Is the Spotlight on Social Media Scaring Off Guerrilla Marketing?

Just a year ago, social media hadn't quite exploded into the thing we know it as today, especially with regards to marketing. Now every major news station has a twitter and every company has a Facebook and a blog. Major companies having an open presence on social networking sites is the norm now, but what happened to subtly?
I first saw the "guy catches glasses with face" video during a presentation a year ago when I was highlighting the benefits of using social media marketing. Someone asked "How come we don't see all major companies using this kind of thing if it's so successful?" I said a lot of companies are to which he replied "Okay, search... Ray Ban. See it they're using it." So I did. I clicked on the guy catches glasses video and everyone at the meeting slowly realized it was produced by Ran Ban as a guerrilla marketing video. Ray Ban's Never Hide Film campaign continues today with videos like Super Chameleon, (brought to my attention via Neatorama) which got me to start thinking about how few guerrilla marketing campaigns I see these days.

Around the same time last summer, major car company BMW had a wildly successful viral video series on YouTube on "Rampenfest," which was a fake documentary on how a small town in Bulgaria planned to launch a car across the ocean to the United States. This fake documentary was never directly linked to BMW until months after when the car company claimed responsibility for the series. When it was covered by CNN, it was looked at like a more experimental form of guerrilla marketing on a fresh new media outlet. (watch CNN's coverage here) Now CNN has a YouTube. And a Twitter.

With the spotlight on social media marketing, users expect that anything that looks well put together is probably an advertisement of some kind or is put together by a company. Have guerrilla campaigns been replaced with open and thoughtful social media content by companies? Not that well done, entertaining content from companies is a bad thing, but with lots of companies putting this kind of content on the web now, it's nice to have a guerrilla video sneak up on you, camouflaged in the colors social media.