Levi's "Social Media Girl" Effort Degrades Social Media

The sight of this headline at the top of the website of The San Francisco Chronicle sent this blogger into orbit: "Levi's seeks "social media girl." The reason's simple. Here's one more large company that hands off its social broadcasting efforts to one person, and has an approach that's uncoordinated, inconsistent, and not effective.

This blog post isn't about who does this correctly, because as long as companies continue to refer to Twitter as a social network, and compare Facebook to Google, when they have different roles online, finding great examples of social broadcasting done well will be like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

What Levi's is trying to do is find what marketers call a "brand manager." But the implication is that the company itself, from the CEO on down, doesn't get social media at all. Indeed, the one person who should be out in front on this is Levi's CEO John Anderson, but he doesn't even have a Twitter account as of this writing.

Mr. Anderson's shirking his duties. The overall message must come from the person in charge; if Anderson's not using social media platforms, or having Levi's make its own, then it's not going to know how to values its own efforts.

(Indeed, this "handing off" of social media efforts to one person or some intern was widely complained about and by digital media experts like Cheryl Goodman and Russell Reeder at CES 2011 Las Vegas.  Check out this video:



)

My research reveals a Levi's that just plain doesn't know what it's doing when it comes to social media and social broadcasting. For example, it's most successful effort in this area, the iSpy program, was recognized by Digital Buzz Blog in 2009, and had this video as part of its campaign case study:



But guess what? The iSpy Twitter Campaign, a real work game where you use clues to find people, brand ambassadors, wearing Levis, and if you went up and asked them if they had Levis pants on and were correct, got their pair, was launched not in the United States, but in Australia and New Zealand!

That's it!

Meanwhile, Levi's has does not have a name that's consistently used between its Facebook, Twitter, and other online platforms, and no blog at all. Thus, there's no place for Levi's CEO to get out a consistent brand message.

That's his job, not that one "Social Media Girl." And the problem is that because Levi's leaves its social media efforts to a few people, rather than it being part of its culture's DNA, the remnants of its failure are all over the Internet: page after underused page on platforms showing what Levi's tried to do at one point or another.

It all ads up to one big fail. An already big fail the jeans brand is about to continue in it's search for a Levi's Social Media Girl.

In fact, to show how bad this all is, Levi's reps have the messaging "We're looking for the next Levi's Girl," right?

So you'd figure they'd buy the URL LevisGirl.com, which they did. But they're not using it, didn't buy anything else as of this writing, and totally missed levissocialmediagirl.com.

I didn't, I got it while making this post. I'm going to use it by Friday and in a way that will be more effective than what the jeans brand would have done.

That's bad. Levi's job is to mark its online territory.

Levi's effort degrades social media and digital media as a whole. It's the CEO who should be doing this, and calling his culture to do the same, not one woman.

Er,"girl."

Meanwhile, watch this space via levissocialmediagirl.com.