MORE THAN ADVERTISING

Adidas launched an new integrated campaign with young Orlando Magic center Dwight Howard.

A TV spot invites people to follow Dwight live during the NBA’s All Star weekend. At the event they pushed his content out to fans on the net as quickly as possible. These bits of celebrity-insider content were uploaded to Dwight Howard´s  Twitter, Flickr and YouTube pages.

Here is the Youtube trailer:

“The biggest challenge was getting the site, technology and media ready to deliver a constant steam of communication, that alone was a huge task and all credit goes to the folks who worked day and night to pull it off,” says 180/LA ECD William Gelner

What I really like about this concept is that they had used mass media to drag people into this branded social media experience. Plus they generated a lot of interesting content that will remain on the web long after the campaign period ends. But what 180 and Adidas failed with is to really engage with their audience.

“Howard’s Twitter account, while followed by 1019 others, doesn’t follow anyone, and hasn’t managed to graduate from Twitter 101 and attempt @replies or ReTweets. Compare Howard with Shaquille O’Neal, who has been vocal about claiming his online identity and boasts over 111,000 followers and a more advanced familiarity with the service. O’Neal and Howard have jousted over who gets to be called Superman on the court, but it’s clear Shaq is the social networking man of steel.”  Nick Parish creativity online

The key to succeed as a brand in social media is participation. You have to take part in these conversations, retweet and follow them in order to connect and be accepted.

I don´t believe that it is possible to build up real relationships with your customers when your efforts are limited to a campaign period. Social media only works with a good longterm strategy, thats the reason why most of the agencys fail to manage a process like that, because the client only pays for the realisation of a particular project and not for the maintenance of these potential relationships.

So we have to change something in the system if we want to succeed in this new emerging media world.

via Creativity

Here is a great webinar about how to use Twitter for your marketing. I found this video on HubSpot, an interesting blog about inbound marketing – SEO, Blogging, Social Media, Landing Pages, Lead Generation and Analytics. – have a look.

Twitter is a micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ 140 character updates. It is also the third largest social network (behind Facebook and MySpace), and puts the number of users at roughly 6 million and the number of monthly visitors at 55 million.

Twitter had become a media channel on its own, not surprising that also some large businesses have discovered that this is an effective way of communicating with consumers. Companys such as Cisco Systems, Jet Blue, Sun Microsystems, IBM and Whole Foods Market already use Twitter to provide product or service information.

Dell even set up an Twitter marketing programm and offer their followers @DellOutlet some pretty exclusive deals.

“Beginning today, Dell will offer deals from the Dell Outlet exclusive to Twitter in the U.S. With over 11,000 followers, our team wanted to show their thanks to the Twitter world through these new deals which will continue each week.”

Here is a short interview with Stephanie Nelson about the programm:

Given the great response they have decided it seems to expand the program. Dell says Twitter has produced $1 million in revenue over the past year and a half through sale alerts.

Dell’s initiative proves how effective it is to use Twitter as a marketing tool and have a conversation with your market and make and mange connections with prospects, customers, bloggers and other influencers.

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