Are you using social media within your experiential strategy? Wouldn’t it be great if there was a tool that enabled you to engage with your consumers simultaneously both online and through live experiences?
Well there is one, and you probably use it every day. We’re talking about Twitter.
With a user base of half a billion people and the ability for brands to communicate directly with users, the potential for Twitter as a marketing tool is immense.
Experiential Twitter installations
One of the most underutilised yet wonderfully effective ways of engaging with consumers on Twitter is to use it as part of an experiential installation.
Using Twitter experientially isn’t anything particularly new – we have talked about experiential twitter campaigns in the past, such as our very own Tweet to Eat Sausage Sandwich Kitchen campaign. In order to earn a sausage sandwich, consumers had to tweet the reason they deserved a free sample and show it to the chef at a pop-up kitchen, as a form of social currency.
Another example is from Walkers – which transformed three London bus stops into tweet-activated vending machines as part of its ‘Do us a Flavour’ campaign.
A series of short clips showed Gary Lineker appearing to sit inside the bus stop vending machines. He encouraged passers-by to tweet @Walkers_busstop, which triggered the vending machine into doling out free packets of crisps.
The Twitter activated campaign was designed to give people the chance to try the new flavours before they hit the shops – this experiential sampling campaign was a clever way to generate buzz. The Twitter activated installation took the nation by storm, boosting engagement and discussion on Walker’s Twitter account, as well as crucial customer feedback about the new flavours.
3-second rule
The average consumer decision is made in around 3 seconds, which poses a problem for traditional forms of advertising, but is the reason why Twitter is so great. The speed at which 140 characters can travel around the world is phenomenal, and the fact that users are forced to only use short messages means you don’t have to wait long for a reply.
By utilizing an active social tool to trigger a brilliant live experiential brand activation, the effect is two-fold; you create a memorable and engaging live experience, and amplify it massively with the introduction of twitter, which allows fans of your brand to spread the word for you.
Hotcow is a non-traditional creative agency that specialises in experiential marketing that goes viral. Our campaigns generate buzz through crowd participation, PR and content sharing. Contact us on 0207 5030442 or email us on info@hotcow.co.uk.
