vandalized).

From what the press says, this repaint is being managed by a different agency from the original that organized the “vandalism”. From ST 10 Jan:

The artists were picked by Farm, a local arts collective that is organising Stamp 02.

In 2007, Farm had also worked with SingPost to launch the first Stamp competition, which saw 40 post boxes transformed into different scenes of Singapore.

I’ve often complained that many locals aren’t as appreciative of good art as they should be. But this episode has taught me that at least, they know how to reject bad art.

***

A SingPost postbox that was vandalised as part of their marketing. Photo from Stomp. 

A good commentary in Today newspaper today on the SingPost PR fiasco:

TO SOME in the marketing industry, any publicity – good or bad – is still publicity. It’s an adage the brains behind the botched SingPost "Express Yourself" campaign may want to seek some comfort in following the public furore over the campaign which saw six mailboxes all over Singapore being vandalised.

But for their client, SingPost, the gimmick has been nothing but a public relations disaster.

What was to have been a press conference on Wednesday to announce SingPost’s sponsorship for the 2010 Youth Olympic Games saw the company going on the defensive. It had to take hard questions from the media:

Did it know about the vandalism gimmick, did it approve the marketing strategy, did it even consider the public alarm the vandal may trigger by his actions?

In the end, SingPost issued a public apology and the police – which had to look into a few 999 calls as a result of the stunt – have said they will be taking up the matter with SingPost.

Read the rest of the commentary here.

In the first place, the whole marketing gimmick didn’t seem to me as very creative.

A lot of people seem to mix up creativity with rubbish. In marketing, being creative doesn’t mean that you lose sight of the main message you are trying to send out.

In SingPost’s case, what message was being sent here? Who on earth knew that this was related to the Youth Olympic Games?

And why is “creativity” being associated with the YOG? The YOG is a sporting meet – it’s about a group of young athletes coming together to compete aggressively to become number one in their respective fields. It’s not about putting on a show to demonstrate how different they are, but how similar they are in their desire to win.

Real creativity means turning ideas on their heads while making sure people understand your real message in the process. It requires marketers to think about the thinking process – how will people process the information and not get the wrong idea?

There are also marketing agencies that come to clients to pitch big and grand ideas, but guess what, some of them are not really interested in your business or your message. They’re often out to make a name for themselves and add your brand to their portfolio of gimmicky stunts.

I remember many years ago, there was this MRT poster that went something like “By the time you finish reading this poster in the next 10 seconds, something would have changed.” A classmate said she actually stood in front of the poster for 10 seconds and wondered what would happen. I think the poster was trying to highlight the nature of time and how efficient the MRT system was (or something like that lah). But the message didn’t sink in fully with at least one person and thus it wasn’t a good ad.

That’s why good marketers are hard to find. There are many who think marketing is just about spending the budget to put out big flashy advertisements or public gimmicks, and unfortunately, there are many marketers who prove that stereotype right.

That’s why in bad times, marketers are often laid off before accountants and HR folks who are deemed to be doing more tangible work.

This fiasco also sheds some light on something most people don’t want to talk about  – marketing and PR are intrinsically tied together, though industry professionals try to separate them due to the different materials and approaches used.

A good marketer will understand how to manage the media coverage of such a gimmick, and a good PR guy will understand when such a gimmick is going to drag down the company’s name. But I know in many companies, PR and marketing folks don’t talk to each other very much. I guess it helps my team is so lean, I happen to do both together, so if anything goes wrong, you only need to crucify one bald guy.

Still, kudos to SingPost for doing the right thing and apologising for its mistake. Better to admit you’re wrong than insist it was a spark of brilliance that was misunderstood by the masses.

Next time, hire a better marketing agency and perhaps, better graffiti artists. The artwork on the postboxes was really low quality, I’ve seen better at canals and slums.

Related posts:

1. Do not pay to learn about social media!
2. The day I met JBJ
3. Why I can’t blog about work