According to Mashable.com, Gatorade’s new command center, based inside the Chicago headquarters, has been set up to listen in on real-time social media conversations. Since “listening” is one of the key strategies to successful social media marketing, Gatorade has come up with real-time software to help watch the tweets, the posts, and the blogs with visualizations and graphs to help measure out the data. However, listening isn’t all that they do. They watch for conversations and decide whether to jump in or not. Although this seems good and all, I’m not sure how comfortable I feel with companies, such as Gatorade, “spamming” my conversations. Now I can understand that today’s generation of young adults aren’t necessarily worried about privacy and sharing information, but I think they are this way because they filter what the don’t want and keep it out. I believe Gatorade has found a new way to get into the conversation without any filters or barriers blocking them.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Gatorade’s new Mission Control is awesome, but how they are going to use their new marketing strategies to welcome themselves into conversations might be going to far. I think we need to really re-consider how we converse online and exactly who we let in or not.
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