Often social media campaigns simply consists of a Twitter feed, blog, Facebook page and YouTube channel. And for many companies that is the most appropriate, cost effective and manageable strategy to use. But every now and then a company will introduce a little sprinkle of social media fairy dust to add a magical element to their campaign…below is a look of some of my recent favourites….
Jimmy Choo and Foursquare
Jimmy Choo recently used Foursquare to launch a real-time treasure hunt around London. A pair of Jimmy Choo trainers were placed at fashionable hangouts, marked up on Foursquare, for one lucky winner to claim.
This campaign shows innovative use of one of the lesser used social networking sites in the UK (though Foursquares users is constantly growing…and I wonder if this campaign increased numbers)..but I can’t help but find myself wondering if they might have been better to wait until Facebook’s geo-location networking launches…
Creativity score: 7
Potential impact score: 6
Pringles Outs Social Media Addicts
(Source: Media Week)
The crisp brand heralded as ‘good for sharing’ has launched a website for people to out their over sharing friends. Users are encouraged to name and shame friends who post boring status updates or Tweets – hoping instead to encourage people share things that are ‘really worth sharing, like Pringles’.
The campaign demonstrates integrated messaging and clever tie-in with the ‘sharing’ theme. It is also wonderfully satirises one of the common complaints about social networking, promoting over-sharing by sharing the banal comments more widely – brilliant!
Integration across different social media channels is also very effective, with a bespoke website dedicated to the campaign, ‘oversharers’ tweets retweeted on a Twitter feed and an ‘overshare’ button on Facebook.
Creativity score: 8
Potential impact score: 8
Such Tweet Sorrow
The Royal Shakespeare company used the power of Twitter to try and make Shakespeare accessible to the digital generation. What followed was a re-enactment of Romeo and Juliet, through the medium of Twitter (Juliet had over 5,000 followers). The campaign brilliantly updated a classic and kept many gripped for the duration of the month long storytelling.
The real-time nature of Twitter meant that it was sometimes hard to keep up, but a bespoke website provided a timeline of events for those that missed out.
Overall an effective use of social networking to (hopefully) bring Shakespeare to a new audience…
Creativity Score: 8
Potential Impact Score: 6
T-Mobile – Life is For Sharing Flash Mob
An oldie but a goodie…and not a pure 100% social media campaign, but the Liverpool Street life is for sharing advert perfectly married two phenomonons of the digital generation – flashmobs and social media.
The advert was posted onto YouTube as soon as it was premiered on Channel 4, and has now received 2,693,903 views with the video quickly going viral online.
This showed good integration of the marketing disciplines, which is exactly what is needed for an effective social media campaign, but I would suggest that perhaps more people were interested in the entertainment factor…than who the campaign was actually by.
Creativity Score: 9
Potential impact Score: 8
Do feel free to share any other examples of creative social media campaigns you have seen below!
P.s. some of the above campaigns were kindly pointed out by my colleague Nicky Smith, who also blogs over at ‘Research in the News’ – go check it out for some interesting insight into the use of research in PR….
Listening to the radio yesterday I heard a piece about an Oxford University Professor who has found that, despite the emergence of social networking sites such as Facebook, human brains are still only capable of managing a maximum of 150 friendships.
Albeit for me to contradict a professor, but I have to say I was initially sceptical. The dawn of social networking, and more specifically Facebook, has certainly increased the number of ‘friendships’ that I can manage ten-fold, at least. I often comment on peoples’ statuses or wish people happy birthday to those that I would not text, call, write to, meet in person…
However, the story intrigued me. So upon my return home I commenced an evening in front of the telly to conduct the great ‘Facebook cull’. Aiming to reduce my 250 friends (which I think that is quite tame actually…) to the more ‘manageable’ 150 was actively encouraged by my fellow Facebookers with chirps of ‘I’m on 178 and think it’s too much!’ and ‘I culled 80 the other day’. So, newly inspired, I flexed my fore-finger over the delete button and in an instant became ruthless.
Using Professor Dunbar’s rule of removing those I do not have contact with at least once a year my 250 ‘friends’ has now dwindled to ‘177’ more manageable contacts. But I am not sure it feels more manageable. I now have an impending sense of doom that I might run into some of my Facebook casulties down the pub and find myself in an awkward situation when the subject of their ruthless deletion from my Facebook circle rears its ugly head. I do not say this out of blind panic – it has happened to my friends before following their very own culling sessions.
If this is the case perhaps ‘friends’ is not the right term. Social networking has allowed me to keep up with many more ‘acquaintances’ than I would have had the time or inclincation to maintain contact with in Facebooks absence. On this occasion I am going to have to disagree with the Professor and suggest that perhaps if he revisits his study ten years down the line, he might find that our circles have widened beyond the 150 mark, of acquitances if not friends. Location-based social networking sites search as Foursquare will most certainly have a role to play in this, but that’s another story…
Meanwhile, I am going to promptly scramble out into the Facebook sphere and beg forgiveness from deletees….it was all in the name of research, honest?!
Brad Downs
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