PR Squared: Beware the GMOOT!

In a great article in AdAge last week, columnist Scott Donaton warns readers to beware of the tendency among marketers to pile-on to any and all cool new trends. Donaton calls this the "Get Me One Of Those" (GMOOT) syndrome:

"[Too] many of these sponsored viral-video (and fake-blog and social-networking) thingies really, really suck, and there's a reason for that: They are not the end result of an actual idea or strategy but are born of a desperate desire to do something, anything, in the new-media space ...

"It's the dreaded 'GMOOT' syndrome, short for 'Get me one of those,' the basic command from CEOs to CMOs or CMOs to their agencies ... It sounds oversimplistic, but if you get a few drinks into a marketing exec, he'll admit that at some point he's been directed to do something because his boss read about it in Ad Age or saw that a rival company was doing it or was told by his neighbor ... that he had to get in the game."

Brilliant. I know that it's not just advertising agencies that face the GMOOT monster. It certainly happens in PR, too --- and more and more often, in the Social Media era. There has been more than one occasion when I've reviewed a PR program proposal, and felt compelled to challenge one of our own execs about, "Why are we pitching a 'viral' video concept to a B2B company?"

That's not to say it's automatically a goofy idea to consider cheeky video storytelling for B2B applications --- in fact, I think one of our clients, BigFix, did a good job of it with their "Software Truth Hearings" campaign (pictured) ... In fact, I would love to see additional examples of video storytelling --- whether via staged pieces or authentic vlogging --- that humanized a big corporation. That's what Scoble did for Microsoft, back in the day, as a blogger.

But, it's harder and less obvious to come up with reasons to shoot a video for the relatively staid B2B market, and thus, "Let's Do a Viral Video" should never, ever be a check-box element in a B2B PR program (or any PR program, for that matter). Whenever a client or employee pipes up with "Let's do 'One Of Those'" ("those" being a fill-in-the-blank tactic that "everyone is doing"), it's usually time to run in the other direction.

UPDATE: Shel Holtz also approached this topic from a worthy angle, a week or so ago. Noting the rise of specialized social networks, e.g., Toyota's network for hybrid owners, Shel asks, "How many of these [social] networks do you think you could belong to before your participation became an occasional diversion instead of a consuming passion?"