The one thing you need to remember when creating social media campaigns.
When you look at successful social media campaigns, they all seem to have one thing in common – they are easy to participate in. It’s something we touched on in last week’s post about the Kony 2012 campaign. The fact that all that was required of people was to click a few buttons in order to participate played a huge role in the success of the campaign. Whenever we’re talking about social media campaigns (or doing anything online, really) I always tell people to keep one thing in mind right from the start: people are lazy. As horrible as that sounds, it is true. Every day we are relying more on technology to perform regular tasks, because we can now do these things much quicker and easier than ever before. Why would you go to the bank and wait in line when you can get the job done right on your smartphone from wherever you are? Because of this, we are willing to do less in order to enter contests and participate in any kind of campaign.
Last week AMEX launched a new social media campaign that really takes this whole “people are lazy” idea to heart. By partnering with Twitter, they have developed a way for people to save money that is far easier than clipping coupons. Here’s how it works: First, the user uses the service to connect (or “sync”) their card to their Twitter account. After this is done, all they have to do is watch the @AmericanExpress Twitter account for the deals they want to participate in. In order to get the deal, all they have to do is tweet the associated hashtag (eg: #AmexMcDonalds) and the deal is added to their card. When they use the card at the retailer, the discount is then applied to the card as a credit. The whole process is easy to set up and easy to participate in, which is why it has been so successful in the first week since it launched. It gives people access to deals without having to clip coupons or remember to mention the deals when they’re out shopping. There are very few barriers to entry and the process is easy enough for people to continue to participate in as the campaign goes on.
AMEX pretty much did everything right with this campaign. They created a huge buzz at the launch and offered great incentives to sign up (they launched at the South By Southwest festival and offered tickets to a Jay-Z concert for festival attendees) and made sure the process was easy to make sure people would continue to participate after the initial launch. If they had made the process more complicated, it wouldn’t have taken off the way it did. If you want your social media campaign to be successful, you can’t forget this: People are lazy. Make it easy to participate in and easy to share, and you’ll be off to a good start.
Do you agree? Are we really that lazy? Do you think people would still participate in a complicated process if the incentive was really good, or would it fail? Leave us a comment and let us know what you think.
