Slide and Vh1 excel at making products geared towards America’s lowest common denominator. The first makes SuperPoke, a popular social network app that lets you send text messages saying you’ve done “stuff” to your friends. The latter produces reality show classics like “Flavor of Love”, “Rock of Love”, and “I Love New York”. And next week, their powers will combine to bring you VH1’s SuperPoke!Fest: a four day reality show marathon to promote a new show called “I Love Money” that will give users a chance to see their very own SuperPokes live, onscreen!
Beginning July 2, Facebook and MySpace users will be given a choice of 30 Vh1-branded SuperPoke actions that will let users “get romantical with” and “slip the tongue to” their friends. Each of these special Vh1 SuperPokes will be entered into a lottery, and the luckiest 10,000 users will get to see their poke displayed for a few seconds on TV.
I’m sure this sounded like a great idea during a marketing meeting, but did anyone ever pause long enough to realize that SuperPokes can be annoying, even when you know the people involved? I don’t care if OLIVER B has slipped the tongue to some girl I’ll never meet. And why is VH1 taking up about 40% of the screen to display these things?
The event is also likely to flood Facebook and MySpace with spammy messages from Slide as users vie to get their first names displayed on television. Slide probably won’t mind so long as it can maximize the number of users it reaches, but the rest of us may have to deal with a new onslaught of SuperPokes.
According to Slide, we’ve got even more of these promotions to come - let’s hope they take a different approach:
“This partnership, the first of many to come, offers our enthusiastic users the chance to become SuperPoke! stars on the television network they already know and love. Now, SuperPoke! is not only fun and social, but it might get you on TV too.”
Slide has recently been in the news for having their popular Top Friends application disabled by Facebook. The application apparently has a security hole that allows Facebook users to view portions of any Top Friend user’s profile - something that is clearly in violation of Facebook’s privacy policy.
Uhg.
Here is my message to FB: Keep going like this and I’ll be outa there. Ridiculous.
Sounds pretty stupid but I guess we’ll see how it turns out.
They really don’t care how stupid it sounds.
All they really care about is the bottom line. $$$$.
I would like to think, something as annoying as this might actually work against them. But, I dont think so…
They have been doing this for way to loo long and they know exactly what works and what doesn’t.
I personally think we are going to see a lot more of this.
MySpamBookSpace is getting out of control
The bubble goes BOOM!
First rule of the internet: Never EVER get involved with Viacom.
I don’t think anyone in the Techcrunch demographic actually watches MTV, so the extent of our annoyance right now is at you for writing this!
I’ve already seen these on late-night VH1 when they actually bother playing videos. Since I avoid SuperPoke like the plague I understand why I was clueless as to what was going on.
Who watches this shit anyway? Come on Jason…really?
I remember seeing this kind of thing late at night on German cable channels. Every trashy after hours show has a ticker along the bottom of the screen showing txt messages, or the whole screen is the just a stream of messages. People pay about 1 euro per message, and users can reply to each other in public or private.
Like reality television it was both annoying and totally addictive.
Seems to me that VH1 viewers have an absurdly high annoyance threshold, so I’m not quite sure who the “You” in the title of this post is meant to refer. I mean, I won’t be aware of this otherwise unless I watch VH1, right?
Junk.
Ross said…
They really don’t care how stupid it sounds.
All they really care about is the bottom line.
I agree Ross, most web 2.0 internet companies don’t care how stupid their ideas are, since they know that there are suckers/naives everywhere who can’t see those stupidities, where they’re always ready to step in & use those software services and products.
Lowest common denominator is where the money’s at, your audience grows as your service gets stupider.
Although with SuperPoke they obviously decided to start with stupid rather then work towards it.
What scares me is that corporations (VH1 aka MTV) are actively encouraging spamming without realizing the implications for their brands. I’m sure this wasn’t their intention but annoyed users would never understand that.
I haven’t seen VH1 for so many years, so it’s zero annoyance to me.
Craptastic!
I feel like something like this would be great in markets like Japan and China, where that modified YouTube with streaming comments across the screen, rather than below the video, seems to be a big hit.
VH1 seems to be really trying to embrace these new interactive social media apps. I went to the site for the I Love Money show and found they even have a fantasy game there:
http://www.vh1.com/shows/serie.....azzi.jhtml
(it seems Fafarazzi has a lot of other reality TV fantasy games on their site)
all this criticism comes from folks who are obviously outside the demographic to which this partnership appeals.
i bet a lot of 15 year olds find the pejorative comments of a middle-aged peanut gallery to be quite annoying too. it’s all relative.
This is the kind of news that makes you wanna shoot yourself.
Are we moving forwards or backwards with technology these days? I’d argue the latter.
I won’t be using Facebook much longer.
Geez, this chain has a lot of visionaries…
I think this sounds like a pretty innovative first step towards “convergence”. Ya’ll remember that pipe dream media companies have been yapping about for years?
I applaud Vh1 and Slide for bridging the two mediums and finding a way make them work… Good for them!
Очень полезно.
Неплохо.