5 Winning Social Media Campaigns to Learn From

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1 Mashable on Facebook Join Us! Ads by Google Brand Brand Marketing Plan Business Marketing Business Advertising Facebook Marketing About 1 month ago Zachary Sniderman 27 5 Winning Social Media Campaigns to Learn From Do you like this story? Like 796 people like this. Be the first of your friends. This series is supported by The Awareness Social Marketing Hub, a leading enterprise-grade application for marketers struggling with the social media chaos of managing multiple social channels. Click here to learn more. Companies are starting to broaden what they consider online advertising, and are opting to run some amazing social media campaigns. Rather than slapping a banner ad on a site, social media campaigns take full advantage of the web s unique properties like interactivity, communitybuilding, and the ability to specialize local offers. Making a social media campaign work sometimes requires a certain je ne sais quoi. We looked into some successful campaigns from the past year to figure out what they did right and what lessons they can provide. We know we left out some brilliant social media campaigns, especially for niche and small-scale markets. Add your voice to the comments below, and let us know which social media campaigns you admire and what lessons they offer. 1. Gap mashable.com/ /social-media-campa 1/10

2 The Campaign: Gap teamed up with popular group-buying site Groupon to offer a nation-wide deal: $50 worth of apparel for just $25. By the end of the day, 441,000 groupons were sold bringing in a little more than $11 million. What Worked: The sale marked Groupon s first nation-wide deal with a major brand. For Gap, the deal brought in a ton of cash and, hopefully, new customers. We re really trying to reach new customers, said Chris Gayton, Gap s Senior Director of Media. To reach them in ways that are part of their everyday so that it becomes like a conversation. Gap s other social media efforts, including deals for Foursquare users, are about building a community. Gayton said that 70% of people that buy something in a Gap store started browsing on their website. Social media is a way to reach those people and bring them under their brand. Part of that is encapsulated in their 1969 denim stream. Billed as a catch-all resource on denim (not just Gap-sponsored ads, though they are there as well), Gap built it to offer added value and create conversation. Online loyalty will hopefully turn into profit. What Flopped: Some people, like digital marketing expert Augustine Fou, commented that the Groupon deal was a bust because Gap doesn t need more word of mouth. He saw it in terms of revenue loss rather than customer gain. 2. Toy Story 3 mashable.com/ /social-media-campa 2/10

3 The Campaign: Pixar and Disney let out a barrage of videos, tie-ins, and ads to promote Toy Story 3. Aside from traditional banner ads and billboards, Disney created viral videos including fake, vintage-style ads featuring the new characters, an iad featured on the iphone 4, and a Facebook Page complete with a built-in ticket-buying app. What Worked: The video successfully played on the nostalgia of their entire demographic. Kids could appreciate the fake toy commercials while their parents could reminisce about their own childhood toys; a sentiment entirely in line with the Toy Story brand. The Facebook app was connected to news streams such that you could share when you bought tickets to the movie. Word-of-mouth and in-stream recommendations are a powerful tool. The whole idea is that no friend gets left behind, a Disney exec told the IFC. It s both a play on the movie s tagline ( No Toy Gets Left Behind ) and pressure to join in when your friends buy tickets. What Flopped: The social media campaign was pretty solid on most counts. The danger of associating with major brands (like the iad) is that your product can appear too polished or too corporate. It all comes down to knowing your product and knowing your brand. In this case, Disney-Pixar hit a home run. 3. AOL The Campaign: mashable.com/ /social-media-campa 3/10

