From my blog

Engagement smells fishy

Have you seen the @ShippamsPaste Twitter account? Purporting to come from the ‘social media intern’ at Shippams, it promises that its Tweets will ‘help you engage with our brand’.

In fact, the feed is a stream of gags about sandwich pastes, Chichester and what being an intern at a firm like Shippams might be like, all delivered in an engagingly naïve tone with adventurous spelling and punctuation. It’s surreal, inventive and very, very funny.

On one level, the feed is an in-joke, almost certainly created by a marketing insider. It brutally satirises the doomed ambitions of dull-as-ditchwater brands like Shippams to ‘engage’ via social media. (In reality, Shippams has wisely opted to have no social presence at all.)

Everything is there – the lame invitations to contribute user-generated content…

…the attempt to hijack trending topics…

…or establish self-serving hashtags…

…’helpful’ ideas for enjoying the product…

…and ‘interesting’ facts about the company and its ranges.

Naturally, @ShippamsPaste has been a runaway success. As I write, it has 2300 followers, having gained about 800 just yesterday (when I first saw it). It’s generated the sort of viral social publicity that brands would kill for – which is why Shippams would be well advised to let it run, rather than sending a crabby cease-and-desist letter. (Always assuming, of course, that it’s not an absolute marketing masterstroke from the brand itself.)

What’s interesting, though, is how the feed has whipped up such interest. Although it’s finding popularity through social channels, @ShippamsPaste is an interruptive phenomenon, not an engaging one. Like the Old Spice campaign, it uses the product and the brand as the starting point for some inventive, memorable humour that grabs our attention with both hands. But that’s got very little to do with ‘engagement’.

Normally, we’d never want to connect with a brand like Shippams, but we’re definitely up for some LOLs and WTFs at the expense of its products (or pompous social-media delusions). @ShippamsPaste offers the sort of content that makes the sharer look cool just for sharing it.

And, ironically, we’re far more likely to try the product as a result of reading @ShippamsPaste than if the firm’s marketers really had tried to engage us in some fun activities or content generation around the brand.

@ShippamsPaste rarely replies to its audience, but that one-sidedness is the whole point. As with other Twitter wits (@sixthformpoet, @jacques_aih, @OhLookBirdies), the feed preserves its superiority and mystique with one-way communication, rampant creativity and strictly rationed audience interaction – the exact opposite of what most social campaigns deliver, on all three counts.

Such refusal to compromise is hard to achieve once suits and client anxiety enter the frame – but our real-life experience of social media proves its worth. The social content that people genuinely respond to is much closer in spirit to a traditional interruptive TV campaign than it is to ‘engagement’ – however that hazy term is defined.

And that’s why this funny, fishy feed can tell us a lot about what people really want, what really interests them and what really makes them more likely to buy.

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Comments (21)

  2. It seems to me that the account is a poor rip off of the wonderfully written @betfairpoker and the badly written (!) @dmuper.

    I think it is a proper account.

    Unfortunately, the character is not amusing enough to sustain interest for too long. There is only so much fun can be had out of someone who is basically stupid.

    Good luck to it though. Twitter needs more amusing corporate feeds.

  3. Much as I’d like to believe that it’s real, I can’t see how it can be.

    No matter how apparently unhinged, no real account would post a tweet like this – http://twitter.com/#!/ShippamsPaste/status/129490775988899841.

    I’m also a big admirer of @Betfairpoker but disagree that @ShippamsPaste is poorly written. In fact the poor spelling and grammar are exactly the things that are making people think the account is real. It’s just how you’d expect a spotty adolescent who has grown up in text-world to write if left unsupervised. It reminds me of Les Dawson playing the piano badly for laughs. You have to be a good pianist to deliberately play badly well.

  5. Thanks for the comments. I agree with Phil – while a client might sign off on a wacky SM presence, they’re not going to stand for stuff that borders on trashing the brand. It might make marketers laugh, but the people who actually buy the product (pensioners, fishermen?) will be confused and put off.

    Also, to go from no social presence at all to a meta-marketing masterstroke just doesn’t seem plausible.

    Just for the benefit of social-media historians reading this in 25 years’ time: at the time of writing (28 Oct), @ShippamsPaste has reached 6949 followers.

  6. I thought the “Special Olympics Paste” was particularly funny, is that a UK/US humour division? Do you have Shippams Paste in the US – is it meant for your market?
    IMHO this has been the best, most imaginative marketing on Twitter that I’ve seen, genuinely made me laugh. Whoever is behind this isn’t just clever, but is a comedy genius.
    I’m off to have some toast with beef curry paste now.

