Should social media be a bigger part of the Fabergé egg hunt?

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Posted 11 January 2012 15:42pm by David Moth with 0 comments

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Fabergé, famous for its jewelled eggs, is gearing up for a Big Egg Hunt promotion in London, due to start on Shrove Tuesday 2012.

For 40 days and 40 nights there will be 200 Fabergé eggs, decorated by leading artists, designers and jewellers, hidden around central London.

By collecting a map or downloading an app, people can take part in the hunt - which aims to raise £1m for charity.

As you would expect from Fabergé, the Big Egg Hunt is supported by a high-quality PR campaign, with beautiful visuals and top notch production values. It's certainly a clever way to gain publicity while maintaining the brand's exclusive image.

However the hunt currently has a relatively small social media presence, with only 311 'likes' on Facebook and 200 Twitter followers. There's also no obvious tie in with any location-based tools and services.

Social media agency FreshNetworks ran a similar campaign for Jimmy Choo last year. It used Foursquare to give out clues about the location of pairs of the brand's newly-launched trainers - which were hidden around London.

By following the brand on Twitter users could win free shoes by locating them first.

So has Fabergé missed a trick by not focusing more on social media? Or are the luxury brand's target audience not the sort of people who use Twitter and Foursquare?

FreshNetworks managing director Helen Trim said that this campaign is obviously on the right track, and because of the nature of the brand there's bound to be a lot of online chatter, as well as lots of images.

With this in mind, it would be a shame for Fabergé not to enhance or reinforce these conversations by engaging proactively with people through social media, or making use of the content for brand building purposes and raising awareness about the charitable cause."

There is a launch party planned for next week, which Trim suggests would be a great opportunity to get not just celebrities, but influential bloggers to attend. 

In many ways, the party could generate more positive sentiment within social media than the hunt itself. 

Hunt said that another way for Fabergé to potentially use social would be to encourage discussions about the charitable cause behind the egg hunt, as well as encouraging people to bid for the auction. 

It could make the auction more social too, with online bidding or perhaps live tweeting from the real-world auction in order to raise awareness.

However, before we criticise Fabergé for not using social media to its full extent, it's important to remember that social is not the answer to everything. For Fabergé's business needs, the basics may be sufficient enough for now.

With 40 days to go until launch there could be things in the pipeline that it hasn't yet announced. After all, Fabergé is most famous for its surprises."

David Moth is a Reporter at Econsultancy. You can follow him on Twitter.