If you look at mUmBRELLA's top ten marketing disasters for 2009, five of these are mismanaged social media or digital marketing plays. I thought this was interesting given a video I just watched from the 2009 TED conference of Alexis Ohanian of Reddit complaining about social media experts, and then giving a brief example of how Greenpeace used Reddit to select the name for a humpback whale which was used in an anti-Japanese whaling campaign. The video says:

The lesson of Mister Splashy Pants is a shoo-in classic for meme-makers and marketers in the Facebook age. 

Whether generated by "Social Media Experts", Traditional Agencies, Social Agencies or others, the key thing about these campaigns seems to be that they have failed or succeeded based on the control that the client's marketing department has been persuaded to give away.

1. Greenpeace Whale - SUCCESS - Greenpeace controlled the original three names they put up to the market for voting. They were decided in-house with branding in mind (perhaps!), however the team knew they would be happy with all three results. Even though they wanted the other two more sophisticated names, Mr Splashy Pants still worked and probably worked extremely well with the Japanese market which likes that type of branding. We don't know the details, but perhaps that was strongly embedded in the thought process.
2. Westpac – Banana smoothies - FAIL - It seems this was a breakdown internally over customer communication policy and digital strategy. Who gets to make decisions about sending information to clients and what to put up on the company website and let it "out there in the wild", to quote Stilgherrian.
3. Toyota Yaris – Clean Getaways - FAIL - This could be looked at as the opposite of the Greenpeace success. The Agency, Saatchi & Saatchi took complete control of the project. "Voting is done on hits and comments," said an email sent out to encourage submissions as deadline approached and entries were thin. So the authenticity that Saatchi's were playing to for their social media experiment was, we must select the entry that stirred the most hits and comments regardless of strategic positioning, thinking about the market for Yaris, comments from the marketers at Toyota etc. It comes down to social marketing experience. But also integration across the marketing and communication mix. How can you have a social media campaign that doesn't think about the market your talking to and your other communications?
4. Kraft – Vegemite iSnack 2.0 - FAIL - See Greenpeace and Toyota Yaris above.
5. Witchery – Girl with the jacket - FAIL - This is a story about so many FAILS. Poor production, poor strategy, falsehood, misunderstanding the market and then public bitterness, revenge and demise. Shakespearean in scope and scale. Aristotelian in tragedy. I think we all know this one. I don't know where Witchery was on this, though.
6. Tourism Queensland – Fake tattoo - UNSURE - Here's a case of Australia's media losing the ability to investgate properly and agencies happily riding on the back of that. That's as opposed to others seemingly going out of their way to mislead in order to tell their story of romance.