4 AOL set out to hire an ambassador for its social aggregation site Lifestream. More than just a mascot, the ambassador position was known as the best job ever with bonuses like a cushy apartment and VIP access to concerts and events across the country. The hiring process was a mix of traditional resume and interview applications and an extensive social media voting process headed up by the hopeful employees. The eventual ambassador was asked to reach out to their fans with regular updates. What Worked: AOL is trying to reboot as a cool brand. Rather than spend a fortune on commercials with hip people using the product (cough, BBM, cough), AOL offered a service that its desired demographic would actually want; namely, a sweet job. Having the position decided by fan vote helped organically spread the word and create a supportive community that was invested in their product. The attempt was to recruit a person to the position, said Tessa Petrich, the eventual winner. Secondly it was to pump up the position, to get more eyeballs to the product Thirdly to that, what it did really well was to get people excited about AOL. Speaking about the campaign s organic fan base, Petrich said: You need to give people the opportunity to get excited about you. Your strongest outreach are your own customers. What Flopped: The campaign just ended so it s too early too tell its long-term effect. One let down was the inevitable decrease in hype. The buzz around AOL s new dream job died down once the spot was filled. No amount of celebrity spottings or updates from the winning ambassador could compete with the initial creativity of the campaign. Planned followup campaigns are also suffering from this. 4. Starbucks The Campaign: Starbucks has been busy with a bunch of successful social media campaigns across a range of networks. The coffee giant offered mayorship deals on Foursquare, free goodies for Tax Day via Twitter s then-new promoted tweets, and a free pastry day promoted through Twitter and Facebook. What Worked: If you re going to offer discounts, make sure they re on products you want to feature. Rather than setting up blanket deals, Starbucks focused on areas where they wanted to improve sales. Free pastry day got publicity for their non-coffee offerings, the mayor deals often provide discounts on new products, tax day s free coffee promoted recycling part of the brand s greener image. mashable.com/ /social-media-campa 4/10

5 Jumping on Twitter s promoted tweets early also garnered Starbucks a lot of publicity in the tech and social media worlds a demographic that generally has money to spend on premium coffee. Essentially, if a news organization wanted to cover promoted tweets as they launched, Starbucks was a major go-to example. What Flopped: Starbucks is good at promoting things its social media campaigns seem less concerned, however, with building a vibrant community. Starbucks already has near-religious levels of customer loyalty, so this may be a smart resource allocation rather than oversight. 5. Mountain Dew The Campaign: When Mountain Dew wanted to create a new flavor, they did it the social media way. DEWmocracy was a multipart, long-term project aimed at creating a new soda flavor through fan voting. The campaign started by narrowing down a series of fan-made flavors with home-tasting packs. The three were chosen through a country-wide tour complete with voting and video booths. Mountain Dew then created Flavor Nations composed of fans, experts, and professional ad agencies. Each flavor nation was responsible for the packaging, graphics, and social marketing of their flavor including viral videos, promotion on Twitter, and professional commercials. The winner was chosen by mass vote. What Worked: Like AOL, Mountain Dew gained a ton of exposure and loyalty by mobilizing its customers to help grow the brand. The largely grassroots movement built natural buzz around the new flavors with a huge net of social media exposure. Mountain Dew was also able to keep the projects on-brand. Despite having disparate communities working on the flavor nations, the ad agencies and experts helped guide the discussion and create a polished finished product while allowing fans to have a real say on the company s marketing direction. What Flopped: The nature of the campaign means that two of the flavors won t get made. Assuming the voting was close, this means Mountain Dew could alienate a relatively large portion of its fans who worked on the losing, discontinued flavors. This also assumes that Mountain Dew s fans took the campaign to heart and would be more frustrated at losing the competition rather than excited to be shaping their brand s future. Speed Round mashable.com/ /social-media-campa 5/10

