Jared Quinn

It’s not all that often that an advertising campaign grabs my attention and actually gets me curious – it’s even less often that I see a campaign that makes effective use of social media.  Even more rare than both those things, a campaign I actually feel compelled to blog about – today these things happened.

The campaign I noticed was for the Samsung “Tap and Take” digital camera.  There are a couple of major reasons that I think this campaign is effective and a sensible use of social media.

The right demographic

The first and most important reason that I think this campaign is effective is that social media users are actually going to be somewhat interested in a new, shiny, yet to be released digital camera with some interesting features – especially if they are given the chance to win one.

Unobtrusive

This campaign is unobtrusive.  I’ve seen a few social media campaigns recently that in summary were just tedious to say the least.  This particular campaign did not require me to follow/friend anyone, nor did it require me to register, sign up, provide any details at all, just a single tweet.  Brilliant.  Why not do it?

Social media is all about participation and interaction – without that, it is just content being blasted at people, who probably don’t want it.  This seems to be most often the case when advertising agencies add a social media aspect to a campaign just because they think it’s trendy.

Viral

I saw a few tweets this morning from various people I follow, entering this competition – and I was curious, so I checked it out.  It was unobtrusive – so I entered.   This is a perfect example of leveraging the viral aspects of social networking.  If you’re not planning to make use of the viral aspects of social networking in your campaign, why are you even using a form of social media in the first place?

Minimal participation

This is another key factor.  I use twitter a lot because it’s convenient.  I don’t have to pay attention to it, and when I do it’s for very short bursts of time.  There was no entry forms or details to get bogged down with in this campaign, it was as simple as twitting anything I liked and including a hash tag.  I entered while I was at work, and while bored a little later on, had a browse of the other entries – spending a total of about two minutes interacting – which is all it needs.

Along with the effective core use of social media as the platform of the campaign, the agency (I assume) responsible for the campaign have also used a few traditional methods to support the core campaign, including banner advertising – I haven’t seen any of it myself – which in my opinion is the best banner advertising.

Well done to whoever came up with this simple, yet incredibly effective campaign – especially for actually managing to get it backed and out there without a panel of marketing “gurus”  turning into another all-singing, all-dancing, gets in our way and irritates us style campaign that we’re used to seeing from most of these type things.

You can find this campaign at http://www.twitter.com/tapandtake

Disclosure: I am currently doing freelance web development and social media integration for a digital creative studio.  However I have no connection to, nor do I even know which agency is responsible for this excellent campaign.