While I applaud Trident for bring social media to trad adv, as it needed to be done by a big brand, I really think that they missed the boat. They started their Twitter in Nov 2009 and ran the ad in Dec with under 200 followers. It is not about how many followers but they appear to have made zero effort to engage the community whatsoever. Their tweets are almost the same over and over. I would expect more from a big brand that took out a FP ad in USA Today.

I think if they were going to take the plunge as try and be a leader, they needed to know bit more about engaging online and spend more time on twitter to get a better feel for it before the ad ran. Had they done that, almost every SM blogger would have been singing their praise and the exposure would have been incredible.

Applause on running the ad bridging the gap between SM and trad adv but failure in execution.