6 We ve gone through five campaigns in relative depth, but there were a slew of recent great ones. Below, we run through some honorable mentions of interesting, unique, or just plain polished social media campaigns. Old Spice: The mother lode of all social media campaigns, the Old Spice guy commercials and Twitter responses generated a huge response for the brand and created an Internet meme in the process. We ve already covered the campaign extensively (which is why it was left off this list) but be sure to check out some of our favorite video responses here. Google Chrome : Everybody s seen the commercials showing how fast Chrome can be. Most people may not realize that the innovative web music video for Arcade Fire s new song is itself a promotion for Chrome. Built with some help from the folks at Google, the video has so many interactive windows and moving parts that they recommend you watch in Chrome just to avoid any slow-down. Sneaky, but smart. Film Companies: Hey, that girl on Chatroulette looks sort of cute maybe oh my goodness she s possessed. The Last Exorcism used a fake video on the chat site to drum up some scares and some interest in the upcoming film. Tron too has had a complex and multi-faceted social media campaign complete with fake phones, geo-location bonuses for checkins at Tron previews, and a staged, in-character rally. Car Companies: Ford jumped on Facebook to unveil its 2011 Explorer. The campaign marked the first time a major car company had forgone the auto show for a web unveiling, as the car was only later rolled out in traditional outlets. Honda has followed suit but with social gaming on Facebook. They promoted their new CR-Z in the Facebook game Car Town with built-in ads and an in-game car with special, persistent features. Series supported by Awareness Awareness builds social marketing software for marketers leveraging multiple social channels to engage with customers, build their brand, and increase revenues. Built upon Awareness expertise deploying more than 200 communities and social media projects for the world s biggest brands including Sony, JetBlue, Kodak, ASOS.com and AIRMiles, The Awareness Social Marketing Hub is a leading enterprise-grade application for marketers struggling with the social media chaos of managing multiple social channels. With the Awareness Social Marketing Hub, marketers are now able to publish, manage and measure across all their social channels from one central location using advanced built-in permissioning, workflow and audit controls. More Social Media Resources from Mashable: mashable.com/ /social-media-campa 6/10

7 - HOW TO: Get the Most Out of Your Business Facebook Page - 5 Huge Trends in Social Media Right Now - The WikiLeaks Debate: Journalists Weigh In - A Field Guide to Using Facebook Places - 5 Useful Facebook Trend and Search Services Image courtesy of istockphoto, DNY59 For more Business coverage: Follow Mashable Business Become a Fan on Facebook Subscribe to the Business channel Download our free apps for iphone and ipad More About: aol, aol lifestream, arcade-fire, campaign, car town, dewmocracy, disney, facebook, Print Story ford, Foursqaure, free pastry day, gap, Google, google chrome, groupon, honda cr-z, mountain dew, old spice, pixar, social media campaign, social media for business leaders series, starbucks, The last exorcism, toy story, toy story 3, TRON, twitter User reviews: Chrome, Facebook, Google, Google Chrome, Internet, Twitter, iphone, istockphoto (New York, New York) at American Express JOBS Senior Manager, Interactive Development AXPi, Global E- Communications Capabilities Team & Mobile Capture and DeliverabilityThe Interactive group at American Express (AXPi) is the center f... View more jobs» 6 people liked this. Add New Comment mashable.com/ /social-media-campa 7/10

8 Showing 15 of 27 comments Sort by Oldest first Subscribe by Subscribe by RSS yllwdaisies 1 month ago The Google Chrome / Arcade Fire / Wilderness thing worked for me. I am (was) a committed Firefox user, & now just finally downloaded Chrome. Will switch over to Chrome as soon as I put in addons/extensions (I have to use wisestamp for work ). My brother has been tooting Chrome since it came out, but this made me want to switch. Niki liked this Local Mobile Search Marketing 1 month ago Years ago, I thought (and I bet others agreed) that Yahoo, Excite and Alta Vista could not get upstaged in the search engine space. Along comes Google and POW! see ya later. Twitter and FB have such large numbers, it hard to imagine either of these marquis properties losing their top tier status. Never say Never. Martin Kovac and 2 more liked this Ef Rodriguez 1 month ago I totally cried at Toy Story 3, you guys! 3 people liked this. Martin Kovac 1 month ago hkgkbkjnmlggh Kyle Bridges 1 month ago Another great example is TWEAK footwear. They use "Internetainers" (select internet figures with 300,000+ followers) to reach out to their followers and ask them what they want in a shoe. Then TWEAK collects all the feedback, designs a shoe "for the people by the people" and sells it. All of us at Cascade Web Development were glad to be a part of their success! Check it out at: ChiefAlchemist 1 month ago Please allow me to play the contrarian - and be somewhat sarcastic :) - for a moment... Maybe the headline should have been "How To Throw Gas On A Fire To Start A Fire". These are all VERY well established brands. Brands that have to make an effort to muck it up. Instead of congratulating the 800 pound gorillas for being able to throw their weigh (and budgets) around, I for one would prefer to see recommendations that are more indicative of: true success; what is the trenches for many of us; reflective of creativity as well as the tools available; etc. Telling me people like and recognize Gap, Ford, etc.is like telling me Lady Gaga is an over-exposed flash in the pan. Save your breath (and bandwidth). Maybe I'm wrong but my expectations of Mashable are higher than this. Rant over ;) Thanks for listening. SoSoJuicy and 5 more liked this mashable.com/ /social-media-campa 8/10

