In the midst of this Adweek Magazine story by Brian Morrissey which is all about big brand big budget busts in social media initiatves, comes this astonishing factoid about a new virtual world online social media site that has is succeeding. In its first four months of operation it attracted 4 million members:

Barbie Girls is now one of the largest virtual worlds in existence, outstripping the most famous, Second Life. Second Life in Second Place? Avis? I bet that Hertz, yes?

As you likely know by now, I have a four year old. Her name is Her Majesty. She'll answer to Cinderella, too. [And yes, I am the Tony Randall of PR, wise guy, except I'm not dead yet!] Anyway, here's the link to the BarbieGirls site.

Now the point of Mr. Morrissey's piece seems clear to me: big time social media initiatives are no slam dunk. Some of the biggest, best, and presumably smartest brand managers and marketing executives routinely fail with the new media at least once… and they do it pretty publicly, too. Ouch. But there are enough big winners from smaller unlikely sources to keep the big brands coming back to try again, at which time they often succeed. But while Mr. Morrissey attempts through sources quoted in his piece to pinpoint the causes of social media traction versus retraction — i.e., social media sites need to solve a problem says one of the SMEs quoted in the article — I have my own, related theory.

I think the success of social media sites comes in inverse proportion to the amount of marketing molestation they endure at the hands of messaging doctors, brand managers, and traditional PR people who can't solve a problem because the word "problem" is not allowed in their vocabularly. Ask any traditional PR agent a straight question about a client's problem, fasten your seat belt, reach for the barf bag and listen while you ride out a 90mph answer that blurs logic. If you could plot the answer on a graph it would look like a double S-curve, with S for Spin, not Social.

Every big time brand considering a social media extravaganza should ask itself — or have people strong enough around them to ask — "Who cares?" For example: Planning a major social media initiave for your caramel colored sugar water? Who cares? If a good answer to that problematic question can't be had at the very beginning, you can expect an unhappy ending.

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