#LRNY – some further “unpleasantness”

As a further addendum to the #LRNY issue it is interesting to see another example of the aggressive opposition to the idea that anyone should examine and critique the initiative.

Chris Baccus, who actually works for Wunderman in their Detroit office, wrote a post largely based around my initial analysis and the Twitter tiff – Twiff he called it – it generated.  It was a good post and invited people to add their own opinion on his blog – which I did, drawing his attention to the more detailed summary post that sought to draw some lessons from the exercise.  Then a Mr Anonymous (ah the great Mr Anonymous) weighed in with this.  You can see it on Chris’s blog – but to save you the effort, here is his comment in full.

Anonymous said…

Richard Stacy, get over it already and stop pushing your unintelligible nonsense all over every blog that I end up at on this topic. I’m trying to do some research on this topic and all I see is you self-promoting and trying to ride the coat-tails of a campaign that generated so much buzz that it’s still being talked about all over the world. No one cares what you have to say since your thinking is flawed and you have absolutely no credibility. Go back to your angry little life so that we can quickly forget about you.

Nice stuff.  I think it is unlikely that this person is doing any genuine research – because if that is the case I would have thought they would be interested in any reasoned critique (even if they didn’t themselves necessarily agree with it).  Even if my analysis didn’t qualify as a reasoned critique – it would at least highlight the dangers of a TagSpace being used  by someone engaged in, as Anonymous put it, self-promoting and trying to ride the coat-tails of a campaign.

What seems more likely is that this person is an employee of the agency responsible, charged with producing the analysis for the client (I have been that person many times!) and they are upset by the fact that what they thought was their space is being contaminated by material that they don’t like.

Two issues here – first there was an error in not recognising that this is social (i.e. shared) media not bought media – as I have already pointed out – and therefore you can’t control the space or exclude material from it.  Second – it is thus foolish in the extreme to launch this sort of rather unpleasant rant because this also becomes added to the digital record of the event thus further ‘contaminating,’ as Mr Anonymous might see it, the space itself.

I would make no personal comment about “Anonymous” and/or the people or organisation that he (probably not a she) may represent – I don’t really have to, it is up to anyone who reads this stuff to draw their own conclusions.

Hopefully all of this will serve as a lesson to anyone who wants to create TagSpaces specifically or engage with social media in general.  You can’t hide behind the facade of a piece of mass communication as you can with an ad.  You have to be prepared to expose yourself and be exposed.  This wasn’t really pitched to Land Rover consumers – the  ‘buzz’ has been generated in the marketing and advertising space based around the pitch that this is the first (and successful) use of a #tag in a campaign.  I, as a marketing and communications person, choose to take issue with this interpretation, largely based around my own support for the use of TagSpaces and desire, therefore, to see them used effectively.

Anyway – to pharaphrase Anonymous – “enough already”.  I don’t want to add anything else to this other than drawing attention to any further personal attacks that might come my way.

One comment

  1. Pingback: #LRNY – just when I thought… « Richard Stacy @ Stacy Consulting

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