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Virgin: a (very) positive social media case-study

Yesterday I witnessed something pretty special – a social media marketing campaign that (bar a few niggles below) delivered a very strong positive message for Virgin. Virgin did something pretty darn good – and it’s secret?

Simplicity: engage, ask people what the next BIG Virgin idea should be and do a blinking good competition.

What happened?

All of the various UK-based @Virgin Social Media people (representatives were there from about 18 Virgin companies with twitter accounts) joined at their London Club HQ and worked together in the same room from 10am to 7pm (oh hello, it’s Jelly co-working, corporate-style!), for the first time ever.

They decided to call it a #socialmarathon, the day after the London Marathon (clever). Their main question for the day was  hash tag ‘#ifvirgindid’ and they simply asked their followers to say what should be Virgin’s next big idea e.g. ‘#ifvirgindid entrepreneurial scholarships’. They also had @joshbroden pop in for a #teatime chat.

What they did well:

1. They’ve hired very good people to run their twitter accounts on the whole – that much was clear: friendly, positive, consistent, fun messages were coming out from what are effectively 18 or so disparate companies – no mean feat.
2. The competition (once found on Facebook) was quick and easy to enter & they made it easy to social share.
3. They put a very human, friendly, approachable face on one of the world’s biggest global brands – again, no mean feat.
4. They increased followers numbers by over 5% (from the accounts I looked at) – not bad for 9 hours work’. Whether these translate into quality followers long-term for them is of course another matter.
5. They received literally thousands of free ideas on how to develop the Virgin brand – saving themselves how many millions of pounds in research?! There were plenty of daft ones but I spotted quite a few gems too.

What they could have done better (sorry Virgin, I have an analytical brain):

1. Using 2 hash tags at the start of the day – #socialmarathon and #ifvirgindid – caused some confusion. The ‘winner’ by a country mile was #ifvirgindid because it was a ‘call to action’ within itself.
2. How to enter the competition (via Facebook) wasn’t clearly detailed on twitter for some time, again some confusion was caused and I’m guessing total number of entries was probably lower as a result. I didn’t feel the competition was promoted sufficiently (and consistently) enough on twitter to encourage people across to their Facebook page.
3. The whole experiment worked far better on twitter than on facebook – evidenced by thousands of #ifvirgindid tweets vs about 150 similar comments on their facebook page – a stark contrast. Possibly as a result of using all their twitter accounts but only their main FB page but also maybe a clear message to Virgin that that is where they want to engage with them?
4. A few of the participating twitter accounts didn’t seem to be fully briefed on which hashtags to use and when (but this was very much the minority).

What amazed me:

As I’ve seen with a lot of other big brand campaigns, I really expected to see a fair amount of negative sentiment from unhappy customers complaining about their poor broadband speed/customer service etc – you can imagine ‘#ifvirgindid decent broadband I would have had an internet connection for the last 3 weeks’ etc etc.

The reality – hardly any negative tweets (can count them on 2 hands), absolutely astonishing. Testament to their overall good customer service maybe?

Conclusion:

A huge success for Virgin (at least from the outside looking in – only they know if it had the success – brand impact, reach, ideas generation – they were looking for). There are a lot of big brands out there who should look and learn!

Virgin still have much to do though – they should have FAR more followers on all their twitter accounts and Facebook page for the brand profile they have globally, maybe a case of too many accounts/company products actually diluting its overall power/message?

Personally, I watched & learned with interest; I also found that one of the participating Virgin companies, @VirginBalloons, are Shropshire based so I found a great business to follow!

Did you see any #ifvirgindid tweets yesterday? What did you make of it?

TTFN
Jan

Tags: #ifvirgindid, #socialmarathon, facebook, jelly, Online Marketing, Social Media, Social Networking, twitter, uk jelly, virgin