One of the characteristics of fast spreading social media campaigns is the fact that many of them take the goods and services that they are trying to promote out of the box and into entertainment. Most of the time it includes humor, off the wall concepts, or just creative positioning of the company. Think about that for a second, how could you take what you do or what you sell and make it something that people would want to tune in and watch on a regular basis for 2-3 minutes at a clip maximum?
Take the case of a very mundane, unentertaining product like a blender. Not a lot of innovation has gone into the blender over the last 20 years, the purpose of the product remains the same through the years. So how do you take something like that and make it so entertaining that people would actually subscribe to a YouTube channel just to get regular updates to watch someone blend something??
Well if you are BlendTec you start up your own episodic YouTube channel and website called http://www.willitblend.com/. In every episode, engineer, blender creator and founder of BlendTec, Tom Dickson attempts to answer the question "Will It Blend?" by sticking all kinds of everyday objects into his BlendTec blender to see what happens. Everything from golf balls, bic lighters, and silly putty, to glow sticks, footballs, toys and rakes have been pounded to dust or liquified into shakes. The campaign evolved again when the company started asking people to send suggestions of what they would like to see pureed and it produced some of the most popular episode when Mr. Dickson destroyed an Apple iPhone and later an Apple iPad in his mighty blender. Somewhere Steve Jobs is probably weeping, but Tom Dickson is laughing along with his audience...all the way to the bank! Since this campaign started in October of 2006 the company has added close to 300,000 subscribers, and seen the cumulative viewing of his episodes explode to over 116,000,000! Now the phrase 'Will It Blend?" has become an internet meme and the company sells everything from T-Shirts to DVDs of their videos. Ultimately, however, what was the impact on sales? In Tom Dickson's own words:
The campaign took off almost instantly. We have definitely felt an impact in sales. Will it Blend has had an amazing impact to our commercial and our retail products.
It's a fantastic example of out of the box thinking, creativity and social media strategy combining to make CFOs happy and bottom lines grow. Want to make a splash, earn top of mind awareness or just get people to think about your product, service or industry differently? Try thinking about making your message become a part of the infotainment movement especially using video.
If you need ideas, let Xapsis help!
From where you are to where you want to be,
Doug
