Yesterday on the Halogen Blog we started a series about the essential components of mastering the Internet when half of all U.S. retail spend is influenced by the web. Today we start on the inspirational end of the spectrum with a series of social media mastery, but instead of bring you the highly syndicated list of hits like PepsiCo’s social vending or Ben & Jerry’s Fair Tweets, we bring you five flashes of genius you may have never seen. Here they are, the top campaigns you’ve never heard of (in no particular order):
1. Volkswagon Public Polo
When Volkswagon released the new Polo they made one of their cars public and gave brand fans a chance to win the vehicle by driving it the furthest. During the 8 day, 12 hour per day contest users could steal the Polo from other people’s profiles and even influence the direction of the Polo by entering their postal code. At the end of the contest 175 people had driven 2,500 KM, but thousands connected with the car on video and social media sites. Perhaps most interesting, this has been said to be the campaign that inspired the MINI Getaway campaign.
2. PQS Across America
BaseballHQ is a wonk site for fantasy baseball fanatics who breathe sophisticated baseball stats. As you can imagine, the site recruits some true baseball wonks, so when Fanalytic Ron Shandler had the half-joke idea to run PQS Across America the niche audience responded.
The object of the campaign was to encourage people to spot and take pictures of license plates that say PQS-5. In return for a snapshot he would give away a free annual subscription to BaseballHQ. When the campaign went viral Shandler collected PQS-5 plates from 22 states and decided to keep the contest going for a year. There weren’t any huge, multichannel initiatives to push this campaign out across digital channels, but one can imagine the momentum an already viral idea like this might get if it were strategically seeded across channels.
3. Emergen-C
The Emergen-C Facebook page may not have the biggest fan base to date, but their strategy encourages a wealth of consistent interaction between the brand and fan. Today fans can share Emergen-C stories in a custom tab, but my favorite Emergen-C campaign is actually fairly old. A couple years back the brand let users send each other free sample packets of Emergen-C when their friends wrote something on Facebook about catching a cold or being tired. Other brands have since emulated similar spin offs, but this page feels like one of the first to truly buy into interaction above fan quantity.
4. Intel Visual Life
Back in January of 2011 Intel launched a video series that featured bloggers talking about technology and how it has affected their life and work. Bloggers often turned around and shared their stories across the social graph, giving this campaign a boost. The first video (above) featured Sartorialist creator Scott Schuman and has since earned nearly one million views. This is significant though, because Intel is one of the few technology brands that understands the importance of branded content, lifestyle, and breathing the brand across digital channels.
5. Greenpeace and Mattel
Greenpeace and Mattel may not sound like a recipe for success, but I’ve decided to include this example because its the kind of exchange we’ll start to see more frequently. This summer Greenpeace targeted Mattel with a multimedia campaign in hopes of improving the company’s poor deforestation policies.
To do so, the nonprofit created a Barbie, It’s Over microsite featuring shareable videos and location specific quick-links to write to Mattel’s CEO from anywhere in the world. The same letter writing campaign was linked to Facebook Connect, ultimately forcing Mattel to address the campaign and modify their practices.
This is a far cry from Paul Watson’s whale wars where he takes to the seas for months at a time in an attempt to stop whalers, but as online becomes more powerful we’ll continue to see brilliant campaigns like these change minds, take hearts, and create change.
