Tag: Shorty Awards

If It’s Hinting Season, I Want an Apple Watch

Posted on by Drew Neisser

shortyAt tonight’s Shorty Awards, a number of brands and their agencies (including Renegade!) will be recognized for their effective use of social media.  Among the winners is one of my favorites, a campaign called #HintingSeason that was created by CP+B for BestBuy and won Best in Retail and Ecommerce.  I call this particular campaign to your attention because it exemplifies all of things I believe social campaigns can and should do:

 

  • Build off of a social truth (people would love to have permission to drop hints about what they want for the holidays)
  • Help solve a particular business challenge (getting people to talk about gifting long before the holiday season)
  • Features a really fun, clever and wonderfully simple idea (a two word hashtag #HintingSeason)
  • Is inherently social but doesn’t rely solely on organic posts to get the conversation going among a broad target (paid media including bloggers & influencers helped spread the word)

To take a behind the scenes look at this campaign, I caught up CP+B’s Peter Knierim, VP/Creative Director and Britten Wolf, Social Supervisor.  Both offer some critical insights into the success of this campaign that are well worth perusing.  And since Peter notes that “It’s never too early to start hinting for what you want this holiday,” I just wanted to add that an Apple Watch would be lovely, thank you.

Drew: Hinting is certainly an age-old offline behavior — did you all notice that hinting was already being done on social channels for other things? If so, how did this influence your approach to #HintingSeason? If not, what gave you confidence that people would actually use the hashtag?

Peter Knierim: Research showed us that consumers who shop in October are likely to shop again during the holiday season. So, we first looked to solve the problem of talking to consumers about holiday shopping when they were buying their Halloween costumes. Hinting Season solved this by giving people permission to talk about what they wanted without rolling out the Santas and snowglobes that come with the holidays.

Britten Wolf: We used social listening to analyze how people were already hinting for what they wanted and found only a moderate amount of conversation. Considering the idea tapped into a truth we all do in real life, we knew that we could own the conversation come the holiday shopping season.

Drew: I’m guessing your campaign hashtag was not being used prior to launch. How did you build awareness of #HintingSeason? How much of a role did paid social media play in helping you to build this awareness? 

Britten Wolf: Best Buy was not using #HintingSeason prior to the campaign’s launch. We had to build its awareness and correlation with Best Buy from scratch, which is an increasingly difficult task in today’s social media landscape.

We worked closely with Starcom to create an omni-channel media approach to build campaign awareness. From a social perspective, our teams and our influencer partners created really entertaining and engaging content. Paid social was pivotal in amplifying its reach and exposing the campaign to new audiences.

Drew: So once the idea was seeded via paid & Vine influencers (who were also paid right?), how long did it take for regular people to start using the hashtag? Was it a slow build or more like a big bang? Ultimately, do you have a sense for how many times #HintingSeason was actually used by “organically” by regular people?

Britten Wolf: Instantly. People already know how to hint. Best Buy just made it even more acceptable to do so before the holidays started. Conversations started on the first day of the campaign and sustained throughout the holiday season. #HintingSeason was used organically almost 50,000 times between October and December.

Drew: Looking back on this highly successful campaign, were there any “organic” surprises? What are some of your favorite hints? 

Peter Knierim: A big part of the influencer component of the campaign was showing people how to hint in entertaining ways. We were surprised at some of the creative and funny ways people hinted at what they wanted.

Some of our favorite hints came toward the end of the campaign, when people started posting photos of them getting what they had hinted during Hinting Season.

Drew: Organic social media is often extremely difficult to link back to business performance. Were there any effort to differentiate results by paid versus organic social? Is that a fool’s errand? 

Britten Wolf: Data drives everything we do in social. From content strategy to message effectiveness, we’re constantly testing and analyzing both paid and organic social’s performance to measure its effectiveness and show ROI.

Drew: Are there some things that you would do differently if you were to start again? Any lessons learned for marketers looking to achieve similar success? Is it time to start hinting to Best Buy to bring the campaign back for a 2nd round?

