Join the international network fighting against 1st World problems.
Do you think that social networking is an appropriate and effective way to promote your educational campaign? If yes, explain why and describe 2 social networking tools you would choose for this purpose and what makes each effective for your intended purposes.
Social networking would definitely be an appropriate way to promote this educational campaign since our target audience is people with technology problems; therefore they are also technology users. Since we want to reach high school teachers and high schoolers dealing with their first world problems, social networking will prove effective because that generation is very keen on social networking. The two social networking tools we’d use for this purpose are Twitter and Instagram.
Twitter would be a great tool for spreading the word because topics can “trend” and rise in popularity. Users can quickly “re-tweet” promotions to spread them like wild fire. Twitter is free which not only makes it cost effective for our campaign, but also brings in a wide user-base. Twitter’s character limit ensures that users don’t drown in information overload, which makes them more attentive to the short tweets that go out.
Instagram would be our second tool of choice because it balances out the text-focus from Twitter with a visually focused platform. Instragram is an effective tool because once a unique hash-tag is created, such as #SAFPWebinar, any user can post to that hash-tag to contribute content. This has a very participatory feel to it because there are low-barriers to entry and quick pay off to know that everyone can instantly see your post.
How would you use gamification in your social network campaign? Briefly describe a game that you might implement through social networking to engage your audience and make them want to visit your webpage or sign up for your training. The Two Truths and One Lie game in week #2 is an example. Write a brief description of which social networking tool(s) your game would work with, how you would implement it, would you offer prizes or incentives, etc.
First we’d be looking to build our base of followers. So we’d do a shorter contest on Twitter, “Follow @SAFP to win!” where we pick five new followers randomly and send them a $10 Starbucks gift card. Then once we have followers on Twitter we could run other games like Fill in the Blank, sentence with the most ReTweets wins $30 to Starbucks “I can’t change the ringtone on my ______. #SAFPWebinar”. An example can be seen to the right.
On Instagram we’d run a contest to get users to submit their own first world problems by capturing a picture and tagging #SAFPWebinar to win. The winner will be the post with the most likes. The prize would be that our scientist will address that user’s first world problem at our upcoming webinar and offer solutions! This would be a great contest because users would be encouraged by seeing the posts of others and have heightened awareness for the first world problems they face each day and the opportunities to capture them with a picture to share (example to the right).
Find an example of a social networking campaign that you admire and feel is particularly effective in making the public aware of its mission. Provide a link to either their webpage or their social networking home page (It can be business, education, charity, etc.). Explain what you think is so effective about this campaign? What particular tools or strategies do they use? Explain how might you adopt these in your own campaign?
Drew Barrymore recently published a coffee table book that was a collection of photographs she had taken of random hearts she noticed in nature or in everyday items. To promote her own book she invited the general public to contribute their own photos of hearts and tag them with her book title #finditineverything. She then went on the Ellen show and promoted her Instagram contest and said that she’ll pick the top 10 pictures and publish them in a second version of her book and fly them to a book signing event etc. This campaign already has 75 high quality posts and 22,388 followers because it is simple, beautiful, and easy. The participants feel like they are the ones that have benefited because they get to browse through lovely pictures that people have posted of hearts, which reminds them that love is everywhere. Participants get to feel like they are a part of this beautiful project because they can contribute. And Drew Barrymore’s book is getting free publicity which is very effective in spreading. That is the reason we adopted a similar strategy for a simple hashtag to encourage users to post their own images and participate in the fun.