Zombies and Tourette's: Two creative and successful social media campaigns
I'm not the most active social media user, but thanks to the proliferation of news articles reporting on the Twitter feeds of certain people, organizations and other groups, I've seen or heard about a number of interesting uses of social media for a variety of purposes (most of them the marketing/promotional kind). Now that I'm in this program, and paying more attention to what's going on in the industry, I'm now realizing that these relatively new methods of communication can help your company reach an enormous number of people who might otherwise be completely unaware of your brand or message.
While I was doing research for a presentation for another course, I came across a particularly inventive social media campaign that was used to promote the premiere of The Walking Dead in France. Since the show's age-restricted rating prevented regular broadcast promotion, and because it had already been on the air in the States for some time and was among the most heavily pirated, the Darewin agency had to come up with an innovative way to drum up interest for the French premiere. Their idea? The very first Twitter and Facebook zombie attack.
On the official site for French network NT1, visitors were advised to NOT use #walkingdeadNT1 as a hashtag or in Facebook posts, or they would face zombie-related consequences. Tweeting or posting the hashtag caused users to be "attacked" by a horde of zombified Twitter and Facebook accounts. After more than 30,000 people were followed by digital zombies, the premiere of the show was a success, scoring massive ratings, and was among the most-tweeted premieres in France.
#walkingdeadNT1 was an example of social media being cleverly employed as a marketing tool, but this next campaign shows how Twitter can do more than just raise awareness for a TV show.
One of the presentations at last month's Fall Tour Interactive detailed another creative but considerably more noble social media campaign on behalf of the Tourette Syndrome Foundation of Canada. It should come as no surprise that most people don't have a clear understanding of what Tourette Syndrome is and how severely it affects the lives of those who have it. Through a desire to educate the largely misinformed masses, the #SurrenderYourSay Twitter campaign was born. Earlier this summer, Twitter users who signed up to participate in Surrender Your Say handed over control of their Twitter feeds for 24 hours to a bot that posted tweets for them. The tweets were often nonsensical and sometimes offensive in nature. The idea was to have users experience the same loss of control over what they said that people afflicted with Tourette's suffer through every day. Almost 9,000 users participated in the campaign, with over 3.9 million people being reached worldwide.
Social media can be used for much more than your marketing strategy or letting people know what you ate for lunch. It's easy to get cynical about the usefulness of something like Twitter when you're constantly being bombarded by stories about "that outrageous thing that celebrity tweeted about," but there are those out there (like the TSFC) that have realized the potential for social media as educational tool, as a means of raising awareness about serious issues that people might not have heard about or previously misunderstood.
