Five great social media campaigns and their metrics

For the last month we've been bringing you some exciting campaigns and creative, shortlisted for The Digitals 2013.

Here are five more, from the social media category. I've included some of the hard results of the work, as so often our readers are interested in the numbers involved. Enjoy!

Kern & Sohn Precision Scales

A precision scales company (repeat that to yourself) reached a 355 million audience. Kern wanted to grow their reputation and revenue in the education and laboratory sectors.

The idea was thus. Earth's gravity actually varies, so we weigh slightly more or less wherever you go. These fluctuations wouldn't register on typical scales, but Kern scales are capable of measuring them. The audience demonstrated just how accurate the scales are by recording the gravitational variation in their location and adding the data to the experiment website, gnomeexperiment.com

Gnomes are well-known for globe-trotting. So Kern equipped one with a Kern Scale and packed him in a flight case. Once people received the gnome, they happily escorted him to landmarks for photos – they even sent him from one laboratory to another, from the South Pole to the CERN particle collider.

When he reached the South Pole, the press got hold of the story.

Results:

• Within two days the story had reached an audience of over 355m in 152 countries, with three requests every minute from people wanting to weigh the gnome.
• The story was Twitter Top News and after one month, 16,386 websites had linked to GnomeExperiment.com - this pushed Kern to page one on Google for 'precision scales' in all five key markets (up from an average of page 12), resulting in a 21% sales uplift and a 1042% ROI.
• There was a TED talk all about the experiment. 

ASOS

In February this year, ASOS held a series of live Twitter games where social met real-world events. There have been four separate games hosted within a live studio set up. To take part, fans watched the activity on uStream and tweeted using a bespoke hashtag to interact and win prizes in real time.

The live games were low-fi and playfully executed, allowing ASOS to inject their well-known personality.

The objective was to get twenty-somethings talking about specific product points on Twitter, namely cost per wear (value), denim and shoes. And to do this in an exciting way that increased positive conversation around the brand.

Results:

• During the four hours the games were live more than 15,000 people tweeted to take part with a large proportion tweeting 5-10 times during the competition, delivering a total reach of over 120,002,897.
• Each time the games ran, ASOS's Twitter following increased by +133% (versus the daily average increase) hourly sales attributable to Twitter jumped to +774%.
• 45% of viewers streamed the events on their smartphone or tablet.

IRN-BRU

Launched in May 2012, the marketing objective for this project was to generate as much "earned media" as possible for IRN-BRU's film, "Baby".

A single fan of the brand, randomly chosen, was allowed to exclusively launch the film on Twitter with a YouTube link.

Data visualisation was then used to observe social network dynamics as the film received over 1 million views in four weeks. "Baby" was the fourth of four ads in a new campaign. The first three had all been produced as TV commercials, whereas Baby was planned as internet-only content, hosted on YouTube.

The Topsy API was used to track the link across Twitter to see what happened. A single tweet from a single fan with just 329 followers led to nearly 700,000 YouTube views in three weeks.

Results:

• Link shared by one person, generating 127 retweets.
• 100,000 views within 24 hours of launch. Driven by a few dozen heavily followed accounts, each generating large numbers of reactions when they tweet the link.
• Within three weeks the number of YouTube views climbed to 675,000. The link passed through a dense network of interconnected groups. The number of reactions to each tweet was between two and five. The density of the network sustained momentum through this phase.
• Encouraged by the positive reaction to the film, the client broadcast it in a few TV spots during Euro 2012 football matches. The first spot aired on 11th June. The number of YouTube views increases by 300,000 in 48 hours and passed the one million mark on 13th June.

RS Components

October last year, RS used video tutorials across social marketing and beyond, to achieve near-dominance of the search and social space. The co-branded campaign used Massimo Banzi, technologist and Arduino co-founder, to promote the Arduino starter kit, an open source electronics dev kit.

The recent Raspberry Pi launch showed RS how valuable engaging with their target audience through the online social space can be, and the same was hoped for Arduino. Check out RS' slideshare on the campaign. And here's Massimo talking through a Twitter controlled lamp.

Results:

• 361,819 views of the videos. 
• Traffic: 230k sessions from external media: YouTube, Twitter, PPC, Google Display Banner and Email. 
• YouTube channel: 55,650 visits and 2,283 new subscribers (representing a 613% increase). 
• Twitter: 2,244 new followers, representing a 14% increase. 
• Email: 3,094 contacts registered to the email program - Unique Open Rate 56.30%, Unique CTR of 36.59%. 

British Airways

During the Olympics, British Airways asked people not to fly. They wanted people to stay at home, paint their faces, wave their flags and be part of the Home Advantage.

So, during London 2012, this project aggregated all the tweets, updates, comments and posts related to the hashtag, #HomeAdvantage, that BA propagated. These tweets were turned into a sound wave via their 'social symphony'.

Every sport, athlete and venue were used to generate the live, constantly updating wave. The more social noise, the bigger the graphical sound wave became. BA commissioned a score to bring the sound wave to life that responded to the number and even the content of the messages.

Results:

• More than 50,000 people visited the Social Symphony during the Games.
• More than 65,000 sounds were generated and interacted with.
• 700,000 tweets and posts were collated and tagged, including some from the athletes themselves.