Marketing Director

Shaw VS. Novus' via 6S Marketing's '10 Bucks Too' Campaign UPDATED

 
>>> Scroll down to see a list of all the posts related to this case study from other sites

First some background, recently Shaw, a telecomms provider in Canada, offered customers of a smaller competitor Novus an amazing deal that is less than 10% of what current customers pay for similar services to 'steal away' customers from Novus. In response Novus turned to agency 6S who thought up "10 Bucks Too" a campaign to push Shaw to offer this amazing deal to other customers outside of the Novus areas of service.

This story has been heating up our little Vancouver corner of Social Media Marketing. 6S Marketing, one of Vancouver's premier Internet Marketing outfits, has set off a storm of conversation and controversy around the use of Social Media Marketing that seems 'organic' or naturally occuring.

With the help of Matt from Novus 6s created this video:




Check out the website here, the Twitter here and the Facebook group here.


Here is a different YouTube video they created with Matt from Novus:




The internet has responded with a  bunch of posts:
 and a furious Facebook discussion.

These comments originally appeared here on the first Techvibes blog entry:

SweetPea said on Thu, August 6, 2009 at 8:40 AM:


The problem with a company like 6S Marketing taking on a client like this is that they no longer become credible. When your staff is told to Tweet, post on FaceBook, messageboards about how terrible something is, you can no longer take thier word as their own personal opinions. I find myself shaking my head when employees and friends chime in with the "me too!". Didn't these people get sweet deals when they signed up with Shaw? They should have!! Every company gives out loss-leading deals to gain new customers. If you missed the boat that's on you, not the company.

...

6S put themselves out on a limb by taking on Novus as a client and running this anti-Shaw campaign. They cleverly masked it as a, "But what about the poor Shaw customers that aren't getting the deal", but in reality, they are doing their own company a major disservice and I'd imagine that the team is thinking that perhaps, this was not the best move in recent history.

6S Marketing owns the 10bucks domain.
6S Marketing employees created the FaceBook and post negatively.
6S Marketing populate messageboards and blogs with biased commentary.

On the other hand, if they were more clear about their relationship, more transparent, if employess said they work @ 6S or are related/friends of 6S instead of feigning shock and awe @ Shaw, then they'd have some sort of credibility. You'd think if they were so emotionally invested in Novus' cause, they'd make sure to put their logo's and links on all the sites...

Kelly Miller said on Thu, August 6, 2009 at 11:07 AM

Thank you for your post. 6S Marketing is an Internet marketing company that provides Social Media Marketing as well as SEO and more. We are not trying to hide our work. Just like a company hires an Ad Agency, companies hire us to provide Internet marketing. In this campaign we are simply trying to educate consumers on the pricing model offered by Shaw. If you feel it is fair for a company to offer extremely low pricing to only Novus customers then you are of course entitled to your opinion. If you feel that this pricing is unfair and predatory then you are entitled to this opinion as well. This is one of the reasons why social media is so great, it allows two way dialogue instead of ad companies just telling you what to think.


Again thank you for your post, and I look forward to future comments and dialogue.



A little earlier the same day on that aforementioned Facebook discussion this was posted:

John Blown wrote at 10:31:

Thank you for your post. 6S Marketing is an Internet marketing company that provides Social Media Marketing as well as SEO and more. We are not trying to hide our work. Just like a company hires an Ad Agency, companies hire us to provide Internet marketing. In this campaign we are simply trying to educate consumers on the pricing model offered by Shaw. If you feel it is fair for a company to offer extremely low pricing to only Novus customers then you are of course entitled to your opinion. If you feel that this pricing is unfair and predatory then you are entitled to this opinion as well. This is one of the reasons why social media is so great, it allows two way dialogue instead of ad companies just telling you what to think.


Again thank you for your post, and I look forward to future comments and dialogue.

The two posts are exactly the same as highlighted in this comment:

Novus-Pacific said on Thu, August 6, 2009 6:49 PM:

Kelly Miller? John Blown? Which one are you? If you are going to try and change public opinion, perhaps you may want to make sure your alias' are straight.



This comment has been added. It lays out the dangers in these activities:

Not-so-social-media said on Sun, August 23, 2009 at 8:35 AM:

Methinks that 6s Media's initial foray into "social media" hasn't worked out well for them and instead of building false hype, they are now in retreat mode. The Facebook group has removed Jenn Lowther and Chris Breikss as Admins( so people don't know a marketing company is behind the Group and the derogatory posts), and a post that recently called out the staff at 6S Marketing for being hypocrites(according to their own admission, they are Shaw customers, yet they are getting paid by Novus to stir up trouble) was deleted from the Group. 


The post questioned the "integrity" of the staff that was posting, suggesting that if they really believed what they were posting, they'd leave Shaw right away. The post that was removed went on to say that Novus might rethink the strategy of hiring a company made up of mostly Shaw customers, to create false drame[sic] and hype, while saying negative things about Shaw.

While this has been fascinating to watch from the sidelines, I wonder if this was the best move for the local Vancouver internet marketing company. Now when we see or hear 6s Marketing staff posting or commenting, we will assume that the words they speak won't necessarily be their actual opinions, but rather the opinions of those that are paying them. They can't very well tell people they are in favor of a product or service, when they are being paid to say that, or being paid to create drama about the competition.

...


Having a social media company try to sway our thinking by creating false hype against one company or another, or having them attempt to socially engineer the thoughts of the masses by removing comments that go against their own bought-and-paid-for opinions just doesn't cut it in my opinion.

In this case, 6s Marketing has dropped the ball. I'm sure they'll try their best to turn this ship around and spin their involvement into a positive light but the beauty of "social" media is that eventually, ALL sides of the story will be told and all facts will become public.

Guess they forgot about the "social" part of social media.


Social Media as defined by Wikipedia:


"Social media is online content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. Social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content; it supports the human need for social interaction with technology, transforming broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers. Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal, political and business use. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content(UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM)." -Wikipedia


I will let these statements tell this Social Media Marketing tale.

Please comment below

3 comments:

  1. I’m all for social media used to promote stuff. Heck, I do it to. However if companies start to get the idea that the best way to drum up support is to take the low road, the “social” part of social networking will start sinking into nothing more than political games, attack ads, manufactured drama, misinformation and overall shady tactics. Leave that to the mainstream media. I don’t want MY social networking to include that.

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  2. Did you know that Shaw also named 6S Marketing in the suit?
    Shaw names 6S Marketing in lawsuit

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  3. Looks like they transferred the 10 bucks domain from 6S back to Novus. Suprised they let 6S own it in the first place.

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