With spring break season approaching, I can’t help but
reminisce on the one-of-a-kind experience I had during last year’s spring break
in Panama City Florida. Aside from all of the typical memories one would expect
to take home from a spring break experience; friends, the beach, and partying,
my memory of this week will forever be clouded with the looming presence of one
particular social network, YoHolla.
If you’re wondering to yourself, “what is heck is YoHolla,”
you’re not alone. YoHolla was a social networking site that was launched in
2010. With so many complaints about the privacy issues and the practice of
selling personal information to advertisers on Facebook, YoHolla attempted to offer
an alternative, and marketed their brand with the promise of complete privacy.
This privacy however, came with a price. YoHolla charged
used $5 per month to maintain a profile on the site. This, they claimed, would
allow for an advertisement-free site. They also promised to reward users for
signing other members up. According to the site’s rewards program, users would
get $1 per month for each user they signed up and an additional 20 cents for
every person their friend signed up, and so on. Clearly, this program did not
work, and site terminated the program shortly after it began. This was the
first major mistake on the part of YoHolla, aside from the obvious mistake
made when they chose the name.
The second major mistake the site made was the aggressive ad
campaign that they implemented, which included a tour of college campuses, and
of course the 2011 spring break season in Panama City Beach, Florida, which I
unfortunately had to experience first-hand . YoHolla was inescapable during
this time in Panama City. Spring breakers were bombarded with Flyers, posters,
airplane banners, announcements and contests which all promoted the site. The
attempt at drawing users to the site seemed fake, forced and incredibly
desperate. The overwhelming flaunting of the name was obnoxious, and was far
more likely to turn users away than it was to appeal to potential profile
holders.
The most infamous mistake YoHolla made during spring break
2011, however, was the use of “sign-up” busses that were parked in front of
major night clubs. These sign-up busses were similar to tour busses. They were
oversized luxury busses with their logo plastered all over the side. Inside
were dozens of computers that spring breakers could use to sign up for a
YoHolla account.
The deal was, or so they claimed, that anyone who signed up
for a YoHolla account would get free admittance into the club. With cover
charges exceeding $40, this seemed like a pretty good deal. Promoters promised
users that all they had to do was enter their credit card information, and that
they would be charged five dollars for the first month of YoHolla, but that
they could terminate the account at any time. To hundreds of drunken spring
breakers, this sounded good.
Although I personally
opted against signing up in exchange for admittance to the club, a few of my
friends made the mistake of doing so. The next morning as new account users
checked their bank statements, they discovered that they had been charged a
total of 75 dollars, a charge that included numerous hidden fees and taxes,
which were not refundable because the site had “warned” them of these fees in
the fine print prior to signing up. Needless to say, people were outraged. The
next day was chaos, with people ripping YoHolla signs down and even cursing at
YoHolla promoters, not exactly good public relations.
Clearly, YoHolla did not take off. Today the official site
explains that it has been taken down and is “no longer available as a consumer
social networking platform.” Currently YoHolla exists as nothing more than an
embarrassing example of what not to do when marketing a social networking site.
This further proves the point that people are not willing to pay for social
networking profiles, and that social networking sites must refrain from pushing
themselves on potential users in an obnoxious manner. Social networking sites may
be taking off as one of the most popular means of communication, but launching
these sites cannot be done in a careless manner. Successful social networking
sites must be free, and be marketed professionally in order to become
a successful social media giant, unlike the epic failure YoHolla.
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