The MoPR Blog

This holiday season do it right… and by “it” we mean your PR efforts. One effective way to take your campaign an extra mile is to tie it to something larger than just your company’s announcement. Trust me, we all understand that your company’s announcements are the most important and interesting things anyone could ever hear about, but there are some other events that also happen to grab people’s attention this time of year. With the start of the winter season, the holiday shopping and the actual holidays themselves, some companies are focusing campaigns around these, errr, larger events. Let’s take a look at how certain brands have used social media to further newsworthy efforts.

Walgreens.

Walgreens launched a mobile couponing aspect for its mobile app that was made available on  Black Friday this year. Holding the availability of the coupons until Black Friday peaked interest among consumers. Promoting the new savings via Facebook and Twitter, Walgreens made sure to spread the shopping cheer. Kudos to the company for not weaseling the news onto its photography centric company blog; however, Walgreens could have taken the twitter post further with a little help from a well-placed hashtag, like the popular #BlackFriday.

Columbia Sportswear.

Ringing in the ski season right, Columbia Sportswear launched a campaign to increase customer engagement with a good old-fashioned competition. The contest was held via Twitter and outdoor enthusiasts tweeted at Columbia Sportswear (@Columbia1938) while wearing gloves in hopes of winning a pair of gloves. The company posted the competition across multiple platforms (Facebook, Twitter and its blog) encouraging the creative race.

Throughout the day, Columbia challenged the resourcefullness of the competitors with its own orginal tweets. Check out this one:

Enjoy some of the tweets elicited by this humorous campagian:

From these companies we can see that the short-term goals of increasing customer engagement and creating an overall positive customer experience will help the long-term goal of brand loyalty and increased sales. Waiting to add to the conversation when people’s interests are likely to be heightened about a topic helps to get more people talking about your brand.

What’s an awesome timely campaign that you’ve seen?

Thanks for stopping by for a little more social media and PR strategy.