Stupid Robot

"I wouldn't rub Pace Picante-brand salsa on my asshole if my turds came out on fire."

I’m pretty sure that the agency handling the social media account for Campbell Soup Company didn’t expect that by automating their work that the result would be quite as hilarious.

I truly hate the words “social” and “media,” particularly when they are combined. It reminds me of the silly 90s when we called online communication “new media.” That phrase also made me frown. Did RCA call their new television sets “new media?” No. No, they didn’t.

It’s with this same type of euphemistic jargon that social media hides it’s dubious agenda: complete control of public relations to favor the corporation.

I firmly believe that one of the biggest problems with content marketing is that is is perpetually, ubiquitously and persistently used to create hyperbolically great press.

This PR utopia not only skews information, it can actually do harm.

As the founder of gaytravel.com, we built our company on the concept “neutral information.” We actually described the bad parts of a trip; telling our clients where not to go. Then we sold it. To people who had no clue about content marketing. Sadly, this truth-telling has been lost (even at the new gaytravel.com). The effect is to spawn yet another PR vortex (see: Yelp!, Travelocity, TripAdvisor) where “reviews” are nothing more than cheaply purchased schill. 

Since creating overwhelmingly good PR is both expensive and tedious, the advent of “social robots” speeds up the whole mess considerably allowing corporations to seems as if they are really, truly communicating with their markets. Essentially nothing more than a slightly more sophisticated auto-responder, social robots scurry about the vast caverns of Twitter and Facebook sniffing out certain key phrases to which they spit out favorably chirpy slogans. Why anyone thinks this is a good idea gives credence to every bad joke about advertising agencies.

Which is why this deliciously bizarre (and one-sided) Twitter conversation makes me giggle out loud - much to the chagrin of Campbell Soup Company.

The command of the situation firmly rests with the human. It is pleasing to watch him taunt an otherwise blithe robot into compromising positions. And the man-behind-the-curtain moment when a human does step in reveals the whole superficial mechanism put into place. The real disappointment however, is that the agency responsible really does not lay blame on the practice of using social robots, but in its inherent “technical difficulty.”

Simply, it can’t be the robot’s fault, it just wasn’t instructed to deal with how we actually use social media.

An update!