5 REALLY Good Social Media Marketing Campaigns

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There were a lot of good social media marketing campaigns in 2009. There were a lot of bad ones, too. We will skip the bad ones – here are the five that we like the most. They are original, creative and they cut-through-the clutter with minimum expense and maximum ROI. You may disagree, you may like others and we probably missed a few. Please feel free to comment on these or any other social media campaigns you like.

The idea behind “Whopper Sacrifice” was simple enough – delete ten of your Facebook friends and get a free Whopper. It caught on like wildfire because by the end of the campaign over 50,000 friends had been deleted. It was brilliant in its timeliness. Networks on social media sites are growing by leaps and bounds and more people keeping adding friends they don’t even know. The thinking was that the value of these friends deteriorates – and removing ten of them for a free Whopper seemed like a good idea. But deleting friends is not what Facebook stands for. Facebook is about making connections, not canceling them, and Burger King was eliminating more friendships than the giant social media site was comfortable with. All good things must come to an end – and ultimately the Whopper Sacrifice was sacrificed. It was a good campaign while it lasted – although some people are now wondering if it was worth losing a friend over a hamburger.

This was a novel idea Buddy Media hatched up that lets users interact around a brand. The premise is a photo challenge game where users are shown two pictures and they have to identify what is different between them. One example – a picture had a dolphin with a fin and the other had a dolphin without a fin. When the user finished the score was sent back to the social network and shared with friends. You could also invite friends to play against you and the winner was broadcast online. Buddy Media created something for Seaworld that was different, viral and it integrated the brand into an experience. It seems like this is the direction where social media campaigns are headed – doing something creative that engages customers with your product. And with this campaign they put social back into social media.

Of all the ways Zappo – the online shoe retailer – uses social media marketing, none is more engaging than the way it uses Twitter. Zappos came up an interesting strategy – get all the their staff to communicate with their customers via Twitter. @ Zappos features its CEO, Tony Hsieh and all Zappos’ employees have their own Twitter accounts, too. They have a leader board that ranks the employees according to the number of followers they have and the staff is encouraged to use the leader board and promote Zappos at the same time. Unlike other retailers, Zappos has successfully put a personality to its Twitter profile. What are Zappos’ employees doing right now? What are they thinking? What are they having for dinner? You will find it on the employees’ tweets. Zappos messages are personal and not necessarily work related. This made it easier for Zappos to connect with their customers, keep the company’s high profile and personalize the online store. Tony Hsieh now has 1.6 million followers on Twitter – more than either CBS News or the NFL – and he inspires his followers with quotes, observations and whatever is on his mind. Zappos knows how to sell shoes. Now it is hoping to profit from people’s interest in the friendly and playful way it conducts business.

How do you promote an exotic but remote tourist destination that very few people know about? The Australian Government did it with an internet contest earlier this year called “The Best Job in the World.” The job paid $100,000 for the winner to be the caretaker of some islands in the Great Barrier Reef off the Australian coast. The person selected for the job would broadcast weekly blogs promoting the area. It was a big success. OK – the campaign began with traditional media but it was sustained over online sites like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. The website for the contest received a million hits the day after its launch. Additionally, the campaign attracted over 34,000 applicants and generated over $70 million worth of publicity. The promotion continued throughout the year and the winner, a British man named Ben Southall, regularly posted blogs and promoted the islands over a network of social media sites.

You don’t need to be a big company to make a big impact in social media. Two University of Virginia graduate students dreamed up “hotelicopter” – the world’s largest helicopter that was modified into an 18-room luxury hotel. Hotelicopter never existed but that it didn’t stop it from being a huge viral hit. It started as an April Fool’s Day prank but quickly grew in popularity. VibeAgent, a hotel search agency started by the two graduate students, wanted to rebrand the company in a fun and interesting way and they wanted to make news doing it. The fake hotelicopter site received more than 1.5 million page views in one week alone. Sites like CNet and widely read blogs buzzed with news about the hotelicopter and whether it really existed. Ian Skurnik, a University of Virginia professor, said, “You want to stand out a bit without being so bizarre that you drive people away or don’t have them take you seriously. A lot of names that sound odd initially stop sounding odd after they become more familiar. For example, you can now say Hulu and it sounds semi-normal and people know what you’re talking about.” The idea wasn’t that bizarre at all. The company rebranded its’ name successfully and is now doing very well in the $100 billion online travel business. Photo Credit: Intersection Consulting

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