Kitcatt Nohr Digitas

Have we once again entered a period of collective madness?

Reviewing some of the latest digital campaigns, I’m getting a horrible feeling of déjà vu. I’m back in 2001, at the height of the dot.com insanity. Genuine measures of significance, such as sales and ROI, or even weak ones like awareness are absent. Instead, commercial success is exclusively presented in terms of Facebook and Twitter.

What does this amount to? It is impossible to know whether a campaign that garners 60,000 Facebook friends is doing well or badly. But what is clear is that right now, too many agencies and clients are obsessed, as in 2001, with something they can't connect to any meaningful commercial outcome.

What is more, a huge number of campaigns are essentially stunts, events or promotions that have some kind of social media idea bolted on. Some promotions are relevant to the brand and the customer, but many are not. My parody version for one of our clients would be this: hey, let's paint a number of cows in Waitrose's green and herd them into London. We'll film the whole thing on our iPhones, and seed the movies on Facebook while tweeting about it continuously. Soon lots of other people will do the same, and we can then edit together a film for Waitrose and run it as TV. At the end of the campaign, we'll have a whole load of new followers on Facebook to talk to. Or in fact, something malodorous to explain to the client, generated by green cows.

You will recall that when the dot.com bubble burst, a lot of money had been irretrievably wasted and many reputations lost. All that can be said in favour of pointless social campaigns is that they waste less money than pointless advertising.

The truth is, real brands need real customers. Talking (or tweeting) is not the same as buying. A lot of social campaigns are fun for the participants, and for the people who invent them. But unless they clearly spring from a truth within the brand, and involve the people who are most likely to buy, they are pure candyfloss. Hip and happening candyfloss, but spun sugar, nonetheless.

Thousands of people liking you on Facebook is wonderful – as a starting point. But if that’s all you get, it’s not enough. I mean, ‘liking’ something is pretty tepid, isn’t it? It’s not even heavy petting. And goodness knows, in these tough times, you want a whole lot more than that.

Settling for a whole load of liking is lame when you consider what’s on offer. Social networking has unleashed a flood of personal information into the public domain. The idea that people would freely give up so much information would have seemed like a data geek’s fantasy only three or four years ago. But now it’s there, let’s use it. And turn all those little thumbs ups into measurable results. Ideally in cash.