My name is Nathan and I’m addicted to social media. Chances are you are too. The SMAA can help.
It appears Sony is using a satirical social media campaign to promote its new line of Vaio W Series laptops. Visit stopwritingonmywall.com to find the headquarters of the Social Media Addicts Association (SMAA). You’ll find:
- the SMAA logo. I love it. It’s a chain of hand-holding stick people, with one of them breaking free.
- a confessions page of YouTube videos
- viewers are encouraged to sound off on their social media addictions and send in links of YouTube video responses.
- a down-and-dirty petition viewers can sign (I joined!)
- Joining consists of submitting your name and email. I wonder if I’ll only get important SMAA updates or also Vaio/Sony ads
- a T-shirt store. One of the shirts says “Fakebook” in Facebook’s logo typeface, so to keep Sony out of hot water, its not available (but there’s a link to a site selling something very similar!)
- In addition, Jerry — the SMAA’s founder — tweets (although not very often, @JerrySMAA), and his tweets are real, relevant to social media addiction, and not linked to Sony or Vaio pages. Nice. I can’t stand campaigns that are too transparent and do little beyond pushing a product so directly.
While this is all very clever and will resonate well with Sony’s target audience (social media addicts), I’m curious to see how effective the campaign is at moving product. Jerry says he started the SMAA in the Spring of 2009. The only mentions that I’ve observed of Sony or the Vaio W series are at the last few seconds of the YouTube videos and at a “powered by” link at the bottom of the site. While SMAA may get lots of viral buzz, how will the campaign’s creators, European firms Nascom and Caviar, translate buzz into sales of the Vaio W series?
Perhaps the underlying campaign objective isn’t to sell notebooks. At least directly and/or within a set deadline. Maybe the aim is to brand Vaio/Sony as not a machine and manufacturer, but the fundamental supplier of social media. After all, one does kinda need a computer to be on Facebook. And less and less it seems people are buying notebooks based on measurable values like brand reputation, product reliability, specific hardware specifications, warranty, customer service, etc. Now there is an emphasis on color, style, and overall sex appeal. Price and value are still somewhere in the equation, but I’ve definitely observed a shift in consumer attitude when it comes to PC notebooks. Suddenly it is important to identify oneself with a PC brand. Or with PC’s in general (Microsoft’s “I’m a PC!” campaign).
Of course Apple has always used emotional connections to sell Macbooks. A majority of consumers buy Macbooks, iPhones, iPods, and the whole array of Apple products simply because they’re cool. And Apple gets to charge a premium for this sense of cool. Are PC manufactures finally catching up? Is Sony trying to align itself with social media? Futhermore, how might this campaign pan out in the future? At some point, the product has to be more visible. Will SMAA sink or swim?
