Company: Hope&Glory PR Campaign: O2 Santa: creating the Digital Grotto Category: Social Media Campaign of the Year - South - Shortlisted Objective Create a campaign that got people talking about, and engaging with the brand via social media – and create a property that could be repeated annually • Create a campaign that would bring the “We’re Better, Connected” strap-line to life in social media. • Create a social vehicle to talk about “Priority Moments”, O2’s loyalty scheme. • Increase positive sentiment in social media channels for the brand: upping “net positive sentiment” across social channels during the course of the campaign (from normally net negative scores of around 20 per cent) We also wanted a vehicle to talk about O2’s Priority Moments package of discounts and deals, which are available to every O2 customer and support the brand’s “good value” proposition to its base. Target Audience The strategy was simple: to enable people to interact with O2 at Christmas in a way that they would find rewarding and would be able to share. We created an O2 “Digital Grotto” with a Santa so that Twitter users could use him to pass on their festive greeting to friends, families and loved ones via a YouTube video. The films could be used to “surprise and delight” family and friends, while also having the option of the films being delivered from O2 to friends anonymously. The core audience was O2’s existing customers – demonstrating the “Priority Moments” that the brand could bring them through social media and creating loyalty and advocacy during a key sales period. We also wanted to use the campaign to deliver reach amongst O2’s tech, entertainment and lifestyle opinion formers – both individuals and media titles – enabling them to get involved and to spread the word. Action The idea was simple: create an O2 “Digital Grotto” with a Santa so that Twitter users could use him to pass on their festive greeting to friends, families and loved ones via a YouTube video. The not-so-simple bit was a commitment to deliver every message we received (ahead of the deadline that we set for them) by Christmas. People who wanted a message simply sent a Tweet with the words they wanted in the video delivered to @o2 using #o2santa. We picked up the Tweets, turned them into scripts that could be delivered from the grotto, filmed Santa delivering the message, edited the resulting films which were uploaded to YouTube before Tweeting the link to the film back to the message-sender. We created a mini-set that comprised a team who would deliver the whole piece from end-to-end. Two community managers collected in-coming messages, wrote them into script and posted links to users when uploaded. Scripts were passed to autocue and our Santa was filmed delivering them by a camera man who passed raw footage to a live editor who in turn passed final films to our uploader posting them to YouTube. From the point that a message came in we stripped the whole process down to a three minute turnaround. In order to spread the work and seed the campaign, we created a series of seeding messages: Targeting the Twitterati (@jasonbradbury, @gadgetpolly, @janeGRAZIA, @alexwintersTV et al) and media titles themselves (@ZOO_UK, @Nuts_Mag, @LoadedMag, @mizzmag and co). For fun, we also created an “homage” to the Fenton/Benton film featuring Santa chasing the pack of deer across Richmond Park in place of the dog of internet legend. The viral picked up 3,500 views and helped to promote the core campaign further across Twitter and Facebook – adding some fun to the brand and the campaign (it can be seen here). Results We were re-tweeted by big-league Twitter users including @jasonbradbury (151,000 followers), @gadgetpolly (74,000 followers), @LoadedMag (17,000 followers), @janeGRAZIA (14,500 followers), @ZOO_UK (39,000 followers), @MizzMag (5,050 followers), @alexwintersTV (7,241 followers), and a host of others. That helped to spread the work from opinion formers amongst their network groups. We ran an online media relations campaign delivering coverage across a host of blogs. The highlights were coverage on AdAge (shared 397 times) and social media bible, Mashable (an article shared 101 times on LinkedIn, 151 times on Facebook and 339 times on Twitter). In all we generated around 50 pieces of online coverage. There were 2,800 mentions that directly mentioned the campaign and a further 1,500 that referenced the activity (eg. messages that linked to articles about the campaign). In total, 4,394,000 people were reached on Twitter alone (according to RTO2, O2’s bespoke social media measurement tool). The online coverage of the campaign was overwhelmingly positive (87%) and had a reach of over 60 million unique users (given the reach of the major US sites, including mashable, AdAge and PSFK that ran the brand’s story). Although the campaign did not run across Facebook, we generated buzz through the site with over 300 comments on O2 Santa related posts, 1,544 “Likes” and 152 “Shares” via status updates throughout the campaign. On Facebook alone, O2’s status updates about the campaign were seen by 230,000 unique individuals, according to Facebook insight data. Cumulative post views for the campaign were over 412,600. On YouTube, we posted 1,024 films which were collectively viewed 38,090 times (at the time of writing). These can all be seen here. The reach metrics are remarkable. However, the other element of this campaign was to create a wave of positive sentiment about O2 during the Christmas period. We delivered that in spades. In total (across Twitter, YouTube and Facebook) there were 6,000 engagements with consumers through the campaign and sentiment was net 43 per cent positive (and 55 per cent neutral) – the best score that O2 has ever achieved for a social media campaign. This campaign shows what a brand can do when they set out to create a highly personalised campaign that gives a content-based reward for relatively low effort from a consumer: achieving unprecedented positive sentiment and amazing customer reactions through earned media alone. The PRmoment Golden Hedgehog Awards 2014 are now open for entries. Here are this years updated categories.