SwBratcher's Posts

This is worth reviewing and learning from. I, too, fell into its tsunami.

Keys here:

1. Have a good product.
2. Integrate that product with an outward voice for those willing to shout to get an incentive.
3a. Make sure that shout can be customized to fit the user's personality, while retaining the plug for your brand.
3b. Link that shout back to your funnel.
4. A powerful incentive is infinitely fulfillable and boosts the social perception or enables features for new and established users.
5. Do what you can to get a few 'influencers' in play early to spur on an initial onslaught of traffic. This rush will help build a momentum that is self propagating.

With the advent of 140 character communication, there has been much speculation about how Twitter can further the success of business and organizations. It’s fair to say that the potential for Twitter as a business tool is widely recognized; what’s now needed is an accumulation of case studies proving its worth. Our experience launching HootSuite 2.0 provides a case study for how this social technology can help businesses and organizations achieve marketing goals.

With the release of our HootSuite 2.0 upgrade, our objective was straightforward: to become a trending topic on Twitter. Visitor conversion rate on HootSuite.com is high–our primary challenge has been to promote awareness of the product. With the upgrade to HootSuite 2.0, our campaign aimed to harness the power of Twitter as a promotional agent to drive awareness of HootSuite. To accomplish this, we employed a three-pronged approach.

1. The upgrade tweet: The upgrading process we built was easy and optional: we invited folks to send out a formulated upgrade tweet. As soon as they did so, they were automatically upgraded to HootSuite 2.0. This way, we were able to connect not only with the HootSuite userbase, but with an entirely new group that may never have been aware of our upgrade, or even HootSuite.

2. #hootlove hashtag campaign: We asked folks to tweet their favourite feature of HootSuite 2.0 and attach the hashtag #hootlove. We incentivized the #hootlove campaign by retweeting our favourite responses from our Twitter account, @hootsuite, which has thousands of followers, many of them major influencers. By retweeting responses, we were educating our followers about the new features, prompting more #hootlove submissions, and encouraging positive branding through customer feedback - and hey, who doesn’t love a little love?

3. Blogger outreach: We added another dimension to our campaign by sending press releases to key online publications and blogs, which directly resulted in HootSuite 2.0 coverage in several top tier tech blogs. Once some influencers published our news, numerous other online publications picked up the thread. We’ve counted approximately 90 stories about HootSuite’s upgrade to 2.0, and more are being written everyday. The extensive coverage encouraged discussion as well as debate, and ultimately got people buzzing about the HootSuite launch.

Results

We achieved our main objective. HootSuite became a trending topic at approximately 5pm on the date of the launch, garnering our Twitter client millions of eyeballs and attesting to the success of our buzz campaign. We also went to #1 on hashtags.org, and were in top 3 for majority of launch day. This was a result of the approximately 25K #hootsuite hashtags that were sent over Twitter the day of the release. Moreover, we gained 4332 new member signups, with 6738 new Twitter profiles, and experienced about 2 million page views in one day.

Review

The HootSuite 2.0 launch campaign effectively used social technologies to accomplish its primary objective of trending on Twitter. While the strategies we implemented were intended to optimize promotion through Twitter, the most pivotal piece of the campaign’s successful use of social technology was our flexibility when it came time to adjust our strategy.

Halfway through the day of the launch, we began to receive some pushback about our formulated tweet. Despite the fact that the upgrade was optional, and our first version of HootSuite was still functioning fine, some people felt they had been forced to endorse our product in order to get the new and improved version. As the first few negative comments rolled in, we initially embraced the controversy and responded from our customer service client @hootsuite_help. However, when more than a handful of people expressed they wanted a change to the upgrade process, we delivered. Thanks to our crack team of developers, we were able to swiftly alter our optional upgrade tweet so that people keen to get HootSuite 2.0 were able to customize their upgrade tweet. The open-ended optional upgrade tweet now read: “I updated to #HootSuite 2.0 because…” By inviting people to fill in the end of the sentence, we let them explain why they upgraded in their own words. While some comments were negative, the overwhelming majority were positive. The hashtagged upgrade tweets poured in, as did extra tweets, about our flexibility in the midst of a marketing initiative. These additional tweets, combined with the upgrade tweets, the #hootlove tweets, and the tweets generated from coverage on tech blogs like Venturebeat, worked together to help us achieve our goal.

Social technologies are conduits for social activity. When using them for business objectives, the only effective way to do so is to respond to feedback - and to do so at the drop of a dime. This is why the HootSuite 2.0 launch was so successful.

July 30, 2009 to present

Check out this website I found at ow.ly