Is Your Social Strategy ‘Landfill Marketing’?

“But that’s landfill marketing”.

So here’s how to kill a campaign idea (and offend a marketer).  Accuse them of doing “landfill marketing” – producing unwanted and unloved marketing refuse and waste from useless, mindless and pointless campaigns, usually using social media.

And here’s a neat formula:

Social Media + Campaign Mentality = Landfill Marketing

That’s the subject of a great presentation “Let’s Kill Landfill Marketing”  by Tim Malbon – that’s gone viral over at Slideshare – from UK digital agency, Made by Many, specialising in co-creation of social products and networked services.

We love the term “landfill marketing”; it’s so mean, yet so true.  The forgotten, unloved and abandoned flotsam and jetsam of marketing.  Are social media campaigns – like much advertising – the bum-fluff of human culture?

Examples of “landfill marketing” – according to Made by Many include

• Gap “Denim Confessions” Campaign where people are invited to share the most daring place they’ve worn/removed jeans (sigh)
• Kingsmill (bread brand) and its Kingsmill Confessions campaign clogging up YouTube with mindless and pointless digital landfill
• McCain’s Say Goodbye to Guilt Facebook campaign where people are invited to share and broadcast guilty secrets with the brand
• Nando’s (restaurant chain) ‘Nando’s Noise’ YouTube campaign – share what you say when you hear Nando’s brand, mix it and share some more
• Brands teaming up with Blipped to add augmented/degraded reality landfill (Tesco, Marmite, Cadbury’s)… (okay, actually we quite like this…)

Yep, it’s a Keenian attack on UGC and The Cult of the Amateur, but it’s also more than that – it’s an attack on what is set to become the bane of the internet ‘social spam’.

Rather than do landfill marketing and manufacture social spam, what the deck argues for is – as you’d guess – utility; building digital products with social technology that help people do stuff. Okay so, it’s all a bit Ideo, but great stuff – a kind of Cluetrain Manifesto for Digital Design.  Worth a read.