The Big Four banks

There's the old way with marketing communications. And there's the new way, especially when dealing with the internet.

The old way is prescriptive, controlling and constrictive.

The new way is relaxed, go with the flow and collaborative. The idea is to try to engage audiences across the whole wide web rather than attempting to track them through your website and keep them there (while the real action is happening on forums, blogs, twitter, Facebook and other social sites).

It's a world a lot of marketers and advertisers are having trouble with.

There are many marketers who expect something for nothing - free advice, free pictures and content despite the fact they are making hefty profits.

These are the ones who need to earn their place and respect in the social media world.

And so it is with the latest social media effort from ANZ, trying to engage women bloggers with research and the Febusave blog ambassador program.

“We want to invite leading female bloggers into a campaign that will help Australian women to save money in February,” it says in a document emailed to bloggers.

The problem is they are asking these bloggers to do quite a lot – recruit others, write posts and  post a blog badge (read advert for ANZ).

All this is in exchange for a single link from a transient campaign website which is highly unlikely to drive particularly decent traffic to their blogs.

To me it smacks of a campaign with the blog element cobbled together at the last minute by somebody who doesn’t engage with social media on a meaningul basis.

As one high profile and influential blogger, who receives more traffic than some mainstream websites, told me: “All for no benefit to us monetarily and we just get a reciprocal link. Obviously what they're asking is worth a lot of money and as we know, banks aren't short of it."

In other words it is typical of banks’ old fashioned greedy baby boomer mentality.

edcharles@yaffa.com.au