The lesson here is “don’t try to be cool if you have to take out the risk.” I’ve never seen it work.

Firstly, let it be known that I’m not trying to attempt to protect brands within social media. If you check out the archive of my blog you’ll find plenty of instances where I’ve criticised brands myself. ANZ and Wrigley’s are 2 brands I’ve taken a swipe at in my last handful of posts. That simply isn’t my agenda.

As I said to Nathan earlier, criticism in fine provided it’s of a constructive nature, particularly from an audience such as marketering professionals. Unfortunately, I have seen little discussion of a constructive nature. Instead, I’ve seen Hitler parody videos being passed around and lame jokes. And I’m sorry Tim but your iSnack blog falls into the same category for me.

I expect more from a professional audience. I’d hope we’re above brand trolling. It’s true that this backlash would have happened regardless. But that doesn’t mean we marketers need to pour petrol on the flames.

I read a lot of blogs within the industry. Many are frustrated with the Australian corporate mentality and hesitancy towards new media channels. But it is the ultimate in hypocrisy to complain about this issue one day, and then fuel that very fear the next.

but weren’t we all praising kraft like a month ago for their crowdsourcing promotion?

seems like you have to execute a perfect social media campaign due to the backchannel. but there’ll never be a perfect campaign and i beileve kraft took a brave step towards engaging social media. you have to experiment, try, fail, succeed, etc..

I liken Social Media to the music industry, you have brands being creative and pushing ideas out to audiences… you have marketers who didn’t make it as the critics, consumers are the fans… I could go on.

Anyway, I agree it’s pretty shameful when marketers start throwing mud particularly when it’s not exactly clear what’s going on. I flagged this campaign on my blog some time ago, they toy with a beloved product, they ask people not to link to them, then this. How easy would it have been to narrow down a list of top 10 names and have the public vote on it? So, I don’t think we’ve seen the end of this campaign yet.

Social Media is as much about failing and showing how real a brand can be… Weed out the negative industry chatter and I wonder if there would be any online banter at all on this?

How the broader community has treated one of Australia’s fav brands is by standing up for it & protecting it against a stupid and ill conceived line extension. In all of this the criticism is directed at the corporation – The Original Vegemite brand is being more firmly embraced. And that embrace is being shared, communicated and promoted via – social media!

I don’t think that criticising the marketing strategy is shitting in the social media woods. I don’t think that criticising the marketing strategy was shitting in the live events wood either (the name was announced to a live audience in Fed Square apparently). Nor is it shitting in the woods of the TV live-cross.

The critcism is directed towards a campaign that suffered some coitus interruptus (perhaps it could have been heightened and extended by having people vote for the finalists); and for selecting a name that the broader loyal rusted on Vegemite community don’t get.

The two things that have surprised me the most out of all of this is that so many marketers seem to think that any publicity is good publicity. And the premise of this post that we should not criticise the campaign because we may put at risk the take up of social media as a marketing tool.

If social media marketers need to keep quiet about major failures to protect their industry, that’s a worry.

I disagree with your post. If anything, #vegefail is an example of the delicacy with which one must handle a cherished and established brand. It’s not so much that Kraft chose a stupid name, it’s that they appear to be willing to tarnish an Australian cultural icon with an illogical name that was out of date before it was announced.

And if your Twitter stream was a little broader, you’d see that marketers are hardly alone in gathering around, stones in hand, to give Kraft a good going over. Marketers are also consumers, and consumers are angry at this decision.

I think you’re wrong that some marketers “constantly criticise brands for social media inaction”. The broader theme than “criticising inaction” is “criticising poor social media execution”, and that’s what’s happening with #vegefail, too.

And I don’t think we should mollycoddle the marketing industry by insulating it from the effects it’s likely to feel at the hands of the public when its practitioners make cosmic cockups like iSnack 2.0.