Suxorz panel

We had fun with the Suxorz panel this morning. We were seeking to define the worst social media marketing and advertising campaigns in living memory. I hope to post some summary thoughts later, but for now want to get links and results up, since folks have been asking for them.

After three elimination rounds, the crowd voted for The Worst. HP took the ultimate Suxorz prize with Cisco coming in as the runner-up.

Here are a few links… with a few more to come later.

Jeff Jarvis nominated Hewlett Packard for paying people like this woman to talk up their cameras.

And Cisco’s attempt to spam the blogosphere and wikipedia with it’s meme “the human network” by paying bloggers to write about the phrase.

And Giuliani’s campaign for keeping a “private” Myspace page for most of the campaign.

Rebecca Leib argued that these beer ads were fantastic… but who the heck remembers Carlton?

And there was the famed Agency.com self-promotion in pitching Subway.

Charlotte Seles was incensed by Whole Food CEO Jim Mackey’s covert trashing of his competition for 7 years on Yahoo message boards. She attacked Molson’s campaign that gave “winning” college kids $8k for photos of themselves drinking. And she hated Sony PSP’s “all I want for Christmas is a PSP.”

Then there was SPS’s fake “I want a playstation blog.”

Steve Hall bashed Diet Coke for not totally jumping aboard the Mentos/Diet Coke fountain videos.

He bashed Target Rounders, the group Target created in Facebook to promote itself. Target told its Facefriends “‘Your mission: try not to let on in the Facebook group that you are a Rounder. We love your enthusiasm for the Rounders, and I know it can be hard not to want to sing it from the mountaintops (and the shower, and on the bus’). However, we want to get other members of the Facebook group excited about Target, too! And we don’t want the Rounders program to steal the show from the real star here: Target and Target’s rockin’ Facebook group! So keep it like a secret!’ http://www.kayesweetser.com/archives/58

I was thrilled to hear later that a Target staffer was in our audience, and was heard to be mumbling angrily throughout: “that wasn’t us, it was the agency.”

And he went after Walmart’s “Walmarting across America,” the bogus blog.

http://consumerist.com/consumer/blogs/walmarting-across-america-banned-pix-revealed-206843.php

From the audience Jackie Huba kicked in with the story of Marie Digby, fake grungy musician without a label. (Turns out she’d been signed for 18 months.)

Ian Schafer of Deep-focus summed up the panel here. http://www.ianschafer.com/2008/03/08/from-sxsw-the-suxorz-the-worst-of-the-worst-social-marketing/

Tags: SUXORZ