Dutch airline KLM is fast becoming one of my favourite brands for the way it listens and responds to customers using social media. The short story is that KLM put on an extra flight following one tweet. Play the case study to find out what made it so special.
You don’t think the event was staged, do you? Seems convenient that the initial tweet stemmed from a hip DJ and film maker.
Let’s see…social media guru sees ‘Egypt’ trending through the roof before spending rest of morning deciding how best to leverage it and ‘generate’ discussion around the brand. Goal: achieved. But probably not the type of attention he wanted. Don’t worry mate, consumers have short memories. If in doubt, see Kyle Lacey’s post on the end result for Nestle, following the palm oil controversy.
Yo. My man. You don’t have to be a Jay-Z fan to admire this rich media site filled with previously shot video, stylish black and white stills of the ‘hood and everything you could ever want to know about the performer’s career. I’m only surprised he hasn’t taken this opportunity to push his merch(andise) harder. I guess he knows what’s cool. Beyonce’s not-so-better half has nicely harnessed the power of his tweeps (tweeters) with a page overlay that lets fans add their voice (figuratively speaking) on a favourite lyric, show or moment.
Waiting at airports can get pretty boring, so KLM wondered if it could use social media to make passengers feel special and turn their boredom into happiness. The social experiment started with a small team of people tracking down passengers who had checked in to one of KLM’s foursquare locations or left a message on Twitter. They then browsed through their social profiles in search of ideas for small, personalized gifts that were later presented by a lovely hostess. KLM was rewarded for these random acts of kindness with more than a million impressions on Twitter as passengers tweeted about their surprise, plus, more than 63,000 views on YouTube. I love it when brands engage in this type of micro level marketing, which reminds me of a low budget campaign Vodafone ran on Facebook back in 2009.
It’s that time of year again for the Contagious round-up of the best in digital. Some of my personal favourites from recent CDs (editions 22 and 23) include: ‘Breaking the Cycle’ – a campaign from U by Kotex that shakes up the crimson tide category with its sheer honesty; ‘Let’s Colour’ – a Dulux campaign with great feel good factor; and, ‘Microsoft Kin’ – branded entertainment that had the balls to ask if a person’s social media friends were really friends at all.
The silly season is never ending at the Orange offices, as you can see from The Feed: a random collection of light hearted fun designed to get all buddy with customers. This week it’s a Santalookalike competition. But in the past they’ve posted ‘Secret Portraits’ (student illustrators interpreting your tweets), the Film Flipper (a very basic tool to randomly choose the movie you’ll see), and who can forget the Singing Tweetograms. People tend to hate telcos like they hate banks. Rather than serving up this sort of fluff, I wonder if it would just be better to you know…give people what they want…like skilled call centre staff and accurate billing. Am I being grumpy? Sorry.
Some campaigns based on user generated content are good. Some are not. I realise the ‘It’s no picnic’ campaign won awards but I don’t know why. How engaging is it to watch 30 seconds of someone trying to talk while stuffing their face with a Picnic bar? Personally, I much prefer the slice of life moments from Beechies’ latest campaign, inviting fans to submit stories too good not to share (just like their chewing gum). It’s fun and the story lines (if not the idea of sharing) are original.
You’re most probably blind if you haven’t seen any of ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’ campaign by W+K, but in any case here’s the case study. Man, I wish I had worked on it.
DDB Canada has come up with the idea of live Twitter murals to catch the attention of busy Americans in New York, Chicago and LA. Maybe Tourism New Zealand would have been better off doing this kind of stuff rather than blowing $300,000 a day on a giant rugby ball.