We’re working with New York Collaborates for Autism on the Twizzler Challenge! Stars like Lena Dunham, Allison Williams, Matt Lauer and Kathy Lee Gifford all stepped up to the challenge to support autism programs nationwide. We hope you’ll join them by creating a video or donating! Challenge your friends, families, BFFs and frenemies and use #TwizzlerChallenge so we can share your videos. Read what CNN had to say about it here.
Remember when Pharrell wore Smokey’s hat to the 2014 Grammys? At this year’s Shorty Awards, Smokey Bear took Silver for real-time content marketing.
Also, AT&T’s It Can Wait anti-texting and driving campaign that we built the site for working with Omelet received honorable mentions in best multi-platform, best social good campaign and best use of a hashtag.
Yesterday was pure fun for marketers in every industry. There were loads of tech companies and for-profit brands releasing elaborate videos and fake products. Here’s an April Fools round-up from the world of social good.
KARS4KIDS MADE KID DONATION EASY
Kars4Kids called for parents to donate their children to get attention for a real campaign they launched encouraging parents to spend quality time with their children. They cited research from the Boston Medical Center that 73 percent of parents are distracted by their devices during mealtime with their children, a time traditionally reserved for family bonding.
TOMS and UBER ANNOUNCE NEW FOOTWORK
Footwork is a cardboard car that people operate Flinstones style.TOMS partnered with Uber to deliver the car to you. All this to combat the carbon footprint.
BREAK and DOSOMETHING.ORG #PRANKITFWD
YouTube pranksters, Break, encouraged its 1+ million subscribers to put a positive spin on April Fools by pranking people with something great. Every use of #PrankItFWD generates a $1 donation to DoSomething.org. Check out this video of a waitress getting buku tips which include a vacation, dream job and new car.
SMOKEY BEAR INTRODUCES SMOKEY MANTIS
(Full Disclosure: HelpGood Client)
KEEP AMERICA BEAUTIFUL BREAK THE NEWS THAT ALIENS RECYCLE
(HelpGood Client)
Did you see other great April Fools pranks from cause marketers? Please share with us below!
Over the past 5 years at SXSW Interactive, I’ve seen the social good presence grow from two rooms in the convention center to 3 hubs scattered around downtown Austin. Perhaps this presence simply scaled with conference attendance as it ballooned from 11,000 in 2009 to 32,000. Yet I’ve also felt a different kind of shift.
This year, I didn’t need to work as hard to explain “social good” and get people to listen to me. When one of the social good hubs was sponsored in part by Caterpillar, the leading manufacturer of mining equipment, it’s safe to say many understand the benefits of being a socially responsible company.
The hubs, although curiously organized, were awesome. United Nations, Change.org, Participant Media and Beaconfire (the Original SXSW social good hub since 2009) were all doing #sxgood proud. Plus the hashtag, #sxgood, reached over 25 million.
As I raced from one hub to the next (which were miles apart) only to find none of them crowded, I wondered why we weren’t all together. Is the world of social good now super competitive?
My favorite session was in good old 9ABC – The Original Gangsters of Crowdfunding – and this is why. The panelists from Charity Water, DonorsChoose.org, Kiva and GlobalGiving.org talked about their weekly calls with each other to share their data, insights and best practices. All this sharing amongst fundraisers! I was impressed.
These sharing sessions may strike some as the most non-competitive thing an org can do however the collaboration has strengthened them. It also follows that if your nonprofit is going to be competitive in the traditional, for-profit, market-share type ways, you’re actively trying to hinder progress towards the greater good. In the world of social good we talk about transparency, solving the world’s biggest problems and evolving together, not climbing a ladder to be the king of DoGoodville.
This whole notion of us descending into one location to attend a “conference” and “hub” leads me to think we would benefit from identifying one big place to hang out all together. Don’t worry, we are no strangers to oversized partnerships and websites with 15 logos on them.
When real-time marketers post up in front of the TV on an award season Sunday night, they may have a list of pre-written tweets and scenarios bouncing around in their minds to tie-in to their brands and campaigns. However, once you start planning you start to chip away at the magic — the Blackout Oreo Magic that we all hope for and can never see coming.
All you can really do is fire-up the Photoshop and track the conversation so you’re ready just in case the biggest music producer in the world wears a hat that looks like the hat of the bear you tweet for.
The 2014 Grammys and Pharrell Williams gave Smokey Bear a gift and HelpGood was ready to accept it, amplify it and make sure the whole world received that gift too — along with important wildfire prevention messages, of course. We generated images immediately featuring Smokey and Pharrell and jumped into the conversation.
When I say magic, this is what I mean:
Within 24 hours, Smokey’s Twitter followers grew by almost 25 percent. Organic search traffic to our campaign website, SmokeyBear.com, increased by 123 percent. In total, there were more than 36,000 tweets about Smokey, resulting in more than 58.5 million impressions.
Almost immediately, the press began including Smokey in the night’s round-ups. By the next morning, more than 180 media outlets were talking about Smokey, including The Today Show, CNN, Buzzfeed, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, New York Daily News, Elle, Daily Beast, Huffington Post, Adweek, NPR, People, Extra TV and USA Today.
3 things to note here:
1) This is a social good, government campaign that surpassed the big brands to “win the night.”
2) The fact that our client completely trusted us and gave us the authority to publish without approval was essential. (A trust built over 3 years).
3) We had no extra budget for this, it’s apart of our standard community management fees. The ROI was unreal.
If you want even more great information on the story of Smokey Bear and the Grammys, read Meg Rushton’s post that includes tips on real-time marketing on Ad Council’s blog for social marketers.