An Internet Hot Spot’s Cold Response: When Calling Something an ‘Experiment’ is no Safeguard from Critics

In one of the early scenes from the dystopian 70s cult classic Soylent Green the camera shows a largely homeless and grotesquely overpopulated New York City street whose riotous masses are cleared with dump trucks – called scoops – treated more like rubbish than people. And in later scenes the audience learns not only is prostitution legal, but the women that come with the little remaining luxury property that’s left are called “furniture.” Nice.

If only treating people like objects was confined to Charlton Heston-starring science fiction.

Instead, the recent marketing misstep by BBH Labs, the innovation arm of the international marketing agency BBH, has brought us all a notch lower on the “soylent slide.” Earlier this week, at the annual tech-fest better known as the SXSW technology conference, BBH Labs hired 13 volunteer homeless people to stand in as human mobile hot spots. Carrying Wi-Fi devices and wearing t-shirts that read: “I’m [name] a 4G Hotspot,” the volunteers were enlisted to help prevent the overload of the existing mobile network, a common occurrence at tech-crowded events. It was also intended as a conversation starter – homeless workers would have an opportunity to speak with mobile users about their plight and discuss America’s homeless problem. And who knows, maybe a chance encounter would aid their employment and housing prospects?

In fact, Saneel Radia, the director of innovation at BBH Labs, who was quoted in a New York Times story about the Austin, Texas event, seemed utterly surprised by the public backlash.

“We saw it as a means to raise awareness by giving homeless people a way to engage with mainstream society and talk to people,” he said. “The hot spot is a way for them to tell their story.”

Somehow I think that positive outcome is unlikely, especially when you start with turning homeless people into an awkward marketing ploy while treating them like glorified telephone poles –albeit telephone poles with enough of a human voice to request that their 4G “customers” consider a donation to help them survive. While it’s true that these unlucky 13 did volunteer for their services and were paid for their efforts (more on that later), the program speaks to the worst kind of human exploitation. It’s one thing to know your actions are exploitative and nevertheless carry them out based on some flawed “greater good” logic, but it’s another level entirely when you’re oblivious to that cruelty.

The marketing carelessness also highlights another disturbing trend related to technology, a term that Chris Klauda, a vice president at D.K. Shifflet & Associates, a travel and hospitality market research company calls, “isolated togetherness” – people in close physical spaces, but remaining disconnected from the “real world” and are instead solely focused on the goings on in their virtual worlds via their smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc.

As the technology through which we all communicate continues to advance, becoming more immersive, digitally interactive, and mobile, it’s critical we – not as public relations professionals but as moral, caring, and empathetic members of the human race – remember that treating people with respect isn’t just about asking for someone’s assistance or paying them for their efforts in some endeavor. Nor does calling a marketing misfire a “charitable experiment,” excuse BBH Labs from their decision. That kind of qualified and dare I say bullsh*t language serves no one. In fact, it’s the kind of language PR professionals rely on so often that gives our industry a bad reputation and further fans the flames of the media mess at the heart of this blog post.

For their efforts the 13 volunteers, selected from the Front Steps homeless shelter, earned themselves free t-shirts, $20 a day (which based on an 8-hour work day amounts to $2.50 an hour or about the same legal minimum wage in 1976, and $4.75 below today’s legal minimum), and the opportunity to collect some extra donations.

But if you ask me, and the many others who were similarly disturbed by this story, I think they all got a lot less than they bargained for. Consider this “charitable experiment” a dismal failure, and hopefully one that will not be re-dressed and re-hashed for the next South by Southwest technology conference.

They may not have been called furniture as in Soylent Green, but these 13 volunteers definitely served as a 2012 appliance.

Shame on us all.

Knowledge Rules When It Comes to Social Media

Last month, just after the SXSW festival in Austin, I read a column by Eric Schwartzman on Spinfluencer. My first reaction was “I wonder if I’d have missed The Strokes’ set to sit on this panel?” closely followed by “No, probably not, but it seems interesting nonetheless.” But blogging about it definitely beats listening to the Stokes new album again, so here goes…

Schwartzman raises an interesting – and I think valid – namely that by “outsourcing” the minutiae of social media maintenance, companies are ceding most of the efficacy of the channel. His position is that social media is a bilateral pipeline direct to consumers, and that a company that allows a PR, marketing or advertising agency manage that pipeline, then the social media strategy becomes anemic. No agency, argues Schwartzman, can know as much about a company’s products or services as the employees of that company, who by the way, are more invested in the company’s survival than any agency might be. He goes further (a bit too far, really) to say that agencies that tout their social media capabilities as an inducement to land clients are behaving unethically.

While I agree with the principle behind Schwartzman’s argument: in order for a social media strategy to be effective, it must be predicated on a give-and-take of information, and to be truly valuable, that information must be sound. And going through the social media motions does not deliver any discernable benefit – just ask the thousands of enterprises out there with double- to low-triple-digit Twitter followers or Facebook fans that keep posting or tweeting banal, self-serving bits of nothing, ignoring comments, and scratching their heads over why their brand engagement isn’t skyrocketing now that they have a handle and a fan page. Of course, if these companies are relying on a third-party agency to execute this limp strategy, they’ve made a drastically irresponsible choice in agency.

Which brings me to my real point…

It’s the knowledge behind the social media strategy that matters, not who signs the paycheck of the person executing it.

Yes, a company employee may have more insight into the company’s core business than an agency representative might, but that’s not an inherent quality. Schwartzman may be writing from his own experience, but with all due respect, mine differs significantly.

My agency delivers social media solutions to clients, but we pride ourselves on having both the industry and client-specific knowledge to make those solutions effective. Yes, that means personalized attention. Yes, that means making sure that every one of our agency staffers tweeting on behalf of a client knows at least as much about the client’s operations as whatever internal intern they might have charged with maintaining the Twitter feed were we not their agency.

And yes, all of that means a little more investment in our clients than the big agencies might be willing to make.

I’d go so far as to say there are plenty of agencies like mine out there that understand the power of social media marketing and are dedicated to getting it right.

Or maybe there aren’t, in which case my email is right at the bottom of this post.