Turkcell Twitter campaign

Heavy internet users tend to be excellent adopters of technology and they also tend to be the early adopters of technology. That makes for an excellent group to target with non traditional advertising.

A Turkish company, launching a line of smart phones with internet bundles, wanted to attract those heavy internet users therefore they decided that the best approach for this campaign is to go where the heavy mobile internet users are; Twitter.

So How Did they Do it?

To attract the Turkish heavy internet users, Turkcell decided to go into their natural habitat; Twitter. So they took a prize, a Nokia or a Samsung smart phone, wrapped it in a box, and covered the box with post-it notes. The goal of the game is to tweet the message on the post-it note using the contest’s hash-tag (#turkcelltweet). Along the way, the users can play a bunch of games to win free minutes and other perks, and to win the smart phones the user has to get a celebrity to re-tweet them.

The campaign was a great success, during the 7-days of the campaign it had garnered more than 56,000 tweets, and was a trending topic for the entire duration.

How they did it?

They created an entry barrier. Now that might sound negative but if you want to attract heavy internet users, you need to make it a point that you need a certain amount of traction and internet prestige to qualify. In simpler terms, stroke their egos.

Double exposure. The post-it notes carry little advertisements in them, and that’s just an added bonus.

Attention boosters. If you are running a multi-day live campaign, you will probably have to add some little prizes to keep everyone’s attention. Those little prizes will give people something to look forward to and a reason to participate beside the grand prize.

Triple exposure. Not only did they get the participants to advertise for the brand, they also encouraged them to get a celebrity to re-tweet the advertisement as well. The power of a celebrity in the Twitter community is one that can create valuable exposure.

Verdict

Gone are the days of a simple banner advertisement, targeted campaigns with an innovative idea behind them go much further and achieve a lot more than the traditional campaigns. Also, getting people to advertise for you is the wet dream of every marketer nowadays, so a campaign built around that idea will always be a winner.

Did you hear about this campaign? What do you think of it? Looking forward to your comments in the section below…