You may think that all social media marketing promotions are the same — after all, how creative can you really get with a coupon, or a contest, or even a sweepstakes?
The answer is: extremely. At Wildfire, we’ve seen a great many social media marketing campaigns run by brands big and small, everything from chocolate cake by mail to hundreds of cute babies and cuter pets. But the following five campaigns, all run by large multinational brands and companies, have been especially innovative in their approach and the interesting use of social media marketing. They are great examples of how social media marketing can be used in creative ways to achieve a variety of goals – from increasing brand awareness to generating leads, selling products and even promoting foreign relations!
1. President Obama Uses Social Media Marketing to Promote Foreign Relations
The U.S. Embassy in Jakarta used Wildfire to run a promotion on their Facebook Fan Page to excite Indonesian fans about President Obama’s upcoming visit to the country. Users could pick their favorite cultural foods and clothing items to suggest the President sample and wear during his visit and then enter a sweepstakes to win tickets to attend one of the events. After running for just short of a month, the campaign generated 12,000 sweepstakes entries, thousands of new fans for the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, and over 43,000 interactions with the promotion in general, with people choosing their favorite item in some or all three of the choices, and the entering the sweeps.
This was a highly creative way for the U.S. State Department to generate interest among young Indonesians in the President’s visit and the best part is that they got the campaign up and running in just over a week and with a minimal budget.
2. Jamba Juice Uses Social Media to drive in-store purchasing via “Jamba Bucks”
Jamba Juice launched a campaign called “Jamba Bucks” that used Wildfire’s unique coupon code generation functionality in a very interesting way. They gave out ‘lucky’ coupons via our Facebook Connect Product and Facebook Fan Page Product that could be redeemed at Jamba Juice stores. When consumers redeemed the coupons they either received $1 off their purchase or they had the opportunity to win one many thousands of instant prizes, including cash prizes of $10,000! To make Jamba’s campaign even more fun and social, they combined it with Wildfire’s virtual gifting solution so users could send Jamba Bucks to their friends in the form of fun, Jamba-branded virtual gifts like smoothies, bucks, and cartoons. By combining the utility of a coupon with the anticipation of an instant win and the social channels of Facebook, Jamba was able to generate huge interest in their campaign, distributing tens of thousands of coupons and driving around 95,000 consumers to redeem coupons at their stores.
3. EA Games enables Facebook users to help author their games
EA Games is encouraging fans of the popular video game Deadspace to “Design a Kill” for the game’s sequel, Deadspace 2. Entrants can submit their visions of a perfect kill sequence and the public can vote on their favorite entries. The winning entry will be built into the Deadspace 2 game and will feature the likeness of the winner. EA Games created the promotion using Wildfire’s essay, photo, and video contest solution. By allowing for a variety of submission formats (i.e. video, photo and/or text) EA catered to a wide variety entrants– if creating and editing a video seemed too difficult to one, they had the option to instead submit an image or a written description of their kill. Some of the now thousands of entries are not for the squeamish–EA really got into the hearts and heads of their fans, some of whom acted out entire kill sequences in front of a camera, and others who even created their own CGI movies! With many thousands of newsfeeds and friend invites sent, votes cast and videos viewed, EA’s contest has enabled them to reach hundreds of thousands of Facebook users and generate considerable buzz about their new game.
4. Gatorade Commemorates Michael Jordan’s Induction into the Hall of Fame with Vote for Favorite MJ Moments
Gatorade teamed up with Wildfire to commemorate Michael Jordan’s induction into the Basketball Hall Of Fame with a campaign on the Gatorade Fan Page which allowed users to vote for their favorite MJ moment from a collection submitted by some of the industry’s top sports writers. By combining a voting campaign with a sweepstakes Gatorade was able to get the best of both world’s – a powerful way to spread the word about their brand throughout Facebook (voters broadcast their opinion about the best Michael Jordan ‘moment’ by publishing newsfeeds and sharing with their friends) and to generate leads (sweepstakes entrants provided valuable data and contact information to Gatorade). The campaign generated tens of thousands of votes and exposed hundreds of thousands of Facebook users to the Gatorade brand.
5. Right Guard and the Phoenix Suns Team Up to grow their fans
The Phoenix Suns took advantage of Wildfire’s multiple fan feature to kill two birds with one stone – grow their fan base and that of their sponsor, Right Guard. The Suns on the Road Sweepstakes had a grand prize of winning a trip and tickets to see the Phoenix Suns play at Golden State, but instead of asking entrants to become a fan of the Phoenix Suns page only, entrants were also asked to become fans of Right Guard. Right Guard was able to benefit from the positive association with the Suns and the the Phoenix Suns were able to use Facebook to add value in a new way for their sponsor. To give the campaign an added level of interest, the Sun’s also provided a quiz for fans to find out which Phoenix Suns “Legend” player they’re most like, which encouraged the publication of news feeds and further spread the word about the Sun’s and Right Guard.
Wildfire CEO Victoria Ransom will be speaking the the SMASH summit on May 12th in San Francisco, alongside companies like Mattel, Comcast, You Tube, Twitter, Twilio, CoTweet, Dogster, Search Engine Land, Altimeter Group, and many others. JOIN US THERE.
Hunter Walk
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Anamitra Banerji
Paul Kim
Laura Fitton
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Bowen Payson
