Last night I received two Facebook announcements from one of my favorite groups, Teton Gravity Research,  an action sports film company that I’ve supported for years, one that already has a thriving, but truly *unique* ( putting it mildly) community. I’ve made great friends through it, and even met my husband via this network.

So the two announcements came from the same employee (which I guess is good in way – it’s not a case of one hand not knowing what the other was doing), and were about pretty much the same topics – film showings in Denver & San Francisco.

Even as much as I travel, I don’t think I’ll be making a trip to either show. It’s one thing if I happened to see it was something to do with my friends if I was visiting those cities anyway, but that’s what the events list is for. I don’t need a special message to remind me that I live in neither city.

Now, because I have such loyalty to TGR and because this isn’t that big of a deal, nor does it affect a very large group (only 1600 members), I’m not going to bag on them that much – they’re not necessarily at risk for losing me or pissing off too many of their customers.

TGR gets a free pass because  most of their customers don’t give a crap. And for the most part, they don’t give a crap about how their marketing is perceived. And they are absolutely lucky to have those benefits.

But what about (larger) companies who aren’t so lucky or have more to lose? Or Marketing Managers who don’t really know what their interns are doing on the social web?

If the result of actions like this means that most users just ignore the messages that don’t affect us, does that mean we’ll eventually start ignoring all viral messages? Or worse,  will it cause us to unsubscribe from the group/company’s social media outlet?  Either way it doesn’t bode well for the long term impact on social marketing.

What is most frustrating about this example is just that it shows the immaturity of the medium, in that, this would have been so much more effective had they targeted people who actually live in those areas. But of course, that’s going to be limited to the  functionality of the social platform and internal technical savvy.

• As a side note: At least while looking at this message on Facebook, I was served up a pretty relevant ad for a local Subaru dealer – the one were we actually bought our last Subie from.

Secondarily, they could have made use of a slightly stronger call to action (Buy Tickets) via live, clickable links to their partner sites where the tickets can be purchased.  Neither message contained these. Now, you might argue that people using Facebook are savvy enough to copy n’ paste.  The counter argument to that is, don’t make them work for the conversion – serve it up on a silver platter!