Many times at conferences like SXSW, conversations revolve around top notch ideas and thinking. This morning, I attended a panel that chose rather to focus on the worst social media ad campaigns of 2007 and even to vote on the absolute worst.

This was all done in an entertaining way with panelists submitting their picks for worst campaigns and the audience in turn voting on them. Nominees included John Mackey of Whole Foods posting negative comments on a competitor’s Web site under a pseudonym; members of Target’s Rounders group on Facebook who were supposed to keep their corporate affiliation a secret while they engaged in word of mouth advertising; and HP’s activity with PayPerPost where a blogger was paid for her support of Hewlett-Packard, which amounted to filming her children smash a competitor’s digital camera.

The HP example is the nominee that won (by audience show of hands) what was deemed “The Suxorz” or the worst of the worst social media ad campaigns of last year.

The ideas behind some of these campaigns weren’t necessarily bad but they were executed poorly. Many of the examples showed a lack of understanding about the medium on the part of marketers. As panelist Charlotte Selles of Jim Beam pointed out, this is a social world. It’s a conversation and some marketers are having a hard time understanding this. She referenced the All I Want For Christmas Is A PSP blog that was supposed to have been created by a young consumer. After negative comments were yanked down, it became clear that the creator of the blog wasn’t a real consumer at all.

This brings me to the other general trend with these worst-in-class campaigns: the need for transparency and authenticity.

Panelist Steve Hall of Adrants agreed that many marketers don’t understand the Web because as he says, they don’t see a real medium there yet; they still view it as a playground. As the examples today showed, it can be problematic to merely dabble in the medium without realizing how different the rules are.