Case study: The Paul Smith Optimistic social media campaign

A couple of months ago I worked on an incredible social media campaign for Paul Smith. Partnering with youth marketing agency Latimer Digital we created a Facebook page which attracted almost 5,000 Likes in six weeks, ran a competition with over 1,000 entries and culminated in a celebrity party at a cool London venue with 50 of the winners. Here’s how we did it.

Fashion house Paul Smith was launching a new fragrance called Optimistic and wanted to appeal to the 18-30 demographic using social media.

Facebook was perfect: Incentive > connect with the brand > share

Competitions

To promote the fragrance we ran two competitions on Facebook:

1. Users uploaded a photo and shared it with friends to get it Liked – the top 50 photos won entry into a Paul Smith Optimistic party.
2. A weekly Q&A competition – prizes included VIP gig tickets and the chance to meet Paul Smith in his office over a cup of tea.

Incentives

The Facebook page offered plenty of incentives to encourage Likes and sharing.

The main competition was about sharing your photo with your friends on Facebook. In turn, your friends could also Like the page to enter the competitions.

An advantage of running the weekly competition was that there was a reason for users to come back regularly. The new prizes kept interest levels up and the updates reminded users to share their photo to get more Likes.

Getting Likes

The Paul Smith Optimistic Facebook page was supported by the Paul Smith Facebook page – they posted and promoted the competitions regularly and the spike in Likes was always immediate. By monitoring mentions a weekly surge on Monday was noted, which corresponded with the weekly ‘Optimistic Mondays’ competitions. We also had support from bloggers and competition websites linking to the page.

Seeding content

We handpicked fashion, beauty lifestyle and music bloggers and asked them to post on the subject of ‘being optimistic’ (some of the lucky ones even got to meet Paul Smith). We left the brief open so each blogger could write about what inspired them and include anything they liked into the post including photos, audio and video.

We had some lovely posts:

• My Top 5 Optimistic Songs from Musicals by Stuart Wood
• Magic Moments by Peter Davies

By involving the community and encouraging to be part of the launch, we found that most of the online mentions of the brand in the early stages came from blogs.

Tweeting

The social activity was supported by Twitter – we primarily used it to drive traffic to the Facebook page. By including trending topics in tweets where relevant we were able to reach a higher number of followers. The campaign was just six weeks long and we found our numbers of Twitter followers were much lower than our Facebook Likes. This would be less of an issue on a longer campaign.

Conclusion

The success of this campaign was helped by great planning and buy-in from relevant stakeholders, including Boots who promoted the Facebook page from their website. I spent a lot of time developing the right tone so that it matched the established Paul Smith one and posting updates that fitted the brand. The support from the bloggers was excellent and the PR around the campaign generated articles that appeared in featured in magazines including as Psychologies, Shout and Bliss, and newspapers including the Daily Mail and the Telegraph.

Relevant links:

• Paul Smith Optimistic on Facebook and on Twitter
• See the winning 50 images (or watch the slideshow)
• Watch the video of the Paul Smith Optimistic Party
• Listen to the Paul Smith Optimistic playlist on Spotify