This blog is part of our Social Done Right series where we bring to you some outstanding social media campaigns and our insights into its success!
This week I am covering a very active brand on social media – Toys R Us. I was amazed when I came across this brand as I saw them to be doing almost everything in the Book, not the Book of Toys but the Social Media Book of Tips and Tricks!
Social Media Hat
They are wearing the social media hat and rocking it! They have used every trick in the social media book …
Facebook picture tab – check Cross promotion of social media profiles – check
Twitter, Foursquare, Youtube…
Sales Generation – check
cyber sales, discounts, mystery deals – you name it! Apps – check
Scavenger Hunt, Book of Toys, Write a letter to Santa…
Daily frequency of updates – check
Customer queries & comments – check
The rule #1 in social media is to respond/converse with fans. This is usually not done by larger brands. Understandably they can’t respond to all queries and comments due to sheer number of them, however few brands like Toys R Us do respond to some of them.
Sales Generation
As the social media clients keep coming back to “enough with all this storytelling, engagement and communities…..are the activities generating sales?”
With Toys R Us you don’t need to ask! They have Special ‘Online Only’ Sales, Discount & coupons, mystery deals, interesting updates to promote the online toystore items! In fact it is so commercial that I tried going past the Cyber Sale, Black Friday Sale, Free Zoobers, Cyber Sale, Fisher Price Savings, Halloween Sale and so on to some actual interactive content but there wasn’t any or maybe I didn’t dig deep enough Sometimes a simple, interactive update without rushing everyone to buy stuff would be nice!
High Engagement
This was one of the important aspects of the McDonalds Monopoly that it had a ‘high engagement’ value. It would get fans to spend hours on end at an online McD hub. Toys R Us have their own ‘Scavanger Hunt‘ going on! The brand is sending daily messages to fans to check their various brand marketing material to win prizes!! Did I mention how commercial that is?
Its good to see a brand doing so much on their social media channels. In fact I think social media professionals can truly appreciate how much effort goes behind the scenes to actually bring about a real integration of the brands various marketing efforts including offline stuff. Clearly the customer support staff, various marketing teams, store event planning staff and different social media marketing channels are all co-ordinating things with each other to bring about such an integrated and cohesive marketing.
Having already mentioned the commercial-ness of the activities, I would really like to get some stats on the sales they are generating via social media channels.
This blog is part of our Social Done Right series where we bring to you some outstanding social media campaigns and our insights into its success!
So far in social media for kids we have looked at brands that cater directly to kids, this we take a look at a brand where kids are not at all the target group, atleast not directly.
When I first came across Compare the Meerkat website, I was a bit confused! Obviously this is a campaign targeted towards kids, so why does it have such a formal looking website and why do they keep talking about car insurance?
A little research later I figured the campaign was promoting Compare the Market and found that to be really cute. Putting in some thought into the companies target audience and marketing situation I think that this sort of a campaign which has universal appeal, gave the brand a clear advantage on many fronts. 1. Marketing Focus
It’s obviously a good thing when your service is relevant and needed by a large number of individuals. From a marketing perspective however, it sort of creates a dilemma. We at DigiWhirl have faced this while working with some clients when their target audience is very vast, it is difficult to bring any focus to the client’s social media activities! This is the case with ComparetheMarket.com too. The sheer number of people who would find this company relevant are from all walks of life, different professions, different backgrounds, different age-groups and so on! I think you get my point
In this scenario a focus on ‘meerkats’ works! ‘Compare the Meerkat’ campaign brings about a marketing focal point around which all companies fun promotions online as well as offline can be made! 2. Family Brand
When I was younger, companies related to insurance, health, medical, finance would all be irrelevant for me. That is adult stuff, it is ‘parent business’. This is the norm for financial brands from the days of old. Now a days we can see some change in the advertisements where they feature kids in the advertisements thus perking the interest of those little ones who are most often sitting with their parents while watching the TV! This Meerkat campaign immediately appeals to the children of the family and voila – the boring finance brand just became a hit family brand!
Nothing would pique the interest of parents more than when their kid asks them to buy a certain insurance so that he/she can get the free Meerkat toy! Its so kooky that it works!
3. Animal Appeal
Many brands have been successful with animal campaigns. Greenpeace’s Name the Whale campaign, Hello me hippo and Stripey the Cub campaigns in India are all examples where animal mascots bring about a certain appeal to the campaign and make it go viral. Meerkat campaign builds on this brand appeal.
I can see such a campaign going instantly viral when it is launched, however this campaign is not recent! It was launched way back in 2009 and is still going strong! Some of the aspects which contribute its long term success,
Going all the Way!
The company is going all out with the Meerkats! There are special videos, images and facebook apps to build up Meerkovo – the land of the Meerkats. Mr Meerkat – Aleksandr Orlav – has his own personal twitter and facebook account! He even has his ancient family history and other Meerkat friends who are often as popular as him!
