The prickly topic of social media ROI is never far from the surface, and a session at Social Media Week last week suggested that many social media professionals are still very unsure of just how to measure return on their social media work, certainly in terms of pounds and pence.
All of which makes the promotion by breakfast cereal brand Special K interesting. They have released a new crisp (or chip to my American readers), and to launch the new range they created a pop-up stand in the West End of London. These sort of stands are far from new, and you often see them in supermarkets where you can receive free samples of products etc.
This one was different though. They were offering a free packet of crisps to anyone that tweeted about the product. All you have to do is send your tweet, show one of the girls manning the stand, and you then get your packet of crisps.
Sarah Case from Special K comments: “The value of positive endorsements on social media sites is beyond compare so we’re excited to be the first company to literally use social currency instead of financial currency to launch this new product in our bespoke Special K shop.”Case added: “This is big news for Special K and we are hoping the brand’s move into crisps and the high street will create a major buzz on and offline.”
An intriguing approach Adi. I'm not a food industry expert, but I believe it's quite common for brands to give away freebies when a new product is launched. So with this approach Special K may not be incurring any more costs than usual – but is getting something of tangible value in exchange for the freebies. Better still, it costs the consumer nothing to share a tweet provided it doesn't compromise their online identity.
A brand promotion in the UK could easily cost £3m+ if run on TV, so my immediate thought is that a million tweets by UK twitter users would absolutely saturate the UK twitter demographic – and provide far more awareness amongst the UK population than the same spend on TV. Especially if the twitter activity could be linked into consumers taking action (ie. a portion of those who see the tweets go on to request a money-off voucher or suchlike). So the real issue for me is whether this activity can be scaled to a size where the volume of tweets would actually start to be meaningful…
Hi Tony,
Yes, that is the key here. I agree with you that looking to generate buzz via Twitter is no bad thing at all, but I do wonder how long-term any benefits will be when people are probably just tweeting in order to get a freebie. We see with Groupon that it's rare for people that buy the coupon and become long-term customers. Obviously Groupon incurs a cost for the retailer, which this Twitter promotion probably won't, but I'm still sceptical about the long-term benefits. Time will tell though. The campaign was only a few days long so I'll try and find out what kind of results they had.
Ah yes – I totally agree that those who get the initial freebies may or may not go on to become long term customers of the new crisps brand. But what if 1% of the people who see the resulting tweets visit a Special K website and request a money off voucher to buy some of these new crisps. Then the tweeter has effectively become an endorser. I haven't seen the campaign in question, but this is where I think the value lies – in the people who are reached who were never actually at the crisps stand trying the product themselves…
That's certainly a possibility. I published a follow up to this blog later on today talking about some Forrester research into social media generating sales. They analysed 70,000 or so transactions to see where they originated from, and found that just 1% came from social media.
So in that context it'd be really interesting to see how the Special K campaign pans out in the longer term, and more generally whether this sort of promotion would work compared to building a community for people interested in 'healthy' breakfasts/eating etc.
As you said earlier, the costs involved are minimal so I doubt they'd have lost anything from this even if it didn't generate many sales, so the risk is pretty low. That's often a good basis for experimenting 🙂
Twitter had some interesting things to say on this recently.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/02/twitter-follow-b…
88% of Twitter users follow at least one brand, and that more than half of users follow six or more brands.”
Some of them are hoping for discounts and freebies but others are genuinely interested in the brand and they want to be up on what’s happening.
To that end, Twitter is encouraging advertisers to change their thinking in regard to Twitter campaigns. Instead of promotion, they say it should be a conversation. Think of Twitter as a “canvas where ‘you can paint some amazing stories’.