This holiday season we were treated (literally) to a number of warm and fuzzy gestures by large Internet corporations, including Google footing the bill for wi-fi in fifty-plus airports around the country and on all Virgin America wi-fi flights, and Yahoo! picking up baggage fees at , um, two airports (see what Ad Age thinks of this on top of their justified disdain for the new Yahoo! campaign overall).

This whole “random acts of kindness” thing is a great idea and goes to the heart of what we still call emotional branding. I was a recipient of the Google largesse and it did give me a nice brand feeling (more because I didn’t have to fuss with logging in to GoGo than saving the $12.95, but still).
There is also a lot to be said for the tie-in of “free” Internet to the large Net providers/portals/whateveryouwanttocallthem. After all, everyone feels that Internet “should” be free. Why shouldn’t Google, Yahoo, AOL (hi guys, what’s up?), etc., provide that freedom?

The Yahoo! program is a truly bad example of this, unless it’s really not a consumer campaign at all. As a strange kind of B2B strategy, hitting San Jose and San Francisco airports might make some sense. These are hardly the geographical areas where Yahoo! really needs and should wish to build consumer awareness and goodwill. Yahoo! will never be cool again- Google is barely cool- so why not go be Santa all over the country?

From Paul Carr’s TechCrunch piece on integrated advertising, especially on Twitter (the piece is wonderfully entitled NSFW: Give Me Ad-Free Conversation or Give Me Death (Please RT):

A tweet isn’t a “piece of content”. It isn’t editorial. No matter whether we’re talking about what we’re having for lunch or suggesting a new movie or sharing a piece of news, what we’re really doing is having a good old-fashioned conversation. Following people on Twitter is like organising the world’s largest cocktail party – we’ve decided who’s opinions we trust, and we’ve invited them to come into our homes and talk to us about things they are genuinely interested in. The moment people start screwing around with that principle, the whole system collapses.

Couldn’t define the current and/or idealized nature of Twitter any better. As marketers (Carr: “What I do is Good and Pure; what they do is Bad and Dirty.” So true) we are faced with a world where any traditional notion of advertising is easily avoided by all smart people and most not-so-smart. So we leverage ourselves into content and “conversations” because people like those. At which point, like an airborne contaminant, we risk ruining that content/conversation experience by rendering it no longer genuine (the word “authentic” is currently in my “social media cuss jar” via which folks in our meetings are fined for egregious buzzword use*).

One answer to this is to leave the conversations alone in order to maintain their authentic real and genuine nature, thus retaining what is currently a quite effective marketing tool.

Over/under on that happening? Thought so.

* Social media cuss jar is combined with Internet jargon cuss jar and includes such words and phrases as “100,000 foot level”, “drill down”, and the execrable “best practices”. You get the picture.

Someone who really wants to make a difference in the branding world could work on making giant Post-It’s stick to walls better…11:57 AM Apr 29th from TweetDeck