Top 6 Social Media Campaigns

People on social media are demanding, they want new and innovative campaigns from the companies they follow. Hence, companies have to evolve and come up with new and interesting marketing campaigns to woo the present and potential customers through social media. 

Here’s a look at some interesting international as well as Indian social media campaigns-

International

‘Daily Twist’ by Oreo (My favorite)                                

Celebrating Oreo’s 100th birthday, the company created 100 days’ worth of unique images highlighting a number of significant events. To kick start the event the company released a picture of rainbow Oreo on 25^th of June in honor of the LGBT rights. Though it sparked a controversy, it was in Oreo’s best interest, generating over 20k comments on Facebook page and attracting big media eyeballs which included ABC News, The Chicago Tribune and Mashable etc. 

Kern & Sohn Precision Scales

Making it to the Twitter top news, to the TED talk and reaching an astonishing audience of 355 million is a Germany based precision scales company named Kern & Sohn Precision Scales.

                                                    How did they do it?

Earth’s gravity actually varies, so we weigh slightly more or less wherever you go. These fluctuations wouldn’t register on typical scales, but Kern scales are capable of measuring them. To showcase their competitive advantage which is the accuracy of the scale, the company  started an experiment-cum-Social media campaign to demonstrated just how accurate the scales are by recording the gravitational variation in their location and adding the data to the experiment website, gnomeexperiment.com

Gnomes are well-known for globe-trotting. So Kern equipped one with a Kern Scale and packed him in a flight case. Once people received the gnome, they happily escorted him to landmarks for photos – they even sent him from one laboratory to another, from the South Pole to the CERN particle collider.

‘DEWmocracy’ by Mountain Dew

In July 2009, Mountain Dew launched its social media campaign ‘moniker DEWmocracy 2’ to find extreme fans to help craft an all-new flavour for the brand. Fifty applicants were selected to sample and record their reactions on seven experimental flavours. The top three flavours were chosen and testers were organized into product teams called Flavour Nations — one for each flavour. Each team was tasked with the responsibility of naming its flavour, designing a label, selecting an agency and supervising the marketing and advertising plans for flavour launch. On April 19 2010, the three new flavours — Distortion, Typhoon and White Out — hit retail shelves, at which point the teams were tasked with using their social capital to solicit votes for their flavour. More than 2 million votes later, White Out is now a permanent part of the Mountain Dew product line. Mountain Dew wins social media gold in our eyes because the campaign is as genuine as they.

Indian

Volkswagen LinkedIn Campaign

As Lutz Kothe, Head of Marketing for VW India, say, “At Volkswagen, innovation is woven into everything we do.” So in formulating their digital strategy, they looked beyond the obvious for innovative ways to engage our audience. Knowing that for many people, their car affects their professional life and their

professional identity affects their car choices. This made LinkedIn a natural choice to connect with current and potential car buyers among the growing Indian professional population.”

Volkswagen India participated in the worldwide launch of Company Pages in November 2010, and soon thereafter opened up their pages to allow LinkedIn members to post reviews and recommendations of their car line in India including the New Beetle, Vento, and Polo.

Recommendation Ads get people talking

Next, Volkswagen launched a series of Recommendation Ads encouraging more customers to join the conversation. Each ad showcased endorsements of actual LinkedIn members, and invited the community to recommend their favorite Volkswagen model. Volkswagen used LinkedIn’s broad reach (100 million members worldwide, 9 million in India) and precise targeting capabilities to connect with professionals who matched the buyer profi­les for their different models.

Results

 

·         2,700 product recommendations in 30 days

·         2,300 new followers on VW India Company Page

·         960,000 viral updates about VW car model

Cadbury Dairy Milk #ShubhAarambh League (IPL6)

In a cricked frenzied nation, Cadbury took advantage of the ongoing IPL6 by launching the #ShubhAarambh League with the message ‘T20 ka #ShubhAarambh’, which was promoted on the brand’s Facebook cover page in addition to print and TV.

Users created content on Twitter and Facebook with the hashtag #ShubhAarambh. Also they shared others content with the same hashtag. The rewards were daily gift hampers and a grand championship winner.  

Dove’s Secret Diaries

When HUL’s personal care brand Dove, known for its promotional campaigns around every day women launched a brand new product for hair fall – ‘the Dove hair fall rescue treatment’, it built an extensive campaign with real women sharing their hair fall stories and how the new product rescued them.

The company through its YouTube channel started the campaign, with the home page designed as a diary which talks about the product and encourages you to hear the personal experience from the Dove bloggers themselves. 

