We crowdsourced the fourth panelist, pulling submissions from Facebook and then running balloting through Surveymonkey. Smith got the biggest chunk of the 2,059 votes cast.
To prime your water cannons for our Saturday morning panel in Austin, here’s the panel description:
Bring popcorn and rotten tomatoes! Braving hate-mail from last year’s “winners,” the Suxorz ’09 panel returns to dissect the ten worst social media and web 2.0 ad campaigns of the year. Together, we’ll shame the marketers who abuse people-powered media.
See any social media marketing horror shows recently? Head over to our Facebook group to nominate.
For those of you who’ve forgotten, Suxorz is the panel I’m moderating at SXSW Interactive ’09. Here’s the description SXSW’s site (tweaked):
Bring popcorn and rotten tomatoes! Braving hate-mail from last year’s “winners,” the Suxorz ’09 panel returns to dissect the ten worst social media and web 2.0 ad campaigns of the year. Together, we’ll shame the marketers who abuse people-powered media.
Everyone on the ballot was nominated through the Suxorz Facebook page and has affirmed their willingness to participate.
Write a blog post, call grandma, twitter your kids, or tell your neighbor to vote & and we’ll release results Friday!
Lets see…anger mom & pop pizza places (yes, in this economy), and bring in the mass-produced bastardization of their bread and butter to rub in their face. Yeah. That makes me feel better about Pizza Hut. It’s one thing to call out your competition if they are another chain. It’s another to insult small businesses.
My advice? Next time, stop trying to make a ‘viral’ with the goal of getting views, and instead, focus on creating content that actually builds your brand — or at least makes it look good.
The Suxorz panel, for those of you who weren’t in Austin last year, seeks to identify and vilify the year’s worst social media marketing campaigns. Last year, we did three rounds of four nominations, with each round followed by a vote, then a final pitch and round.
HP won followed closely by Cisco. (My favorite line from the morning was when someone in the audience from Target (a runner-up) was overheard huffing “this wasn’t us, it was the agency.”)
I had a bunch of great women in mind for the fourth panelist. Spoiled for choice, I’d like to throw the fourth seat open. The fourth panelist is whichever woman you nominate and select.
Go to the Suxorz Facebook group to make your nomination this topic thread. Then we’ll either have a vote among Suxorz FB members or throw it open to the whole world-wide web.
(Like the rest of the panel, she’ll be responsible for contributing a bunch of nominees to the FB page, pitching three of them on stage. She’ll get a SXSW badge and cover her own transport and lodging.)
Jeannine and Kevin took a bunch of great photos at the party that Blogads through with our friends at Deepfocus, Indiewire, IndieLense, NPR and PBS.
SXSW has posted the podcast from the Suxorz panel I organized and moderated.
Former Ad-tech chair Susan Bratton called it “the best panel” at SXSW in ’08. Thank you Susan.
But I disagree vigorously with Susan’s critique that the “lack of preparation is palpable” at SXSW and “poorly moderated sessions go on and on for more than an hour without a single, actionable insight delivered to the patient crowd.”
I loved this year’s gossip and black technology panels, both of which sparked spontaneous combustion between members of the audience and panelists. Actionable insights aren’t what SXSW is about for me… it’s connecting with people I love, a bunch of great experiences, glimpsing some new dimensions that don’t necessarily arise out of a pre-baked moderator agenda but out of the mood of the room. I thought the Lacy/Zuckerberg interview was fantastic at a meta-level… watching Sarah fall on her face and witnessing the crowd’s merciless twit-heckling was one of the most interesting social media experiences I’ve had in a long while. Ditto the Metrics 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.
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.)
