5 Incredible Social Media Campaigns That Leveraged Video For Worldwide Coverage

Social Media, Video January 9, 2010 5 Comments

Number 5 clearWhen you think of social media you are mostly tempted to think of services like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr but most of us seem to disregard Video. We just  accept that it is there but many of us don’t see it as inherently social. I wanted to pick 5 campaigns that I have seen over the last year that have all had massive success and that nearly every single reader of this blog will have heard of and where 90% of their success has come about by the people behind them relying on video. When you think of video you think of YouTube and you are probably right to do so as it is indeed the platform that matters and even though video has seen small declines last year it is services like YouTube that you should focus your attention on. These campaigns all had very specific goals and most used other social media channels to piggyback on and spread the word but it was the video that appealed to the masses and without it they would not have been anywhere near as successful a social media campaign.

Island Reef Job

In terms of money spent to coverage ratio this had to be one of the top campaigns of the last 12 months. We all know that “The Best Job In The World” was to look after an island in Australia for six months while doing pretty much nothing but surfing, swimming and writing the odd blog post while getting paid a bucket full of money. Applicants were asked to send in videos and the video below gave us a real picture of what the job would be like and proved to be the call to action that 1000s needed to get applying. The video was also picked up by news organisations all over the world and ensured more coverage than the Queensland tourist board could ever have wished for. The used their tiny budget to generate worldwide coverage thanks to social media and video in particular.

Socialnomics

There is no doubt that you will have seen this video, nearly everybody in the industry has. It was commissioned by Erik Qualman (read our post with him on SEO and social search here) along with these other popular videos that you will no doubt recognize to help promote his Socialnomics book. The videos are not complicated and simply took some freely available data and statistics that we have all heard and turned them into a sexy video format with funky music that made the perfect tool for social media companies and brands to play all over the world and to be used at conferences. The videos tapped in to a movement of people to social media over the last year and helped promote the book in a way that would normally have costs millions of dollars in advertising budget at a fraction of the cost online.

IKEA

Many of you will have seen this campaign from IKEA a couple of months ago and it showed their very smart use of tagging photos on Facebook to spread a message virally. The reason this campaign got so much coverage however was that the smart team behind the campaign turned it in to a short video explaining how it worked. There is no way this would have been picked up by the blogs all over the world if it had just been a simple press release as the message would have been lost. This is the perfect example of how video should be used to supplement an existing social media campaign.

U2 Live On YouTube

U2 didn’t become the biggest band in the world by accident and they are surrounded by some of the smartest marketing people in the world who started embracing social media recently. Bono often gives out about dwindling royalty earnings and the rise of piracy but this move would have gone a long way to supplementing their already massive worldwide tour earnings. You’ll notice that along the bottom of all videos on YouTube is a link to directly buy the song and other marketing efforts were in place to turn users from viewers streaming on YouTube for free in to paying customers of the band. Add to that the massive amount of media coverage the stunt received all over the world and you had a very profitable day at the office for U2.

Twitter In Plain English

For the first 2 years that Twitter was running they featured this video on their homepage to explain what their service did. It wasn’t produced internally but instead a company called CommonCraft who specialize in creating this sort of video and offered it in return for a link on their homepage and over 10 million video views. Commoncraft tapped in to a valuable platform and have made similar videos around services like RSS, Wikis and other social platforms that has in turn seen them hired for numerous custom videos for companies like Google and Linkedin. This shows the power of piggybacking on other social media tools and providing valuable information and in return a small video production company now enjoys worldwide brand appeal.

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