Community portal language lameness in brand communication

Let’s make it clear: I find it very entertaining on Facebook (Hungarian), when it comes to duplications in inflection, wrong word order or mixed Hunglish sentences. That’s part of the game. We wanted our Hungarian version of Facebook, even myself have 15 winning phrases. We have been creating it for ourselves.

 

An example for a Facebook application English and Hungarian mix:

 

 

But I’m afraid brand communication is different. A brand that has properties like: professional, one of the best quality available, innovative, etc. cannot allow negligence in communication that may harm the brand. Unless…

Unless what? Unless the company wants to associate a human insight to the brand. Accordingly, this is what Nike is doing with the new campaign. Building running communities by giving them a platform for racing. By this occurrence, once they integrate the campaign into community channels and use those resources well, language lameness would be part of the game. However, Nike is doing it on its own microsite, really by the reason of saving budget. They just don’t want to bother with small markets. So their lameness is a real one, a part of a bad quality web development that is not in harmony with Nike’s brand properties.

 

Nike’s branded Hunglish widget:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This kind of global way of thinking is against today’s marketing trends. I mean personal experiences with the brand. For me, as a Hungarian, it tells me that Nike doesn’t think my engagement is important for them.

Perfect targeting, innovative media use, waste of money

Since my fellow Hungarians translated Facebook to our language, I am really focused about how all the special Facebook language appears for me… and I’m enjoying it. Really. Good job!

I am also very pleased if I see a well-targeted social ad – in Hungarian. This time I show you a very-well positioned ad with a small mistake that makes it totally useless.

 

 

(For annotations please click on the video and watch it on Youtube original environment)

As you can see for yourself, they didn’t pay attention to define the click-through URL properly. Therefore the visitor is directed to the blog but may not find the content.

The good thing is that you may optimize the appearance in online campaigns anytime you find an error, somehow you cannot do in print/TV campaigns. The bad thing is that it’s Friday night and noone will take care of it until Monday.

Update: Bloggers work on the weekend too. Saturday afternoon I found the ad on Facebook working properly. That’s what I call vocation!