network:
Shippam's #paste spreads
As whimsy as it seems to put Shippam’s Paste and engaging social media campaign in the same sentence, the brand’s twitter profile has amassed over 6,000 followers (‘Shippamates’) in less than a week, with followers increasing by thousands daily.
So how did this brand get so popular on twitter so suddenly? Perhaps by accident, joke, or utter genius, an alleged ‘social media intern’ (recently promoted to a ‘social media EXECUTIVE intern’) has been hired by the brand to engage its consumers. Yet unlike most corporate profiles, the @ShippamsPaste feed features candid and completely random thoughts, meta-social media engagement observations and even poems with crab paste motifs, delivered with poor punctuation and ridden with grammatical errors. Well, it’s twitter, not an exam. And it is precisely the informal, all too real and silly tweets that have kept the suspense over whether the profile is genuine.
The Bitter Chocolatier's playful copy echoing a similar candid tone
Moreover, what makes the paste’s tweets even funnier is that they seemingly come from the jar of paste itself. It is precisely what other brands have been trying to do in their copywriting, in fact, by giving their products a candid voice. Prosopopeia, or giving inanimate objects a voice of their own, has proved a successful device not only for advertising products like M&Ms, Cheestrings and Peperami in the UK, but lately also in the serious register of high-end advertising, as Louise Jolly observes for Semionaut.
Many remain convinced that the profile account is fake, albeit a brilliant parody; or that it belongs to an unmonitored intern making the most of the opportunity. Either way, the phenomenon has tempted many to deconstruct its viral success, praise the brand, and even try to source Shippam's outside the UK.
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Nice article. It is incredible how quickly this has taken off.
It is fun but there is only so far this can go as the character is essentially stupid.
Indeed this 'alternative' Twitter style has been done far better over a longer period by the extraordinarily written and consistently funny @betfairpoker .
Posted by: Steve Lewis | 28 October 2011 at 11:25 AM