Peter Knierim: Now that the campaign is over, it’s easy to look back and see areas of improvement for future campaigns. One of the benefits of social, as a medium, is the ability to optimize in real time. From messaging to targeting to timing, we constantly strived to publish the most engaging and best performing content we could create.

Our advice for marketers looking to achieve similar success is to start by tackling a list of challenges, create a simple campaign rooted in human truth, and get more people what they want for Christmas.

It’s never too early to start hinting for what you want this holiday.

Drew: From the agency’s perspective, what did Best Buy do right to help you execute what was both a highly creative and ultimately effective campaign?

Peter Knierim: From the start, Best Buy knew there was potential in the Hinting Season idea. They showed the bravery a client needs to have to drive an idea that we all knew could be hugely successful or fail miserably. They challenged us to focus on it and create a compelling way of owning it. That confidence and challenge helped push our ideas and execution.

Going Long with a Shorty Winner: TD Bank

Posted on by Drew Neisser

shorty tdIn the five years since I first wrote about The Shorty Awards, social media has evolved from a quirky playground for the adventurous to a disciplined practice for any serious marketer.  This change is evident both in terms of the size of the brands competing for the awards as well as the quality of the applications.  The case in point for this post is TD Bank’s #ThankYou campaign which won Best Financial Services campaign. While I encourage students of social media to read this case and the others in their entirety, here’s a quick overview of the campaign:

  • In order to thank its customers, TD Bank turned 4 ATMs into Automated Thank you Machines and used a hidden camera to capture the surprising interactions. TD Bank took it one step further by actually delivering various Thank You’s like sending a family to Disneyland or reuniting a mother and her daughter. These engagements were turned into a 4-minute video that ultimately garnered over 32 million views and hundreds of thousands of shares across various social channels.  According to their Shorty application, “Analysis of all comments related to the campaign indicates that we also achieved our qualitative objective of improving perceptions of TD as the most customer-centric bank. In fact, an independent Google study yields estimates that 3.6 million Canadians or approximately 10% of the Country’s population claimed the video positively changed their brand impression while an additional 1.4 million Canadians said watching the video already reinforced their positive image of TD.”

To gain a greater understanding of how this campaign came into being and why it was so effective, I interviewed Chris Stamper, Senior Vice President, Corporate Marketing, TD Canada Trust. I have no doubt that you’ll find her comments instructive particularly in the advantages of customer centricity, an area that never seems to fail marketers.  As Arnott puts it, “The real ROI was finding a unique, authentic way to thank our customers.”

Drew: Where did the insight for this campaign come from?  

It’s as simple as wanting to say thank you. We say thank you to our customers every day, and we’ll say thank you tomorrow and the next day, but this was a coordinated effort to shout it from the rooftops. And, it was more than just thank you, it was thanks for your business, we wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing if it wasn’t for you. That’s what we were trying to get across to our customers in a personalized and heartfelt way.

Drew: What gave you confidence that this approach would actually work?

We hoped it was going to be successful but we really didn’t know – and it was beyond even our highest expectations. If at the end of the day we took 100 customers and gave them an experience of their lives that would have been enough for us. And regardless of what happened afterwards, we knew we were going to deliver that. We’re a brand that really connects with our customers — they are at the center of everything we do. We don’t believe that any bank or brand could have created this. We know our customers really well – it’s our local branch staff and the relationships they have with our customers that gave us the insights to these incredible stories.  

Drew: Your Shorty application credits employee amplification as an important catalyst.  Can you describe how the program was introduced to employees and if you worked with tool like Dynamic Signal to help manage and track the program?

Every year tens of thousands of our employees participate in customer appreciation day.  As part of our thank you in 2014, we simultaneously surprised customers who were standing in our over 1100 branches across Canada with a #TDThanksYou envelope containing a small cash gift, as a gesture of our appreciation. Customers who were on the phone with us and banking with us online at this time, also received this special surprise with a direct deposit in their account. Another thing to keep in mind is that we found the customers featured in the videos through our local branch employees who know their customers really well and often have close relationships with them. Think of Mike in Pickering who got to meet his baseball idol and throw the first pitch at a Major League Baseball game. Employees were genuinely proud of the video and keen to share it online.