Integration with Product
What I find interesting to analyze in such in-direct marketing campaigns is how it all ties in together. How much or how little is the integration of the campaign and product. In this campaign a lot of inter-mingling is seen. ComparetheMarket – talks about free Meerkat toys with its insurance thus involving its clients into the Meerkat campaign. While the Meerkats simply talk about the difference between, ‘Compare the Market’ and ‘Compare the Meerkat’! Simples! Thus giving a huge push to the Meerkat followers to consider ComparetheMarket as their choice for cheap insurance!
There are also deeper tie-ins where a brand ambassador selection is done on both communties,
Traditional advertisements all portray the Meerkats as brand ambassadors for comparethemarket!
What I found lacking was a 2 way dialogue between the company and fans! Aleksandr doesn’t talk one-to-one with fans!
It is often difficult to maintain and tedious to manage such a brand mascot if there was actual conversations involved. It would need to be in character for all its replies, and still keep the fan excitement going…
Genuine fan comments about not receiving the toy etc.. are barely ever responded to. What I found queer is that the company ‘ComparetheMarket’ has barely any social media presence. Customer support is entirely via email, phone channels. Their social media campaign remains just a promotion channel albeit an engaging one.
After the McDonalds activity analysis last week, Kmart is a very different study. The page overall caters to the adults in the family. When considering the store’s target group this makes sense as they sell a lot of different stuff which is ideal for families to come and shop there together. Most content on the page targets adults but some activities cater directly to kids! This makes it an interesting study to see how the kids specific marketing is being done, and how well it is integrated into other page activities.
Kids Ambassador
Only a kid would know what brings a smile to a kids face and K-mart brings Rico Rodriguez to make this point! Releasing a toy collection is a cool way of getting attention of kids and parents alike. And when they do take a look at what the collection is all about they would really enjoy it with their ambassador kid Rico! I really liked this ambassador idea and I think it can be taken a lot further by having a kid specific section where Rico maybe looks around the store finding cool stuff for kids to enjoy! They have also added couple of videos to give a behind the scene feel to it adding to the fun and excitement of it all!
Useful Apps
Apps can have different purposes, most of the times they are entertaining and fun. K-mart has some interesting apps that are also very useful. One of them is back-to-school app for Mommies. I thought it would be a simple to-do listing sort of app, but its a whole lot more! Parents can sit with their kids and go through a huge catalogue of items, check the price & specifications. They shortlist what they want to buy and add it to their list, they can also figure out estimated costs etc.. I think this can be very useful and it is something that parents can do along with their kids – cause parents don’t shop for their kids on their own. Every kid wants to buy his/her shoes and clothes, they would never let the parents do it without them! This app caters to both
Kid Updates
The page has a hotch potch of updates from different sections of their merchandise. Some of them are toy updates, which are addressed directly to kids. Parents form a large section of their community and we can see some interesting discussions happening at the various updates including those addressed to ‘Barbie Girls’!
Some of the exciting aspects I found in this page that I would like to highlight are,
Fun & Excitement
The brand brings in many exciting features into the page like a toy collection unveiled by a kids brand ambassador, halloween specific activities, free coupons and useful apps like the one mentioned above. These touches are very important to increase fan engagement and bring about a viral word of mouth going.
Parent to Kid Buzz
Since their primary focus is on the buyers of the family – the parents, they are doing a good job bringing activities that involve kids on their page too! More importantly they are bringing in stuff that parents would talk to the kids about. Kids would not ‘like’ this page since many of their updates about home decor and kitchen appliances etc.. don’t appeal to them, but if parents spoke to them about an activity like the shopping list which they could work on together then the kids would be interested to fan the page and eventually interact!
Buildup Potential
Their current activities are very scalable, they can be built on for a much more happening page for the kiddos! The brand ambassador can be used in many other activities within the page. Maybe have a ‘kids day’ on the page where kids and parents can participate in updates, apps and contests!
Confession, being a health food junkie I am not really that fond of McDonalds as a food joint. In India especially there have been serious controversies regarding what actually goes into the vegetarian burger. While I may have different thoughts about the brand’s product itself, when analysing their social media presence I must say that I really like what they are doing!
It looks like ‘toy-world’!
While looking out for some great social media activities targetted at kids, I just passed by the McD’s Facebook page and was totally floored! Another confession, I love board games! My ipad games all consist of free board games so when I saw ‘MONOPOLY’ I just swooned! Okay maybe that was a bit exaggerated, but I love the way the McD’s page looked a few days back (currently it is changed to promote a product launch)! The bright red color, landing page, focus on Monopoly, the top pictures showing the various tokens in the game! Also the landing page makes it clear that there are freebies to be won (Oooh!)
In order to play the game we need a game code which can be found on some of their products – a clear action to generate some sales!
Content is the key!
So going past the Monopoly and the look of the page, I took a closer look at their status updates and saw that they are clearly targetted towards a younger audience! Notwithstanding the fact that ‘kids’ atleast younger than 13 are not allowed to make their accounts on facebook, McD knows they are on Facebook and does the most sensible thing to cater to them – churns the right content! Using games like Farmville and Cityville McD keeps its content oriented largely towards the young folk on facebook. I know a lot of kids who have signed up on Facebook and they are the friends from whom I get all those many game requests. From all the millions of fans that respond to the fact that McD has a farm on Farmville would be these young people and that is who McD is catering to!