  7. Shippams’ own PR company (who now look like dull, unimaginative fools) have come out and said that @ShippamsPaste isn’t anything to do with them, or Shippams, or Princes.

    They’re claiming it’s the work of a paste vigilante, working anonymously to engage with people on the subject of meat paste.

    I don’t buy it for a second.

    The denial that is. I don’t buy the paste at all.

  8. I’m sorry to report that the story has come to a sad end. Possibly because the brand themselves have put a lid on it, @ShippamsPaste has been creamed, canned, brought to a jarring halt etc. Only a few blog posts survive to bear witness.

    If anyone from Princes/Shippams is reading this, I think you’re crackers. With a few judicious tweaks, you could have built a whole campaign around @ShippamsPaste and its characters, unlocking a whole new demographic. Now the whole brilliant idea is toast.

  9. I’d never heard of Shippam’s paste before this campaign and now, thanks to agency/marketing teams stuck in a 90’s mindset, I will have forgotten about them again by next week.

    Such a shame – as others have said, this had the potential to be massive.

    Not surprising though. Anybody with any strong and dynamic marketing insight isn’t going to be working at Shippam’s are they?!

    Hopefully the person behind it will pick up on another industry that will be ready to cash in on the benefits of a successful viral/social marketing campaign.

  11. What a shame in got canned. Another less enigmatic account is @AsdaCurrySauce far more engagement and for me all the better because it’s even more obscure than Shipman’s Paste. Worth checking out, just hope Adsa don’t close this one down too.

  12. Really? I dare say it would have no impact on those who buy the product anyway – the demographic it attracts is hardly likely to include a significant number of twitter users.

    It’s impact would have probably been negligible. As fun as it was, it was hardly going to make people run out and buy the paste and those who buy won’t have been aware of it.

    The account was amusing, as is @betfairpoker. However, you have to question whether the followers of either are of any real value to the brand they are/were linked to. Keeping people on Twitter amused is one thing but if you’re attracting followers who are unlikely to buy the product/service you’re using then the value of your spend has to come into question. Boosting brand awareness is all well and good but if it doesn’t add to the bottom line then it’s probably pointless.

    That said, as @ShippamsPaste wasn’t costing the company anything getting shot of it does seem a bit silly.

  14. Its reminded me that I used to ‘like’ Shippham’s paste actually….this tweeter was clever and quite frankly Shippham’s should hire him/her to do their marketing because its reminded people of the brand and engaged new potential buyers.You’ll laugh when you see the product at the supermarket, reminded of the tweets and be tempted to put it in your basket because of that.
    Is this now #Fishpastegate?

  15. Whether the campaign resulted in direct sales or not doesn’t matter.

    It was creating brand buzz which, if they had a decent marketing team, could then be to converted into profitable relationships down the line.

    Twitter isn’t an end-to-end marketing channel, you use it to gain interest and have conversations, then move people up the chain towards making purchases.

  16. @Will

    Your points go to the very heart of the debate about the worth of social media as a channel. I’m agnostic on that, but I stand by my point that IF you’re going to do social media, you might get more value from memorable or interruptive content like @ShippamsPaste than from a more standard social campaign, where users are invited to make the running themselves by talking or contributing around the brand.

    I think the feed argued very powerfully in favour of single-minded creative brilliance, as opposed to crowd content and indiscriminate interaction. What sells on social media is not engagement for its own sake, but hard-hitting creative messages that happen to be propagated via social channels. (In my opinion.)

  17. I think it’s telling that Shippams have, apparently, and according to some sauces (sorry), shut down @shippamspaste and started up their own official Twitter account instead: @ShippamsOfficia (complete with somewhat clumsy, can’t-quite-fit-it-in missing ‘l’).

    It’s about 100 times less interesting and a shame (for them) that they seem so willing to drop the PR ball.

  19. Thanks to everyone who Tweeted and commented on this post.

    The creator has now been unmasked as @edjeff in this post at The Wall:

    http://wallblog.co.uk/2011/11/04/how-shippams-paste-got-social-media-so-so-wrong/

    And you can also find an online archive of all the @ShippamsPaste tweets here:

    http://twapperkeeper.com/person/ShippamsPaste?sm=&sd=&sy=&shh=00&smm=00&em=&ed=&ey=&ehh=00&emm=00&o=&l=1000&text=

    The ‘official’ (?) @ShippamsOfficia didn’t last long, having been shut down almost as soon as it started.

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