Logophilia, Social Media and the Mainstream Marketing Machine

Facebook has over 400 million active users. People are tweeting an average of  600 times a second. For those of us who are still wondering who the heck are using these services, the answer seems obvious: everyone…and their mother. These enormous user bases are mighty attractive to any marketing team out there, regardless of industry, and the race is on to translate these huge numbers into something more valuable that a database of a billion daily blurbs about what folks are having for breakfast.

Now, it may just be because I’m an English major and thus love the evolution of the English language, but to me one of the more interesting results of this attempt to leverage the social media masses is the appearance of the social media lexicon in mainstream advertisements. The earliest example I can think of regarding this meeting of words involves the 2007 AT&T ad for text plans:

While I acknowledge that the terms used in this ad are also utilized in text messaging, their origins are firmly rooted in the world wide web – specifically the chat features and forum boards which were the original social media locations. It’s should also be noted that at this time the marketing team still felt that now-common terms like “IDK,” and “BFF’ required the subtle explanation that their captioning provides.

What’s interesting about this ad is the way AT&T’s marketing team almost forecasts the future by showing a range of people using these new terms. The youngsters are well versed, as is to be expected, but Mom has no problem understanding their garbled syntax and even Grandma has bought into these terms. Flash forward a mere two years and similar expressions are appearing everywhere, including the tweets coming out of Capital Hill!

To really see the extent to which social media’s terminology has pervaded the mainstream, I present a recent ad for a new Samsung Camera:

Some key “A-ha!” moments in this ad for me were:

1. The lack of explanation regarding what “The Angles” might be (If you don’t know, check out Know Your Meme’s explanation).

2.  The emphasis on the new camera as packed with features that make it ideal for use on the web. This is subtly done throughout the ad, the best example being the shot of “Frankenstein” in which the useful nature of the small LCD screen on the face of the camera is plainly displayed. Their tagline of “Own the Angles” also falls into this category.

3. The screenshots of well known social media sites using great pictures supposedly uploaded from the product. It’s assumed viewers will recognize the layouts of sites like Facebook and  Myspace.

In a nutshell, the Samsung ad represents the complete immersion of social media in our daily lives. It assumes intimate knowledge of the appearance and use of social media sites as well as with it’s memes and terms. So if you’re one of those hold-outs who’s snug in the knowledge that social media will soon go the way of the Dodo, it’s time to tune in and sign up — it’s here to stay.