Pardon my French, but your social media campaign sucks

Kraft Food has launched a "social media" campaign in the UK to promote their coffee brand, Mellow Bird's. It is part of a larger repositioning of the brand to reach a younger audience, according to Brand Republic.

Sounds like a good idea, right? But don't start patting Kraft on the back just yet, says John Bell in Social Media Today. The campaign is mediocre at best, in both strategy and execution. They want to "target students and give the campaign an anti-corporate feeling" — which he notes is a terrible language to use in a PR announcement — and the game itself on Facebook (where they only had 146 fans) is seeing how many times the user can hit the space bar within 10 seconds. And we wonder why kids brains are turning to mush.

Conclusion? It's nice that large consumer brands are seeing the value of social media and dedicating  budgets towards it, but c'mon Kraft. Don't do things half-assed. A good social media campaign is not cheap. It needs to be thought out correctly, by the right people, and executed correctly, by the right people, or it's going to blow up and turn off CMOs forever. "Well, Bob, that didn't work, now did it. Back to search!"

Says Bell: "Social media
is not a channel. It is a fundamental shift in consumer behavior. It is
time for even 'first-timers' to adopt a true social media strategy."