Drew: Your Shorty application offers many measurable outcomes.  Which are you the proudest of and why?

The views are great but what it really comes down to is making an authentic connection with your customers – we’re so glad we could do that. Dorothy seeing her daughter in Trinidad, Christine taking her family to Disney Land and Mike throwing out the first pitch – that’s what we’re proudest of.

Drew: Working with real consumers is tricky since you never know what will happen.  Were there any surprises, good or bad, and how did that impact the program?

It’s true that you never know what kind of reaction you’ll get – especially when you’re going for an authentic reaction. Thank you means a lot of different things to different people, but I think we can all agree that it feels good to be appreciated, and that’s what this campaign was all about. At the end of the day people saw that these were genuine reactions. 

Drew:  This program had such a great impact in a short period of time — has it been extended or is there talk of a round two?  

We’re thrilled with the response – views continue to grow past 20MM – thanking our customers is something we will continue to do and that means finding ways to surprise and wow our customers. 

Drew: In your Shorty application, you talk about suspending typical ROI metrics.  How important was this to getting the idea approved and as you look at the results, can you make a compelling case that the program did have a material impact on customer loyalty?

The real ROI was finding a unique, authentic way to thank our customers. We’ve built our reputation on legendary customer service so this initiative was about more than marketing. It was about creating an experience and expressing to our customers how grateful we are that they continue to bank with us. When you put it this way, it’s less about the dollars and more about the experience of saying thank you in a big way.

Drew: If another brand were to attempt a program that involved “random acts of kindness,” what would you advice would you give them? (This question was answered by David Diamond of Diamond Marketing, the agency that created this campaign for TD Bank.)

David Diamond: The most important thing to remember when doing real world activation is that you are working with real people. There are no actors, no scripting, and no re-do’s. People are pretty astute and know when something is up. The second they think the situation around them isn’t right or they don’t feel comfortable you won’t get the reactions you’re looking for – and that will come through in the final product. Unlike commercials you need to let the situation unfold as organically as possible – there is no waiting for a magic hour, no perfect lighting, no perfect sound. You just got to keep the camera’s rolling and trust the process!

Self-serving note: Renegade is looking forward to this year’s Shorty Awards as our work with Leo Burnett on behalf of the NCAA was recognized as best Twitter campaign.

How the Shorty Awards Came Up Big

Posted on by Drew Neisser

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell posits that success is a much about good timing as it is hard work and raw talent.  Perhaps there is no greater evidence of this theory than the Shorty Awards, which launched in December 2008 just as “Twitter was on the cusp of getting really big,” noted co-founder Greg Galant. But to attribute the success of the Shorty Awards to timing alone would be shortsighted, missing one of the most instructive cases for entrepreneurs in the brave new world of Social Media 3.0.   Here are seven insights I gleaned from my interview with Galant:

1. Identify an Unmet Need

Back in late 2008, Greg Galant and his partner Lee Semel at Sawhorse Media, a small web dev shop, recognized both the potential of Twitter and an inherent shortcoming.  Noted Galant, “The thing which made it unique was that all the content was public and people were creating media but there was no easy way to figure out who’s doing good stuff on Twitter by topic.”  Added Galant, “So we had this wacky idea we would create the first ever directory of Twitter and what better way than to crowd source an awards program.”  Wacky or not, within 24 hours of its launch on December 10th, 2008, Shorty was one of the top trending terms on Twitter, a position it held for the next two months.  And as a result of the Shortys, all the Twitterverse had a real source for the best of the best.

