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Wednesday 26 January 2011

Winter warmer Twitter fun with Orange (part ii)

It would have been rude not to have taken advantage of the live case study opportunity presented by the Orange WinterWarmers activity, so with a little willing help from my colleague Richard, we thought we'd play the game and see what happened:



So we did.... and sometime late afternoon they did indeed turn up in their Winter Warmer branded van


 to give Rich his toasty scarf and a hot chocolate

(Picture kindly taken by my mate @somerandomnerd) who we'd tried to hint might also like a hot chocolate via a subsequent tweet at Orange, but they obviously weren't quite set up for making the most of bigger tactical opportunities to surprise and delight, given that we'd made it clear we were all in the same building).  I think this was a missed  trick. Whilst obviously the principle of sharing and referral made sense, and it wasn't a given that the referee and the recipient were in the same place, following the tweet feed as (what felt like a lot of adland offices started playing), there was a clear opportunity to reach a broader audience with (maybe smaller) surprises, and or potentially thank the referee too.  Yes, it's nice to be altruistic, and in my case, I've now got a brand story to tell delegates but it's even nicer to get recognition for it. All these things are about value exchange: If I do this, what do I get back?

Tweets bubbled along & built throughout the morning

 but took a sudden jump mid afternoon  when  OK magazine with it's 98k followers picked the story up (by which time I think the van route was already reasonably established judging by the confirmation tweets and van location broadcast tweets)...

Which pushed #winterwarmer into the trending list for a while...


And saw tweets hit 50+ / hour which feels pretty respectable given the activity was extremely localised to a tight area of central/eastern London.

Rich, being a very polite well mannered chap, sent an appropriate thank you tweet, as did I, both of which were retweeted by the @Orangethefeed (that's what's called user generated content amplification in the trade!). Incidentally, that's something which Facebook announced yesterday they will be offering a paid for model to enhance.


There were still lots of people requesting winterwarmers as I left the office at 7pm, as RTs got picked up and pushed onwards, yet the @Orangethefeed hadn't sent a tweet since 16.52, which seemed like a bit of a shame on the expectations management front. They started again at 0825 this morning and if via RT rather than pro-actively, are at least being clearer about roughly where they will be in Birmingham today...
My take being that actually they could make better use of  @OrangetheFeed as a comms hub.

That said, Rich got a very lovely woolly scarf in exchange for humouring me and a few tweets. Orange now have 2 blog posts from me alone and I spotted a few others being posted in thanks, plus the pictures of happy recipients tweeted and retweeted so that's  the "show and tell the client look this user generated stuff works"  box ticked. As they're in Birmingham today, and Manchester and Brighton later this week there's also time to finesse and improve the activation learning as they go.

I obviously don't know what the objectives were, but brand interaction, tick, generate buzz, tick, cost of a few scarves and some hot chocolate, a hit squad and a rented van with decals, relative to people touched & conversations generated?:  Probably pretty efficient on ROI relative to the cost of a print campaign or similar, and a heck more human and engaging.

Fun stuff. I enjoyed it, and  I am enjoying watching Birmingham playing today.

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