Jumping social media hurdles
- Luke Telford
- 13 January 2010
Photo credit: brainloc, sxc.hu
You have to admire the companies who come up with inventive methods of making it through to the other side unscathed, and against the odds.
One such campaign accompanied the relaunch of Samboy potato chips. The discontinuation of the Atomic Tomato variety had been long lamented by online fans
. A strongly populated Facebook page had even been formed calling for their return. So when Samboy
decided to relaunch its old favourites, it employed marketing agency Pusher, who created a competition. Whoever created the ‘Samboy is back' fanpage with the most members would win $10,000 and a truckload of chips.
Of course, the campaign was hijacked by a number of non-Samboy related dissidents. A group fan-page was started called ‘Samboy is back for Gaza relief', and was populated with members who were disconcertingly aggressive towards other groups. Samboy wisely avoided engaging with such hijackings, and a group aiming to benefit the victims of the Black Saturday bush fires in Victoria eventually won the competition.
Such a campaign was practically asking to be derailed, and, while some would insist that the outcome detracted from the impact of the campaign, in truth such disruptions garnered more attention for the brand than would otherwise have been the case. An unlikely success, and one that landed them the 2009 Best Social Media Campaign at Australia's Interactive Advertising Bureau Awards.
In 2007, it looked very unlikely that Barack Obama would last through the primaries, let alone become president. But, thanks to an in depth social media campaign that addressed followers such as this one on their own terms, by utilising Twitter saturation, creating a tenaciously updated Facebook page and a strong YouTube channel, the Obama campaign was able to garner 3 million online
donors, and engaging many more viewers with his pragmatically optimistic and transformative proposals, to emerge victorious in November 2008.
In 2005, American Journalist Jeff Jarvis publicly reported his enormously negative experience in
dealing with computer megalith Dell on his blog BuzzMachine (a popular blog which boasted 33,682 unique visitors in Decemeber 2009 according to site analytics). Jarvis' ranting did enormous brand damage to
Dell, as the issues he took with the company were mostly valid. Recognising a weakness in their online reputation, Dell investigated their profile online, to discover that approximately 50% of online comments regarding their company were
negative!
The company then resolved to address this kind of negative feedback directly, by attracting and encouraging it. The result was the Direct2Dell blog, aimed at actively engaging and participating in customer conversations concerning the company and its products. This was followed by
IdeaStorm, an online, open suggestions box for customers. The
site appropriated a Reddit style voting system, so visitors can vote
favoured suggestions to the top of the page, and dispel needlessly abusive or negative ones altogether. By giving the company an addressable, reflexive, human web 2.0 presence, Dell has managed to turn its brand image around.
As an expression of protest against NBC planning to cancel American sitcom Chuck, TV blog Give Me My Remote rebranded itself as Give Me My Chuck, sparking a social media campaign to bring the show back for a third season. This developed into a strong hashtag trend on Twitter (#savechuck) and resulted in fans flashmobbing Subway
outlets (a major sponsor of the sitcom) on the day of the cancellation. The campaign garnered enough attention to warrant comment from the NBC executives responsible for the future of the show, and resulted in Chuck being reinstated for a
third season. Not only that, but NBC acted on this digitally enabled groundswell, placing emphasis for the marketing of the third season on social media.
This is precisely the kind of regenerative social media phenomenon that so many agencies strive for and rarely achieve. Often success in the realm of Web 2.0 depends not on the brilliance of the campaign, but how well the company manages its reception. #
