We all know that Pinterest is the ‘hot new thing’ in social networking. Brands across the world are flocking to the platform. And not just chefs, fashion designers or department stores, also car makers or hardware stores. 21 million unique visitors are an excellent reason.
With the launch of its official Pinterest page a few days ago, Honda not only wanted to put images of its cars on the platform as a way to drive people to its website, they also launched the #Pintermission campaign (a 24-hour Pinterest break, to get out and do some of the stuff the most active pinners are pinning about). Santa Monica-based RPA agency – supporting Honda in this campaign – designed some ‘inspirational’ posters to encourage other pinners to take a Pintermission.
Usually social media campaigns invite people to get more interactive on social media but, in this case, Honda invited to stop wasting life pinning all the time, get outside and take a 24-hour break to live real life.
The reward? $500. Five pinners are on board so far. They have created a board called #Pintermission where they pinned pictures from their break.
The funniest thing? The campaign is based on Honda’s Pinterest page, where all the #pintermission boards are uploaded. You can check it out to see how it is going.
But that’s not the only campaign taking this kind of direction. In Australia, burger chain Grill’d took a similar angle with its ‘F#ck Celebrity Chefs’ campaign which included a poster with the phrase: ‘No bloggers, no tweeting, no instagramming, no Facebook, and absolutely no cravats’.
Don’t you believe us? Well, check out their Timeline cover! Looks like people are starting to get uncomfortable with the way social media are simplifying our life (an issue we discussed just last week). Lately there have been some actions trying to change the way we usually relate with social networks such as the ‘change the like button’ petition, an initiative which asks Mark Zuckerberg to change the famous like button since it is not enough (according to the request, Facebook users need: ‘good’, ‘great’ and ‘super’ buttons as well).
The official Facebook page of this movement counts almost 80 thousand fans, and it’s supported by the Portuguese beer brand Super Bock.
Why are we seeing companies and users launching campaigns “against” social media? For sure, going against social networks is a good idea if the goal is to provoke, as the majority of campaigns tend to motivate a greater interaction. But is it only that, or some people are actually starting to get bored of social media?
Is the boom of social websites coming to an implosion? A lot has been said about the “2.0 bubble”, and as we saw a few days ago, Facebook has reached 900 million users, but its penetration rate is getting slower, and the company disclosed that their net income fell 12% in the first three months of 2012
Facebook monstruos user growth over the last few years has been a primary driver of growth in its revenue – and certainly had an impact on the ridiculous economic value given to the whole social media ecosystem – but the social network cannot rely any longer on adding new users at super high speed as a way of increasing profits. Especially when these new users come from less developed areas of the world, thus with less money to spend and less interest in advertising.
Although these signs must be taken in consideration, I believe there is still a lot of potential out there. The growth of users is likely to become more stable, but per capita usage of social media will probably raise, especially considering the wide range of possibilites to integrate digital technology in our daily life.
And as long as anti-social media campaigns run on social media, digital marketers can sleep soundly.
Jessica Noguez