2. Build it Fast AND Build it Smart

Often software entrepreneurs are faced with tradeoffs between speed to market and quality of performance.  Offered Galant, “We came up with the name Shorty Awards, registered the domain and built the whole system in two weekends.”  Despite the speed, it was brilliant in its use of the very medium it was acknowledging and according to Galant was “the first system ever to use public nominees.” The entry form was literally just a tweet like “I nominate @DrewNeisser for #Shorty for marketing brilliance…” and the Shorty site according to Galant, “Would just automatically suck that in, parse it, and figure out what the nomination is for, and then create a leader board out of all the nominees.” That would be like a movie actress nominating herself for an Oscar in the middle of the film!

3. Make it Competitive and Transparent

Awards by their very nature are competitive but part of the genius of the Shorty Awards is that nominees could see how they were doing in real time.  This level of transparency set the Shorty Awards apart from its advertising brethren.  Explained Galant, “there was tons of campaigning, people were tweeting to get people to vote for them, the leader boards were really a strong thing in that people want to be on a top ten list.”  The leader board also had the added value of giving people a reason to constantly come back to ShortyAwards.com.  In fact and most notably, traffic to the Shorty Awards.com website according to Compete.com (see chart) during its first two years was higher than the better known Effies, Clios and the even the coveted Cannes Lions.

4. Bake the Marketing Into the Product

One of the more remarkably aspects of the Shorty Awards case, is that the brand was built according to Galant with “zero marketing dollars.“  A true social media phenomenon, the Shorty Awards garnered 50,000 nominees year 1 and over 300,000 year 2 without spending a single dollar on advertising.   As Galant explained it, “We thought about marketing at the product design stage, focusing on every little angle, how it would market itself, what kind of viral actions will it create, what’s the viral loop, what about it’s really going to resonate with users—that matters far more than how hard you pitch it and everything like that.”  Entrepreneurs out there would be well advised to embrace Galant’s conjecture, “That much of marketing today is done before the launch, it’s in product design.

5. React to the Road not the Map

Every entrepreneur will tell of the importance of reacting to “the road not the map” when rolling out a new product or service.  But few in my experience were as good at observing the changes in the road and reacting accordingly as Galant and Semel.  First, there was the matter of the award ceremony.  Launched without a real business plan, Galant noted “ We hadn’t yet lined up any plans to actually have the ceremony, we didn’t have a sponsor, we didn’t have a venue, we didn’t have a host yet two months later, we pulled the whole thing off.”   Then there were the awards themselves.  Allowing people to make up any category they wanted, when seeing a particular user generated category achieve critical mass, they’d make it official.  Noted Galant, “It never occurred to us to have a video game category for example.”

6. Deliver Genuine Value Across the Board

Before the Shorty Awards became a real business, Galant and his partner had the simple goal of delivering value by “showing the who’s who of social media.”  Once it became clear that there were a lot of people who shared Galant’s desire to “know who’s actually good, who the stars are, who’s mastered the media,” then the challenge shifted to creating value for potential sponsors.  This value came in multiple ways depending on the sponsor.  During the nomination periods, traffic to the website and PR about the awards reached millions.  At the events, sponsors were able to mingle with top tweeters from around the world, the first of which was the largest gathering of its kind.  And because Galant had the foresight to video tape the event, live streams (+20k) and subsequent plays on YouTube (+100k) increased the value for sponsors even further.

7. Learn from Other’s Mistakes (not included in the FastCompany.com post that ran earlier this week)

They say that most entrepreneurs learn from their own mistakes but the great ones learn from the mistakes of others.  Such is the case with Galant and the Shorty Awards.  Noted Galant, “There was one attempt before us to do a Twitter awards thing, but we heard stories where they promised the winner 100 bucks but they couldn’t deliver on that—so we really wanted to do it right.”  So Galant found some sponsors to help cover the costs of the event and charged for attendance, thus ensuring sufficient funding to pull off a NYC-caliber program in their first year.  Year 2 they upped the ante, hosting the event in Manhattan instead of Brooklyn, allowing for greater attendance and more polished experience.

Final Note

The Shorty Awards were profitable in both its first two years, enough so that Galant is now talking to investors about expansion plans. Not bad for a couple of guys who just wanted to figure out who to follow on Twitter.