9 Michael D. Yoder 1 month ago Thanks for your rant. I agree. It is much easier to be successful in social media when you have a multi million dollar budget and you already are a household name. I, too, would love to see some examples of grass roots efforts that took off and made someone or a company a household name as a result. 2 people liked this. ChiefAlchemist 1 month ago Thanks Michael. Please allow me to rant a bit more... :) At this point, I'm a back to basics kinda guy. That is, "social media" are just channels. They will not save a sucky outfit from being less sucky. In fact, a sucky brand can potentially do fatal damage by drawing attention to themselves. Quality of the core company and brand - big or small - is all too often lost in the soc hype. I, much like yourself, want to see examples where the tools helps lead the brand othe brand to bigger and better things, not just another well establish brand leading the tools, so to speak. I also get somewhat uncomfortable with the use of the term "successful". It continues to get flashed around in a traditional marketing sorta way. For example, just because Gap with 400k+ does not in and of itself mean it was successful. First, as compared to what? Second, what was the goal/objective of the campaign? Finally, given their MASSIVE budget and in a country of 300m+, 400k almost sounds embarrassingly under performing, eh? Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to be a critic, nor a bowel's best friend ;) I'm just looking for info I can use and not mindless rehashing of obviousness and nothingness. Sometimes I feel as if Mashable as well as other in this space went to the Mainstream Media School of Journalism. I digress. Again. Rant #2 complete. Time for dinner. Ranting makes me hungry. lol 2 people liked this. Zachary Sniderman 1 month ago Hey ChiefAlchemist, I agree that social media sites usually focus on the big names often to the exclusion of smaller companies doing truly innovative interesting stuff in the space. The goal of this story was to look at those 800lb gorillas with some analysis: what they did well, what actually didn't work for them etc. in the hopes that new companies could mix-and-match the elements that suited them. The idea wasn't to point out success, but glean some lesson (which hopefully came across). That said, I think there's definitely enough material on smaller companies to fill up 10 of these posts. Are there any social media campaigns in particular that you were really impressed by? I'd love to open up the conversation. CrossTalk 4 weeks ago Too funny, "will not save a sucky out from being less sucky" or as the famous saying "silk purse out of a sow's ear." My friend said it 30 years ago, "if you are boring face-to-face, you will still be boring via telepresence." You are right, it's just another channel - take a look at how your customers want to be marketed to. cheers, TC Web Design Montreal 1 week ago mashable.com/ /social-media-campa 9/10

10 Hello ChiefAlchamist, I believe that the reason why social media campaigns are considered to be "Successful" is you can reach your target audience much easier than any other traditional marketing methods that exists out there.. The choice these companies have is : investing in marketing on mediums where people hardly look at vs. investing where their public audience spends their time.. Gaming PC 1 month ago I loved the Toy Story campaign out of those mentioned, the app designed is brilliant. lbukkfalvi 1 month ago These could be recommended for the 1st edition of Bees Awards : lbukkfalvi 1 month ago These should be recommended to participate in the 1st edition of the Bees Awards : Ht month ago Are you on LinkedIn? Whether you are or not, you'll want to read this article about someone who worked on a secret project for the company: blog comments powered by DISQUS mashable.com/ /social-media-campa 10/10