Online marketing stunts: thinking outside the social media box
- Luke Telford
- 11 March 2010
'Electronic roulette'. Photo credit: shadowkill @ sxc.hu
Why? Saturation. Everyone in digital marketing has a Facebook fan page. The same people all have a Twitter account. And most of them update them all the time. There's simply too much going on in the Web 2.0 realm for a couple of tweets and the occasional Facebook page link to make any real difference.
If you want people to sit up and take note of what your online campaign is saying, it needs to be speaking louder than everyone else.
Exactly how loud, or what needs to be said, varies for each agency and each product. But, to give you an idea of the competition, here are 2 of the more outrageous and absurd recent examples of businesses using social media to market a product or service.
Bludot is a furniture designer and manufacturer. They decided to draw attention to a new line of chair that they were creating by concocting a mysterious daylong campaign utilising Twitter and GPS technology.
"If you want people to sit up and take note of what your online campaign is saying, it needs to be speaking louder than everyone else."
They attached GPS tracking devices to a number of their (‘Real Good') chairs, and placed these conspicuously in various public locations around Manhattan. Each of the GPS devices was programmed to report its location to a unique Twitter feed. As
curious people began to surreptitiously squirrel the chairs off to their respective homes, the chair's journeys were updated to a map on the Bludot website
. After two days, when the chairs had settled all over New York, Bludot embarked on a door knocking mission, with a camera crew, politely
requesting interviews with the people who had appropriated the road-side furniture. Some of the more successful interviews are featured on the site. Kudos to ad agency Mono from Minneapolis: your idea was absurd enough to make a noise above the
chorus of tweets.
Chatroulette is a (slightly unscrupulous) site that connects 500,000 unique users per day with complete strangers via video chat. As to be expected with anything involving free use of web cameras, the site attracts a number of reprobates (as this
informative video explains). It is also quite an exciting
thing to experience, as most people on the site are just interested in having a peculiar conversation with someone from an undisclosed corner of the planet.
This anticipation of conversing face to face with affable strangers, combined with the threat of meeting an undesirable character, makes the site quite an edgy phenomenon. So it was only a matter of time before a brand decided to take the plunge
and use it as a marketing tool. FCUK, in collaboration with London agency Poke, recently launched a marketing campaign to promote their French Connection MANifesto blog. The campaign challenges users to record a video conversation of them charming a woman on Chatroulette, to win a 250 pound FCUK
voucher. The successful results have been posted online, and promoted over Twitter and Facebook. The competition has been so successful at engaging the target demographic that, due to popular demand, women have been allowed to enter the competition too.
This campaign should be praised for it's audacity. Chatroulette is a dangerous site for any brand to associate with.
But, in both instances, FCUK and Bludot have taken the risk, thought outside the social media box and managed to engage very effectively with their target demographic. #
