Topic: Online marketing
Took in Toronto’s Case Camp 7 at the CiRCA night club a week or so ago, and it was an eye-opener on several levels.
First, there were almost 500 people–and not just bleeding edge digital agency types, I even spoke to someone from the Ontario government. They came out to hear the four short, sharp presentations of real life social and viral marketing in action–and to get in some major socializing and networking. Those numbers appeared to take even organizer Eli Singer, whose day job is director of social media at Toronto’s Segal Communications, off guard. There’ve been six other Case Camps in the past 18 months or so, including one in Second Life, and the growth has apparently been exponential for the handful that gathered around a couple of tables in a bar for Case Camp 1. Clearly, there’s a burgeoning hunger for knowledge and insight in the social space.
Case Camp is billed as an “anti-conference,” and with its free admission, very loose vibe and the nearly naked Amazonian mannequins flanking the club stage, this one surely was. Sue McVey, TD Canada Trust’s VP marketing planning, who presented the story of the bank’s Facebook program aimed at college and university students last fall, got off the best line of the night when she glanced archly at the boa-clad mannequins and quipped “I don’t think this is brand compliant.”
Singer acted as MC, and he had almost a Gong Show shtick going. Each speaker had just 15 minutes to do their case, and Singer had a big alarm clock on stage to enforce the timing (“If it can be presented in 45 minutes, in can be presented in 15,” he declared).
Actually ComScore MediaMetrix Canada’s Bryan Segal had just three minutes to present a snapshot of the entire state of social media in Canada–and he appeared to pull it off. Bottom line: Canadians are proportionately more active in social media than any other nation.
Despite the boho circus atmosphere, the substance of the Case Camp presentations were impressively grounded in real business issues–save for possibly one, which I’ll get to in a second. Aside from TD Bank, the RedFlagDeals.com founders told the story of their founding and remarkable growth and the Sick Kids Hospital Foundation shared their learning from a daily video blog they produced, with Segal, to augment the charity’s annual radio telethon this spring.
But what got the crowd most fired up–and that fire has had an impressive and continuing echo in TO blogging circles–was the presentation of an “experimental art project” from Toronto screen writer Jill Golick.
Golick presented her creation, Story20h! as a work of fiction/online performance art featuring several characters who interacted with each other–and the “audience”–through their personal blogs, YouTube video posts, Facebook profiles and even Twitter. The story line appears to be a kind of bawdy Friends–essentially twentysomethings in heat. Frankly, this post-modern concept reminded me a bit of Matt Beaumont’s 2000 novel “e”, which told a story through “found” e-mail exchanges within a fictional ad agency, or even to stretch a bit further, Orson Wells’ infamous War of the Worlds radio play, which freaked out many eastern seaboard U.S. listeners in the late 1930s with its mimicking of the then still young radio news form to tell the H.G. Wells’ alien invasion tale.
Certainly, some Case Camp attendees seemed as spooked by Story20h! as those credulous radio listeners back at Halloween 1938. There was an audible ripple through the crowd. Several people leapt up during the question period to challenge Golick on the “transparency” of her actions, and point out that Facebook is pretty insistent on its policy of only “real” people allowed in their community. A couple of people muttering near me sounded like they were shocked to discover these wild people who had friended them weren’t actually real.
Golick defended herself by saying that all the Facebook profiles of her characters admitted they were fictional creations, although she acknowledged that not every e-mail invite or twitter message in the exercise included that disclosure. “It’s not like I was selling anyone anything,” she declared in her defence. Although that defence was undercut just a tad by her making it mere seconds after showing a PowerPoint slide that advertised her desire to work with sponsors in the future.
Story20! was the topic of hot debate at the after party and after the after party online. The ultimate upshot however: Someone outed Golick’s creations to Facebook, which within a day had shut down their profiles. Which, of course, fed the online furor even more. (Links to many of the posts can be found at Golick’s own site and Eli Singer’s site where he expressed sadness at the lack of civility in many of the posts attacking Golick).
To me it was strangely sweet that people at a conference–even a hip grassroots conference- devoted to commercializing and monetizing the online space should get so bent out of shape over a little bit of online deception in some “entertainment” and “art.” On one level, you want to say, as William Shatner did in that famous SNL Trekkie spoof skit: “Get a life.” Don’t take yourself and the space so seriously. And, as I think it was Trapeze’s Andrew Cherwenka who said to me this week, anyone who allows themselves to be friended by strangers with even stranger life stories like Golick’s Ali and Simon, should hardly be shocked when things turn out to be not quite what they seemed.
But on another lever, the lesson for everyone, especially marketers who are trying to sell someone something, is total transparency is paramount. It’s the prime directive, to make another Star Trek analogy. Mess with it, try to deceive people, no matter what your intentions and motivations, and there will be hell to pay.
So there’s some real business learning in the arty experiment after all.
Originally written for and posted on In:fluencia Digital, a beta site created with Editions Infopresse to serve the Canadian online and interactive marketing, communications and media communities. The site’s development is in hiatus.
