Noesium | Integrative Digital Thinking

It’s a week before my wedding on Aug 29 in Vancouver. Getting excited .

Moving right along with my adventure of uncovering more lessons to be learnt from the Obama social media campaign. Via online I discovered Barack Obama’s Social Media Lessons for Businesses by Brent Leary and David Bullock, and from this new reading I would like to share the third key element of building a successful social media campaign: think out of the box – and confidently take on any resistance that it may raise.

As quoted from Leary and Bullock in this article:

It’s really interesting if you can use social media technologies and think out of the box how many people you can reach.

Leary and Bullock have provided a fabulous insight. Burger King, for example, did a fantastic out-of-the box Whopper Sacrifice campaign on Facebook in 2009. They created an application which by de-friending 10 of your Facebook friends you would receive a coupon for a free Whopper. It was a phenomenal success: the application was installed around 60,000 times in matter of days and nearly 20,000 Whopper coupons were sent out. Although the campaign was disabled by Facebook after ten days, the disabling created even more buzz for the campaign: Burger King’s slogan says it all: “Friendship is strong, but the Whopper is stronger”. What makes the Burger King campaign a success is that it stands out. And it’s not afraid of being different, even when it faces challenges from Facebook.

And in my opinion, for corporations to have successful social media campaigns, they have to think out of the box – and confidently take on any resistance that it may raise. This, I believe, is the third key lesson corporations can learn from Obama’s social media campaign. It’s no longer enough just to keep up with the trend and continuously be innovative; corporations have to be bold enough to stand out from the crowd – even when the campaign faces resistance. And as we have seen from the social media campaigns from Obama and Burger King, often what makes a social media campaign a success is that the campaign has its own character and it’s not afraid to show it off.

Btw everyone, since I am getting married next week, I will not be able to update my weekly blog on Noesium for a while. I will continue my weekly blog when I return from my honeymoon early October – and when I am back, I am going to explore social media in a whole new angle. Stay tuned!