Montreal-based consulting agency Rednod just completed a successful Twitter-focused social media campaign for the not-for-profit organization Visible Government and is sharing the results online.
In a post on Rednod.com, Rednod partner Alistair Croll delivered a comprehensive postmortem examination of Visible Government’s “Beers for Canada” project, a 36-hour social media campaign that largely took place over the Canada Day holiday.
The initiative invited Canadians to make donations to Visible Government via the group’s website, with suggested amounts roughly equivalent to a beer, a pitcher or a round.
To drum up buzz for the campaign, Rednod reached out to influential and supportive Twitter users and urged them to spread the message about Visible Government, an organization that seeks to create and promote online applications that allow governments and citizens to interact in a more transparent fashion.
In keeping with the theme of transparency, Croll—who is a director on the Visible Government board—posted a detailed breakdown of the campaign’s results on the Rednod website.
Croll’s post indicated that the Beers for Canada campaign generated more than $1,000 in donations and received coverage from numerous bloggers. He also claimed that tens of thousands of people read tweets about Beers for Canada and that more than 1,600 people visited the Visible Government website, resulting in a traffic spike of 300%.
Croll’s post suggests that, more than the funds raised and the awareness generated, the campaign’s most significant value may lie in the lessons it provided about using social media for a short, concentrated campaign.
Key elements of the initiative, said Croll, included the simple “Buy your country a beer” message and the use of analytics tools such as Google Analytics, bit.ly and Clicky to track the viral spread of the message and the overall performance of the campaign. But he also identified areas of potential improvement, such as the need for a clearer call to action and more advance planning.
Among Croll’s observations was a comparison between Twitter and Facebook. The former, Croll told Marketing, was far more useful in terms of generating interest in a short time frame.
“Facebook… is like a high-school reunion. Twitter is like speed-dating,” said Croll. “If you think about how to get someone’s attention on Facebook, you say, ‘Hey, remember that time we did that thing? This is kind of like that.’
With speed-dating, you need more of a catchy pickup line like, ‘Hey, why not buy your country a beer?’
“Twitter campaigns have to be more like pickup lines.”
While Croll acknowledged that his firm would tweak the approach to similar campaigns in the future, he remains sold on the notion of Twitter as an effective tool for such fundraising and awareness drives.
“These things are kind of quick and dirty, and the nice thing about campaigns like this is, if we had spent six months planning and executing a campaign and it didn’t work, what would we do?” he said. “This way, if we want to do another [campaign] next week, we can change and adjust and be much more adaptive.
“Online viral marketing makes its own gravy. If you have a cause that’s good, people will continue to tell their friends about it.”
Rednod planned and executed the campaign on a pro bono basis.
