Part 1: Social Media And The Ad Biz

There’s been a lot of talk about whether advertising agencies are up to the job of handling social media. Remember this:

“Clients are placing more emphasis on mastering social media but find their agencies ill equipped to help them succeed in that space, according to a new survey?”

Agencies are trying to get it together with every shop trotting out some form of social technology or media buying on a social media site no matter the campaign. Consider McCann’s weak attempt with Applebee’s. Just get on the band wagon, guys! Don’t think. Use YouTube!

The latest addition is StrawberryFrog’s new website for their client Scion. The agency has launched a social networking campaign titled Scion Speak.

“Scion Speak is one of the best examples of tan integrated Social Media brand campaigns in the market today. It targets existing owners to stoke their passion for the brand and spread the word about the brand,” says Kevin McKeon, Executive Creative Director of StrawberryFrog. “Most social media campaigns are promotional, as in ads on Facebook, we wanted to do something completely different. We wanted to use the existing Scion fan base as our own media channel, with the aim of reducing Scion’s investment on conquering new customers and increasing the passion for the brand among its core fan-base. Scion Speak does just that.”

Scion Speak.com is a “new symbolic language that allows individuals within the Scion enthusiast community to create their own visual fingerprint that represents their lives and their passions.”

Hmm… wanna check it out? Let’s go. So… here we are at Scion Speak where users can create a crest, check out other folks work and then watch some videos. Not a bad idea considering that it allows users to extend their image across the brand, which Scion owners love to do. Owners are notoriously community oriented. On the current Scion website, owners can already create a mini-toy version of their car. They can upload pics of their ride and watch videos featuring Scion’s users across the country. They can also compete against one another as the “top dawg” enthusiast club and check out Scion radio.

So, question – why is this addition by StrawberryFrog so flat? Users create the crest, download it and then post to the gallery. Yawn. Once you’ve done that, then what? You can’t send it to your friends. You can’t download it to your phone. Car owners can save it at the largest size (21 x 16) at a resolution of 96 that is to small for print (minimum is 150), which means you can’t put it on your automobile. Why? Scion users are big on making their vehicle their own. That’s kind of the thing they love about the brand. Hunh… What else? Now what?

The concept of creating a new language for Scion owners is genius and Da Frog has the right imagery, lexicon and attributes for Scion users on the website. Yet, it’s pretty uniform. The language could have been built out by users themselves. Scion owners have their verbiage sort of like the Urban Dictionary. Why isn’t there a Wikipedia like attachment where owners can create the Scion dictionary – visually and with words?

At the least, make it Facebook and MySpace friendly. You know, make it easy for folks to cross platforms with the crest? Spread the language? There should be a button that will automatically upload it to your website if you’re using a blogging software like WordPress. Why can’t owners order stickers, print quality products for their use? Why isn’t this crest attached to other Scion brand messages like music through a widget? Where’s the mobile or fun, game angle, basically the meat of this thing?

It ain’t bad, but it also isn’t badass. Scion is a brand that’s willing to take risk, break the rules. Da Frog should of taken advantage of that and created an outstanding social media campaign that stood out, made some noise.

This is a much larger conversation. Stay tuned for part deux.