New Snitch… errr Product Launch
It seems they are to launch a new food product in their menu, and the hype around it seems to have a serious Harry Potter appeal to it! The design and graphics, for a second make me think of all those awesome RPG’s I keep playing! (I also love RPG’s)! I am half tempted to participate in all this even though I am not in the US and more importantly I am vegetarian so the ‘pork goodness’ has no meaning for me!
So what really makes the page tick? Clear Target Audience
They are catering to the youngsters, not their parents nor their educators. They are saying ‘play monopoly with us, you might have to buy a few of our products while you are at it, but we will give you freebies too’! All their updates are in tune with the young folk psyche.
High Engagment
The Monopoly is a highly engaging ongoing activity! A good game with freebies would keep people strung to it for days on end. It can also become a very potent sales generating mechanism. A fan wouldn’t think much about buying a few McD’s products to get whatever code goodness they need in the game!
Flipside – Page Spam Management
Obviously the page spam management is quite non-existent. One look at the comments and you have to wonder where the McD fans are cause most of the comments are spam! I am sure all major brand with huge fan following would attract its share of spam but its upto the page management to keep the page clean so there is decent conversation happening. This is sadly lacking from the McD’s end. This is probably also the reason why they don’t give us the option to look at fan posts on the page.
Note: There has been some controversy on social media regarding these activities targetting kids who are then incentivized to buy these products which are bad for their health! Like I earlier mentioned as a social media case-study here is one where a lot of brands can take pointers from! Regarding the ethics of it, I personally am not a fan of McDs. I think that overall every country needs to have a legal policy regarding marketing & advertising and that is where the question of whether a McD can or should be able to entice kids in this manner must be decided! If traditional ads and promotions are okay then so is this. IMHO.
This blog is part of our Social Done Right series where we bring to you some outstanding social media campaigns and our insights into its success!
Very recently my brother had a baby and all of us have gone into a ‘baby zone’ – where its all about the oh-so many baby products needed to manage everything well! Its still a few months before she starts playing with toys but the one toy set I am most excited to get is Lego blocks! I know once I get it, me and bro will be as excited playing with them as will my niece! I can still remember the thrill of Lego blocks we had as children. That particular set then got passed off to my younger cousin and from her to some other kid and I wouldn’t be surprised if it is still being played somewhere with a few pieces missing!
When I was looking to cover social media case-studies for the ‘kids demographic’, one of the first thoughts I had was ‘what is Lego doing in the new media space?’. I had come across some interesting stuff regarding LARPs – Live Action Role Playing games being organized for groups of people and Lego LARPing is very popular! Given this huge fan love Lego can totally having a huge social media presence with very cool activities.
Life of George
Lego recently launched a ‘Life of George’ game with their classic brick game, an itunes app and augmented reality features. It challenges the kid to recreate a brick structure from a given picture of George’s various travels! They photograph their creation with the app and get points depending on how well the models are made! Multi-player option is available where two people can compete in the game. Check out the video, its exciting to see a timeless game of building blocks combined with new technology!
Social media is a great platform to make this app-set go viral. They did a number of Facebook activities to create buzz around the product before launching it.
Picture Contest
The entrants had to make George from their Lego bricks and take his picture in a cool place. The best uploaded pics would win! This activity has been done before but always manages to excite – one of my favorite use of this theme was in the movie Amelie where she takes her Father’s garden gnome statue, clicks its picture in different locations around the world and sends it to him. It finally got her dad to travel!
So besides being a popular and exciting activity this contest capitalizes on the fact that Lego players love making mini-figures and then sort of ‘LARPing’ with them. Kids would totally enjoy making George and taking him to exciting places in their neighbourhood and clicking his picture. It can be seen from the numerous and varied entries the contest received! Even after the contest was over people uploaded these pictures cause they really loved the idea!
I am George George got a Facebook page and I am not sure why the custom URL is i.love.numbers. The updates are actually whacky and cool – about George’s family, behind the scene stuff in the office for his ‘secret project’, art class work etc.. Its a cool page that kids would definitely engage with!
Secret Project
The new product was hyped well with references to ‘George’s secret project’ scattered in the contest as well as George’s page. It sort of builds a mystery around what seems to be a simple picture contest. These references would have gotten the imagination of a lot of kids. It can be seen from the excitement and peak in interaction when the product is finally announced.
Building ‘George’
What is totally expected on a Lego page are fans drooling around and showing off their new creations! The ‘George’ page is no different there are many entries from fans about the game – what they made, their level ups! and if they are dissapointed cause they don’t have the right phone to play this game! It was good to see George’s cool replies to most of these entries. These replies and updates build up George’s personality which is one of factors that lead to success of such a campaign.
The flipside of this page I find is that, the activity on the pages is just too low and too few! Contest updates were not even daily. The ‘I am George’ page keeps missing updates and then the next update talks about George being too busy with his secret project… While the tone and content of the updates is exciting, a more robust and dynamic social media presence for this brand is missed!
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Sometimes a simple, interactive update without rushing everyone to buy stuff would be nice!