At the bottom of the home page was a link to ‘Share the secret’ contest which will lead the participants to Dove’s Facebook page where viewers were encouraged to share the secret with product hampers to be won.

Was it any good?

‘Dove Secret Diaries’ is an interesting campaign for a product launch. It manages to build ample curiosity and moreover offers the product as the prize, thus completing the cycle. Dove has always campaigned around real women and their stories and this campaign was as real as real gets with people whom I know through micro blogging site twitter participating and endorsing Dove.

Twitter Bonanza

Each time I log in to my Twitter account some or other company is giving away prizes to the winners of their twitter contest. Sounds Good eh!? Not really!

These Twitter contests are at an all time high. Nowadays, every other tweet on my timeline is ending with some or other brand sponsored hashtag. Even those people who used to make fun of these competitions earlier, are now active participants. After all who doesn’t want an iPhone or A Merc for FREE. For me, these tweets annoy the hell out of me.



What is even more annoying are the brands that I follow on Twitter. Most of the brand handles retweet the answers to their contest questions. Now just imagine hundreds of replies getting Rt-ed every hour and all you can see on your timeline is why someone likes a particular mobile or beer. Who the hell is interested in knowing your favorite beer!? 



If you ask those SMM masterminds, they will say Twitter contest is one of the best way to engage with potential customers. I agree, but most of the time these contests cross the line, from being interesting/hilarious to being downright annoying (to put it decently).


And at last there are maximum 3 winners and thousands of cribbers. 


I don’t think it is the right way of generating followers or engaging people, it is more like luring people to your brand with false promises which is the soul job of advertising. Isn’t it? Social media is a great platform for companies to engage with people, make real connections and create life long loyalty but It shouldn’t be done by spamming our timelines by retweeting each and every tweet you receive. 

There has to be some other way of interacting with people/ potential customers other than Twitter contests. I don’t know what would that be but this twitter competition thingy is not working well for the companies. I can say that with surety as I have un-followed many of the brands and people only because I was sick of them spamming my timeline with contest tweets and I am sure many of my fellow tweeters have done the same.

Social Media and Co-Creation

Bridging gap between the companies and the customers has given birth to a phenomenon called Co-Creation. It views markets as forums for firms and active customers to share, combine and renew each other's resources and capabilities to create value through new forms of interaction, service and learning mechanisms (Wikipedia definition).

Social Media has played a pivotal role in bringing brands in direct contact with their audience in real-time. Facebook, twitter are a few sites in the ever growing sea of social media platforms that are allowing people to talk about the brands they like/dislike, their expectations from a brand and how they want to contribute towards making of a brand. 

Co-creation has come a long way from simple Q&A, polls to an everlasting experience. Some of the notable examples include the Simpsons asking fans to create a character for an episode,Micromax's new logo is the child of co-creation, Sweden handling over the reigns of its twitter account to the citizens to provide viewers with greater insights in to the Swedish life or levis using Instagram to find a new face for its 2012 campaign. 


Using social media to engage people, to create something new or modifying existing product /service/content is definitely increases the value the brand but there is a great danger in opening up one's brand to a larger audience. Getting involved through social media needs commitment, clear goal and research or one risk devaluing the brand.

Brands that "do not embrace co-creation principles are likely to see an erosion of value" 

~ Gouillart and Ramaswamy 

There have been cases in the past where due to lack of understanding of psyche of consumers, companies and their brands have suffered. 

• McDonald's #McDStories campaign on twitter backfired spectacularly with people using #McDstories hashtag to highlight their worst experience of the fast food chain.

• When Gap came up with a new logo, thousands of customers were outraged saying that they preferred the previous simple and traditional logo. They posted bad comments about the company for not involving them in the process. The company took off the logo and started a new campaign asking people to give their inputs for new logo but the damage was done. 

• Although innovative and often successful, the Swedish Twitter campaign has had some strange results, including "I'm taking over this goddamned account for a week! Expect bad sex and slapstick". Too much autonomy to users and little to no control meant potentially damaging Sweden's reputation.

'social media is an enabler and Co-creation is the force that unleashes the true potential of a brand'

So.cl Experiment

Creating a buzz around the social media sphere is Microsoft's new social media website So.cl. And guess what it is NOT a competitor of Facebook or Google+.  So, what is it? So.cl right now, is looking like a marriage of Pinterest with bing.

People can search for things and post them on their timeline or page. It's more like selecting certain result from a search engine and putting it for people to read or comment on it.

