At a time when journalists are being laid off left and right, PepsiCo has a very compelling offer: chronicle the Internet Week conference using social media and receive $750.
Internet Week is June 1-8 in New York City, and PepsiCo is calling journalists, students, social media experts and anyone else to capture the week’s events using social media tools. These so-called “social communicators” will receive press passes and are expected to create content including photos, videos and blog posts. Says PepsiCo’s director of digital and social media, “What we’re looking for are storytellers or journalists or professionals that are at work in this space.”
PepsiCo’s goal is to generate 100 pieces of content over the course of the week with the hopes that other sites will repost them. In addition to reposts, their reports will appear on the PepsiCo Content Network. If it works, this will be an inexpensive and very effective way to generate viral buzz.
As social mediums grow in popularity, corporations such as PepsiCo are scrambling to hop on the bandwagon. But successfully generating buzz via social mediums is no easy task for corporate behemoths like PepsiCo or Coca-Cola. We previously wrote about Coca-Cola’s successful Facebook fan page as an example of how to engage social media the right way.
What are other companies doing to creatively engage social media? Here are some great examples:
Comcast – The company uses Twitter as a form of customer service. Frank Eliason, Comcast’s customer service manager, responds instantly to customer inquiries on Twitter and has become a face of the brand. At customers’ request, he even uses his own photo as his Twitter icon instead of the company logo.
Blendtec – George Write, marketing director of Blendtec, created a brilliant campaign that has since become an internet sensation. Blendtec CEO Tom Dickson attempts to blend objects from iPhones to golf balls in a Blendtec blender in YouTube videos. According to a Mashable.com article, this simple idea has led to a “five-fold increase in sales.”
Sun Microsystems – Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, started a company blog that received about 400,000 hits a month in 2006. One of the reasons for its success was transparency. Schwartz allowed both positive and negative comments on his blog – a move that built trust with customers.
Each of these companies took a unique approach to launch successful social media campaigns. For those of you looking to follow suit, here are a few key takeaways:
Make sure you choose a social medium that is popular with your target audience. In other words, follow your audience.
Consider what interests your target audience.
Think creatively.
Create content that people can easily repost on other social networking sites – this creates customer evangelists for your company.
We will be interested to see whether PepsiCo’s campaign takes off following the June conference. Stay tuned for our analysis of this campaign next month.
– Jessica Luhrs