Social media campaigns are no different from any other marketing campaign; they can be good, iffy, or bad – or even scary! Social media, however, is so very personal.

Under the “iffy” category, we find campaigns like a recent B2B project that inched toward spam.

Here are the basics. You follow a special Twitter account set up for the promotion, simple enough. The account recognizes you as a new follower and sends you a DM that includes an automatically generated response URL (rURL) personalized with your first name and a pitch.

The “gotcha.” The landing page asks you to authorize the account you are following to tweet on your behalf. You are asked to authorize permission to use YOUR account to send a tweet promoting the campaign to all your followers, under your name.

“Some might call this outright spam… I would recommend a different implementation,” said Eric Vessels on PrintCEO.  Vessels suggests the personalized landing page should ask the recipient to “Retweet this” instead. “If you see the Twitter platform as a word of mouth analogy this seems like the logical thing to do. You wouldn’t tell someone about an event and then ask them if it would be OK if you spoke to all of their friends about it on their behalf. You’d ask THEM to speak to their friends. You certainly wouldn’t email them and ask them for their login credentials so you could then email all their friends! Authorized or not, this just seems to be the wrong approach.”

Under the “scary” category, things can go really wrong.

In October, a Los Angeles woman named Amber sued Toyota for $10 million claiming a marketing campaign lead her to believe she was being stalked by a man named Sebastian Bowler.

Over a 5-day period she received emails from Bowler – a fictitious character supposedly on the run from the law – who said he knew her and where she lived. Bowler, purported to live in England, said he was coming to her home to hide. It all seemed legit, there was even a MySpace page complete with photos, claiming to belong to Sebastian Bowler.

One of the emails included a faked copy of a bill for damages Bowler supposedly caused to a hotel room, including a note that said, “Amber, ran into a little problem at the hotel. After I’m done visiting you, I’m going to go back and sort out that front desk Muppet.”

The entire experience sent Amber into a state of panic.

The campaign had been developed to target men under 35 who hate advertising. Does “Amber” sound like a man’s name? Ignoring the questionable taste of the campaign, a little name gender analysis would have eliminated her from the email list.

Moral of the story: think your campaigns through from every direction. Ask for an outside opinion – several, if your campaign is especially “edgy.” And be aware that social media is an emerging tool; use it, use it creatively, but use it carefully!

Read comments (1) for this post & add your own