Is Your Brand An Alex Jones Or A Charlie Sheen?

Charlie Sheen's and Alex Jones's attempts to resurrect their careers via Social media appears to have flopped, While other similarly Twitter-friendly celebrity, are going strong.

The key difference is that the ones who are smart enough to avoid suits tweets form part of an integrated multichannel branding strategy, while Sheen's and Jones's surreal tweets do little to bolster their broader brand.

Social media is not a strategy.

Social media is a venue .....a set of technologies or tactics that enable us to elevate and amplify brands and their marketing communications.

The question shouldn't be, "What's the social-media strategy?" but, "What's being done to make the brand more social?" Or specifically for the suits, "What can we do to make this TV work, print campaign or offer more social?"

Social media may be the channel du jour, but the message and the mechanics of how it's deployed are the things that really count.

Here's what Alex Jones, Charlie Sheen and the other undercover suits missed:

The DellOutlet Twitter feed became a poster child for Twitter's potential impact, earning accolades by generating $6.5 million in revenue for Dell. But surely that success boils down to the product offers in the feed. Twitter was just the medium that carried those messages.

The fabulous Old Spice work featuring Isaiah Mustafa was built on a foundation established by an exceptional piece of creative, work that Weiden & Kennedy then very skillfully augmented through social-media channels.


Take two more high profile brands that have been particularly active in social media: Charlie Sheen and Alex Jones. You could argue both essentially have the same strategy when it comes to social media. It goes something like this:

1. Target the retards as a following.
2. Interact and engage directly with fans.
3. Create buzz and conversation.

Suits miss the important things and don't work. You know that!!

Another lesson we can learn from the suits is that it isn't just about tweeting your brand. It is about being incredibly active across multiple media channels, whether it be interviewing and profiling, doing features or making a live appearances.

After Charlie Sheen's road show ended, and people began wizing up to Alex Jones in contrast, so did a lot of the talk about them. For most brands, having a presence in social media alone isn't sufficient. There are too many one-off social-media marketing campaigns that, although highly creative, fail to connect or drive the broader brand communications platform.

Social media needs to be embedded into all parts of the marketing mix as part of a single, integrated brand effort. Every agency -- creative, media, digital, public relations and customer-relationship management -- needs to grab this opportunity and take responsibility for socializing the brand. Social shouldn't sit at one agency or indeed operate as a separate strategy on its own.