So.cl’s another feature is its “video parties” option, which allows members to create a slideshow of videos instead of still images. The video plays in a sequential order, and allows party-watchers to add videos of interest to the mix and make discussions in the chat window.

Microsoft through So.cl is trying to attract the young and intelligent minds. So.cl will help students to accumulate all of the relevant websites and search results they find which can later be used for project works.

So.cl is a clever tool for Microsoft - having all of these people searching through your search engine and pulling together bundles of relevant content. Clever, isn't it?


Here are the snapshots of my So.cl page :

The question is whether So.cl will be able to do what Google is trying to do for years now- provide smarter and relevant data by reducing clutter- cleaner social signals from your search.
Wait and watch!

For more information click here.

Twitter turns 6

Six years back, on 21st March, Jack Dorsey (@jack), co-founder of Twitter sent the first ever tweet, "just setting up my twttr,". He mentioned Twitter as 'twttr' as this was the code name of the project. Since then Twitter has changed a lot. Twitter now has over 465 million users and 175 million tweets are send per day.

 But few users and tweets created tumult not just on twitter but all over the world.

Six Tweets that made history:

1)  "just setting up my twttr," - @jack (Jack Dorsey).

The first ever tweet.

2)  "I kicked my mommy at 12: 18 p.m on Thu dec  11" - @kickbee  

                                           

This tweet was sent by Corey Menscher's  unborn kid. Corey created a device and a Twitter account,   kickbee, which sent out tweets everytime the kid (Tyler) kicked his mom.

3) "Are you ready to celebrate? Well, get ready: We have ICE!!!!! Yes, ICE, *WATER ICE* on Mars! w00t!!! Best day ever!!"- @marsphoenix

The twitter account of Mars Phoenix Lander broke the news of ice on mars on 19th June 2008.

4) "Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station -- the 1st live tweet from Space! :) More soon, send your ?s" -@Astro_TJ 

In January, 2010, NASA astronaut T. J. Creamer sends the first unassisted tweet from space aboard the International Space Station.

5)  "Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)." -@reallyvirtual

Sohaib Athar (a.k.a. @ReallyVirtual) unknowingly began live-tweeting the top-secret raid that killed Bin Laden in Pakistan on 2, May, 2011.

6) "Here is another photo of the shuttle from my plane"- @stefmara

In May, 2011, NASA launched the space shuttle Endeavour. Stefanie Gordon, aka @stefmara, took a photograph of the launch from a plane and tweeted it, capturing the launch from a new perspective.

                                                                                                    

Six Must Follow Fictional/Spoof Twitter Accounts  

1) @Lord_Voldemort7
 He-who-shall-not-be-named pokes fun at current events, social media and, of course, Harry Potter.

2) @HomerJSimpson
 Our favourite donut-loving yellow man. Dumbishly funny with a tinge of Bart Simpson!

3) @Jesus_M_Christ
 He is the one Rakhi Sawant Keeps on calling.

4) @KimJongNumberUn
 North Korea's new leader -- and the world's number one Eric Clapton fan.

5) @Fakingnews
If  you like news with a twist, Faking news is right for you.

6) @DrYumYumSingh
Parody account of Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh. This one speaks (I, guess)

Tripbirds- A friend's personal tour guide for you.

Yet another entry into the social media sphere is the Tripbirds. The site was launched this Tuesday. It aims to leverage existing data from users’ Facebook, Foursquare and Instagram profiles to recommend places to visit, stay, eat and explore.

Tripbirds create a sequential account of all the geotagged content you post on Facebook, Foresquare and Instagram which can help your friends plan their own trip to the places you went.

“Nobody has nailed ‘social travel’ yet, but someone will eventually,” said Tripbirds co-founder Ted Valentin.  "Most of the geotagged social media apps are about what is happening here and right now and in that app, but we want to take all that data and put it in one place.”

I tried the site yesterday evening, making an account just takes a minute as you can logon through Facebook. Though it was difficult to update my hometown as it wasn't recognizing Dehradun. Except for this, the site ran quite smoothly.
Apart from its biggest feature which is also the base of the site of making a guidebook of one's social media travel data the other features include-

Plan a Trip:

Recommend a place:

  

 Maps:  

Tripbirds is not the only site pursuing social travel recommendations. Other startups in the space include Wanderfly, Gtrot, Gogobot and Trippy. But what makes it different is that its service is careful and considerate unlike the above mentioned sites that are noisy and flashy.

In a nutshell Tripbirds is a gorgeous yet simple-to-use site, whether it would successful in "social travel" sector only time will tell.