Ever since Secret launched last month I’ve been waiting for the first story about a brand getting in on the new app and running some sort of experiment. To my utter and complete lack of surprise I didn’t have to wait very long as news came through today The Gap has been playing around within the network.
Secret, in case you don’t know, is a new tool that allows for anonymous sharing of short…well…secrets. You share something on the network and it’s shared among the people in your mobile contacts, though with your details taken out. As you build a network your secrets will be shared with an ever-expanding group of people.
So what’s the brand play on Secret? I have little to no idea.
I suppose it could be used to tease some upcoming announcement. A movie studio, for example, could post that Tom Cruise just signed to play a lead in a comic book adaptation or something and start getting buzz that way. But by the very nature of Secret the recipients of that message would have little to no way to verify the news except to go through the usual channels of publicity and marketing departments. Which ruins the whole point of Secret, assuming there is a point for brands beyond garnering Mashable and other headlines.
Moving beyond Secret specifically, this is another example where brands are rushing in just moments after some shiny new app launches and intruding on a community that hasn’t even been fully established yet. We just went through this with Jelly, which went just days before brands started to play around and intrude on the experience.
There’s nothing wrong with brands playing a role in social networks. None at all. But not only do instances like this show something close to reckless disregard for whatever strategy there might be in place, but it’s disrespectful to the early adopters who are trying something new out and seeing if it works, only to find themselves bombarded by brands who are either trying to sell something outright or, worse, be overly clever as they intrude on a conversation that’s just begun.
We’re approaching the point where brands trying to be overly clever and promotional in the early days of a new app’s life are going to smother it before it can get out of the crib. That might be somewhat of a strained analogy, but what I mean is that the second wave of new adopters are going to start signing up for these networks, check them out only to see brands all up in the network’s business and decide that ugh, no, they get enough of that on Facebook, they’ll go back to something else that brands haven’t discovered yet or, even better, have already tired of and left.
Secret is, I’ll admit, something that seems perfectly in line with the desire of a new generation of mobile/online users who want to communicate anonymously in short, visually-rich bursts. So it could be very cool, even if it does remove the layer of accountability that comes with signing your name next to something, meaning I can’t approve of it on moral grounds even while I understand why some will find it attractive.
