Crocstar Media » Facebook

Case study: The Paul Smith Optimistic social media campaign

Christine — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 12:10:23 +0000

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:

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.
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.

Ellie Goulding at the Paul Smith Optimistic party

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:

Want to learn the secrets to getting those sweet retweets?

Christine — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 17:45:12 +0000

With the aim of sharing some of our writing knowledge gained at places like the BBC, ITV, Yahoo!, AOL, Magic FM and Heat, my fellow editor Sue Keogh from Sookio and I gave a workshop as part of the Social Media Week London conference.

Our session covered:

how to write a killer headline
crafting tweets to get them retweeted
writing for Facebook and Twitter
bringing it all together with an example from AOL and the Saturdays
sharing our favourite dos and don’ts when writing for social media.

Feedback included:

‘Informal but informative’

‘Very informative, common sense approach’

‘The examples really helped with a current campaign’

‘Lots of great tips’

‘Great takeaways’

We’ll be offering more workshops in the following areas in the very near future. Please get in touch if you’d like to know more.

Writing the perfect headline
How to write a good blog post
Writing for Facebook as a brand
How to write well on Twitter for brands

We held the event at the AOL building on Capper Street. As you’d expect it’s all bright, fluffy cushions on funky sofas and glass staircases. In fact, it was a fantastic venue due to its central location, huge conference room with comfortable chairs and the lovely spread of sandwiches and cakes they put on. Thanks AOL!

Write up on the session by Jonathan Mathias account manager from Johnson King

Watch out for time bandits! How your small business can get results from social media

Christine — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 16:50:06 +0000

As a small business owner, I find Twitter very useful for networking. A lot of my target clients are on there so it’s a good way to break the ice and start a conversation.

I’ve helped set up social media channels for a Bauer Media brand and a few smaller companies, including an estate agent and wedding dress designer. The difference between communicating as a smaller company and a large one is a blog for another day; what I’m interested in exploring today is how a small-to-medium size business can use social media channels to best effect.

A ‘social media strategy’? Seriously?

You need to ask yourself a few questions before you head on into that there social media circus. Start with the following:

What is our aim of using social media?
What will we measure?
Who will we target?
What are our key messages?
How much time will we allow?

Answering these questions means that you’ll have to think about why you’ll use social media. Although it’s free to use in terms of money, there is a huge time investment before there is a tangible payoff. But done right, this payoff could be huge; increasing your customer base, influence and reputation.

Got any tips you can share on doing it right?

Using my experience of using social both as a small business and for other small businesses, I’ve picked up a few things along the way. I’ve also been generously helped out by several people via Twitter. I’d love to hear your tips too – send via the form at the bottom of the post.

Interaction is more important than how many ‘friends’ you have

Do people follow you back? Are you responding to what people say? Social media is perfect for responding to comments – go on, don’t be shy! Make friends first – you’re building a network of connections, not giving it the hard sell. So listen and join in when you’re ready.

Choose your platform

Sue Keogh recommends you pick your platform wisely: “Are you more suited to a chatty Twitter feed, a Facebook page with lots of images and competitions or a Foursquare campaign getting people to check in to your coffee shop?”

Don’t just talk about what you’re doing

One of the great things about social media is that you can talk to people about different subjects. Twitter’s a great place to make a comment on a story you saw in the news, or respond to someone else’s thoughts on a book they read. As long as you keep your tone consistent, you can vary your updates to include more friendly or personal thoughts.

Give back more than you take

Sarah Pettegree says: “It isn’t a one-way street, to be effective on Twitter you need followers (and to follow people) and, as I often say, it isn’t The Yellow Pages. If you just use it as a medium for advertising your wares then no one will be interested, or impressed, and they won’t follow. It’s about being interested in other people’s lives and businesses, talking to them and wanting to help them as much as they help you.”

Be open and honest, but don’t share your whole life

People are interested in you and your company. But there’s a limit, we don’t need to know it all. As Noreen Blanluet puts it: ”Broadly, don’t write anything your mum wouldn’t approve of”. Hollie-Anne Brooks adds: “Remember this isn’t your personal account. Tipsy tweets and celebrity gossip might be acceptable to your friends but not to your customers”.

Watch the clock

Once you start connecting with people, it’s easy to spend hours and hours doing it. Beware of spending too much time on social media, at the expense of your other activities. Make it part of your marketing activity, not all of it. Noreen suggests having allocated times to check your accounts, remember to consider what your intended audience might be doing at that time. No point sending special offers out at midnight on Saturday, for example.

