As we are always looking for new ideas, here is a round-up of some recent Social Media Marketing campaigns which we feel are worthy of closer inspection.
Cadbury’s Creme Egg Twisted
In order to promote their new chocolate bar – “Twisted”. Cadbury have come up with the C.I.A. (Cadbury Intelligence Agency) in which you can enroll and then solve clues to track down escaped Twisted Bars on a map. They’ve got many of the social media bases covered with Twitter, Facebook and Bebo profiles.
Do you want to become a C.I.A. Agent?
So far nearly 10,000 users are registered on the site, and another 52,500 have become friends or fans on the social network pages. This is a reasonable number of participants but it’s possible that they could have done better. The different elements of the site feel disjointed and there is little opportunity or incentive to participate with other people. The social network pages have not fostered much in the way of discussion or media submissions so the amount of shareable content is mostly limited to that produced by the campaign agency.
Nothing To Hide – Air New Zealand
In order to let people know that they don’t add hidden charges onto their fares, Air New Zealand have created the “Nothing To Hide” campaign. They persuaded members of their staff to appear in promotional videos wearing body-painted uniforms. The videos a very tastefully done and the humor comes from the reactions of people in the airport and on board the plane.
In terms of interactivity, there is little direct participation between Air New Zealand and the viewers however by creating compelling content and using YouTube as a distribution platform (making the videos easy to share), they have achieved the goal of creating awareness. At the time of writing the four videos have racked up over 3.5 million views between them.
Prizes for Twitter Mentions
Creating brand awareness by giving stuff away is not a new idea, however recently Twitter has been the platform of choice for these campaigns. It’s worth noting that the most successful campaigns are the ones that appeal to typical Twitter users, giving away laptops and mobile phones is likely to be more popular than boxes of cereal or spa days.
SquareSpace
Squarespace (an online website building service) created a campaign in which they decided to give away an iPhone every day for 30 days to a randomly selected Twitter user who had posted an update including the tag “#squarespace”.
Things have not run completely smoothly for Squarespace however. Once it became apparent that Squarespace were giving away $200 Apple gift certificates, which could be use to purchase an iPhone (or any other Apple products), question began to be asked over whether the campaign was being deceptively marketed.
The results were still quite impressive, #squarespace was a regular entry in Twitter’s trending topics for several days and peaked at 0.8% share of all Twitter posts – not bad for a total of $6000 in prizes.
Squarespace's share of Twitter posts
MoonFruit
Following Squarespace’s lead, Moonfruit (another online site building service) created a campaign to celebrate their 10th anniversary by giving away 10 MacBook Pros to Twitter users posting the “#moonfruit” tag. The response has been spectacular even in the face of other events dominating Twitter’s traffic.
A simple call to action with a desirable prize
Just a couple of days into the promotion, the term Moonfruit exceeded 2% of all Twitter posts
Moonfruit's share of Twitter posts
Having learnt from the criticism given to Squarespace, Moonfruit have been very clear in their offering – a MacBook Pro, delivered to your door, wherever you are.
What are the important factors here?
Be creative – Cadbury and Air New Zealand score by coming up with original and entertaining content, prompting people to share it with their friends.
Be relevant – Squarespace and Moonfruit have used peoples desire to own fancy hardware to motivate them into spreading the brandname in a simple case of grabbing as much traffic as possible
In both cases, the measured output is a volume of online mentions, something which is more relevant than ever as real-time search is starting to become a major source of online attention.
