What Matters Online

Ideally, social media campaigns should have a completely different feel than old-media marketing or even last-gen Internet efforts. While most old-style campaigns talk to (or at) customers, social media marketers need to foster honest, unfiltered communication with current and potential users. 

If you want to know how that looks in real life, I can’t think of a better example than the site “We All Hate QuickBooks,” a unique site mounted by Florida-based software firm Less Everything. The firm, a tiny virtual company with less than 10 employees, has taken candor and transparency to a level you’ll probably never see from bigger competitors–and it’s marvelous to watch.

The WAHQ site, which promotes the company’s LessAccounting software, runs an unfiltered list of Twitter posts (”tweets”) which contain the term “QuickBooks” in them.  Since the posts aren’t censored, some actually offer positive QuickBooks reviews, while others seem to support Less Everything’s contention that the market-leading accounting package is kludgy, hard to use or otherwise a pain in the patoot. (”We’re showing the good with the bad, so decide for yourself!” the site says.)

Online marketing director Rhea Drysdale says that before Less Everthing mounted the site, some of its employees simply lurked on Twitter, and when someone posted a QuickBooks complaint, let them know that there was an alternative. By the way, I asked her whether people complained about being approached this way and to my surprise, she said that they’d gotten no complaints.( Interesting, given the current wave of paranoia over Twitter spam, but I digress.)

The project was a seat-of-the-pants social media project from the get-go. The site was created in-house (using a unique technique known as CSS parallax, for my geekier readers), and promoted exclusively by Twitter posts from Less Everything staffers. Since then it’s gotten more attention from Digg posts and  StumbleUpon links created by WAHQ.com fans, Drysdale says.

While Drysdale isn’t sharing how many people actually signed up for a LessAccounting trial as a result of the project, she says it’s generated “a very nice list.” So yes, the project had an impact. That being said, Less Everything execs see this as something of an experiment. “We’re going to begin moving to formalized press releases, weekly e-mail blasts to existing customers and all of that,” she says. “This is just supplementary, for the fun of it.”  

Even if this was mostly an experiment for Less Everything, I predict that its smart little site will be seen as visionary in coming months. Let’s hear it for people who actually have the guts to put uncensored end user commentary front and center!

Meanwhile, readers, if you’re aware of other intriguing social media marketing efforts, I’d love to hear more. Comment when ready! (If you want to reach me directly, please feel free to tweet me at @annezieger.)
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