Learn from mistakes and successes

I’m a copywriter but occasionally the odd typo creeps through. It happens when I’m rushing so I try to take my time when tweeting and avoid doing it from my phone (damn autocorrect). Sue advises you check out the competition and learn by their mistakes, as well as your own. Whose tweets do you enjoy? Could you be more like them? What’s been your most replied-to tweet? Do more of those.

Measure what’s working

If you know what you need social media to do for you (e.g. referrals, exposure, sales, increased engagement), you need to make sure you have ways of measuring that success. If nothing’s happening think about what advice you could take from this list, or maybe you need to give it a bit more time.

How do I calculate my return on investment?

There’s a great post here with loads of information on how to calculate the ROI from social media marketing.

Huge thanks to the following contributors:

Sarah Pettegree @brays_cottage
Sue Keogh @sookio
Annette Naudin @annettenaudin
Hollie-Anne Brooks @HollieAnneB
Noreen Blanluet @beamazingtoday
Jorgen Sundberg @JorgenSundberg

Live blog with Matt Eltringham from the BBC

Christine — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 10:37:02 +0000

Matt Eltringham is here at Sheffield University to talk to the Web MAs about how the BBC use social media. He starts by telling the group about his role at the BBC.

Only half the UGC hub was up and running on July 7th 2005.

They received 10-15,000 emails from all over London telling the BBC what was happening. They didn’t have the capacity to deal with all the information, but looking back they had credible information about every single bomb that morning.

Users spend on average:

1 minute/day on the BBC
11 minutes/day on Facebook

Social media strategy

social newsgatherring
social production (collaborative journalism)
sharing content more widely

Matt asks: Where do you get your news?

Replies include: news websites, Facebook and Twitter.

The BBC is using social media to push news out and also to bring content in.

Listen to Matt: “If it’s that important the news will find me.”
Listen!

Matt shows several examples of when photographs were used but weren’t ‘real’ e.g. that fire was not in Hampshire, the photo of a flood was not the same one. Users must be able to trust UGC (user generated content).

Twitter is faster for news than the traditional ‘wires’ so you have to know how to use it.

User generated content includes:

Eyewitness ‘accidental journalism’
Eyewitness testimoney
Breaking news
Case studies
Stories
Comment or opinion

Matt says you have to be able to use Google before you use social media.

Most people don’t contribute material to a news organisation. Why not?

Think about your calls to action

Is it obvious how to do it? Is it as easy as possible to do? Is it clear how to contribute? Is there are good reason to contribute? What will happen to the content?

The way you phrase your request or call to action is extremely important. Don’t decide what you want the story to be and then ask people to fit into that – listen to what they want to say.

Breaking news on Twitter

Matt gives some examples of news stories that broke on Twitter including the Hudson river plane crash and Claire Rayner’s death (broken by her son Jay).

The BBC uses Twitter in different ways – from accounts for breaking news to @jiminthemorning who engages with his breakfast show followers and chats and replies to people.

Should BBC journalists be allowed to tweet personal opinions? Phil Lavelle got in trouble for a tweet about a Welsh-language channel.

You’re not tweeting to your mates – you’re sharing your thoughts with the whole world! Count to ten before you press the send button.

Tools of social media

You should make it clear why you’re on social media – is it to gather content? To share?

Audioboo
Facebook
Twitter
Open source maps

Get out and talk to people

Social media helps you get back in touch with people – think of it as a return to ‘old-fashioned’ journalism.

‘Social’ networking – as opposed to what?

Christine — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 17:22:45 +0000

I hold my hands up – I’m on Facebook – who isn’t?

I also use Linkedin to look for contacts and to see who I could work with. So far, so normal.

What I don’t understand is why whoever responsible came up with the label “social networking”. Since when has networking been a solitary activity?

A quick definition of networking:

“An extended group of people with similar interests or concerns who
interact and remain in informal contact for mutual assistance or
support.”

Even if you don’t like the people you’re networking with – be it for business or pleasure, you still have to engage in social activity with them.

So please, less of the tautology… and more of the status updates.

(In case you’ve been trapped under something heavy in your home for the last couple of years, this cute vid explains social networking in plain English)

My Linkedin profile

This post was originally published by Christine on Wed, 02/20/2008