The program — which included a test-drive program — has elicited the interest of about 50,000 potential buyers, 97% of which don’t drive a Ford at present.
In toto, official Fiesta Movement content has drawn 4.3 million YouTube views, 540,000 flickr views and 3 million Twitter impressions.
These are quite remarkable results, indeed!
And all this is achieved with „$0 ad spent and a fraction of marketing costs“. I assume it really does compare well to traditional advertising efforts.
Yet communicating a figure of $0 seems to send out the wrong signal. The total costs (for 100 cars, the website, the staff at Ford, etc.) might be „a fraction“ of what is usually spend, but somehow I can’t imagine this whole campaing having been „cheap“.
According to the study, which looked at 150,000 tweets, 11.1% of the brand-related tweets were information-providing while 18.1% were information-seeking. The latter of these two is especially useful to companies looking to understand what questions and concerns customers have about their products. However, the large majority of the tweets – 48.5% – were simply comments made in passing which mentioned the brand but whose primary focus was something else.
In only roughly 23% users were expressing sentiment (positive or negative) about brands.
So why is that? Why don’t people express so many negative opinions on twitter as compared to the rest of the web? ReadWriteWeb assumes that it is the easy and quick handling of twitter which results in many more positive or neutral, fact based chatter.
That does make sense to me. People will go through a lot of effort, writing long and nasty blog posts, when they’re fed up. But they won’t do the same for positive or even neutral remarks, unless the brand experience was rather extraordinary.
While I am scanning and writing about all sorts of crowdsourcing initiatives by brands, I couldn’t help noticing a new campaign in Germany asking users to participate in a DIY contest. Guess I couldn’t miss it, since it was plastered all over spiegel.de, Germanys biggest online news source, which I happen to visit almost 10x a day.
Hornbach is a German DIY store that everyone watching tool time would enjoy. They had TV spots running for quite some time, in which people completed seemingly complicated projects around the house – refurbishing bathrooms, redesigning gardens, etc.
It excites due to size of presence. Advertising for a whole day on spiegel.de (and I guess other large sites, too) is no small deal. Also, they’re willing to sponsor up to 10 projects with up to 15k Euros per project. Also, I should add: they’re not just asking for any project, rather, they are looking for extreme, original (what’s the translation for „wahnwitzig“?) ideas. Nothing of the ordinary kind.
In the contest conditions, they of course make sure that they can publish photos and names of participants, as well as reserving the right to document and publish the whole project they will sponsor. Unless they only receive applications of complete idiots, which I obviously doubt, they will have some fine material for future advertising, authentic, close to the community, relevant and most likely touching. We’ll see in a few months time, I’ll keep you posted.
Wo ich sonst so bin...