MANILA, APRIL 1, 2013 – In an effort to promote its 4G service, SingTel staged its most ambitious social media marketing campaign ‘When You Need Speed Now’. What began with a couple of print ads, the campaign was taken to the internet with a Twitter hashtag (#need4gspeed) and has remained on the top trending hashtags days after the campaign took off.
The campaign was done in partnership with multi-talented Singaporean comedian Hossan Leong. Together, SingTel and Leong proved to be a force to be reckoned with proving that more can be done with fast internet connection. “Having a well-loved personality like Hossan Leong involved was the icing on the cake because it ensured the campaign had an unmistakably Singaporean feel to it,” said Miguel Bernas, SingTel’s digital marketing director.
The campaign kicked off at 9:00am on March 14, 2013. It started with an invitation on Twitter for SingTel consumers to share situations when having a high-speed 4G connection comes in handy. After the invitation was sent out to the world wide web, suggestions flooded the gates of Twitter and Leong took the best ideas and turned them into improvised comedy skits which were then published on YouTube within minutes. Within the eight-hour window, some 23 videos were uploaded, accompanied by many more tweets and images to keep the dialogue with consumers moving.
The social media marketing effort was design around the idea of igniting consumers’ imaginations around what they could do with 4G. “We wanted to bring to life the promise of the high-speed connectivity that comes with 4G, which was why Twitter provided the ideal platform,” Bernas said. “Importantly, it also showed how seriously SingTel takes interacting with consumers using social media.”
Being the first campaign on record to execute real-time social media marketing, surely entailed stress factors not yet recognized and not present in the usual and expected social media marketing efforts.
One such challenge is finding the perfect personality of the campaign to take off. Leong, renowned all over Singapore to be the quintessential funnyman, was the perfect fit. “We needed to ensure that the artist we were working with brought to the table the perfect balance of Singaporean-ness, wit and irreverence that would make the movement spread like wildfire.” And spread like wildfire it did.
The #Need4GSpeed hashtag continued to trend in Singapore a day after the campaign ended, driving more than 32,400 engagements (retweets, comments, video views, clicks, etc.) in only one day. The campaign, which lasted for only nine hours, also increased traffic to the SingTel 4G website by 39 percent.
Another challenge identified is the risks presented with running a campaign using social media real time. “There are always some risks in using social media, especially when things are happening in real time, so we had to try to foresee every contingency,” Bernas said. “That’s why we spent a lot of time planning and assigning teams to monitoring & community management, so that on the actual day we could focus on producing the videos.”
Strategies for flawlessly executing a social media marketing strategy as possible include:
1) Plan it like a military campaign
Bernas laid out the essentials such as mapping the activities of the day down to the minute, producing whatever materials needed ahead of time (i.e. video end credits, still images for memes, etc.), making sure everyone understands their role on the day itself, determining who makes the creative decisions and who gets the final say, etc.
2) Have your Plan B scenarios ready
Choosing to run your campaign in social media means accepting that you can’t control all the variables, Bernas said. So before the big day, the team shot a number of stills of Hossan to use as responses to tweets in between video uploads, which effectively fills in the gaps between uploads. This also ensured that the people were engaged.
3) Take creative risks
Bernas acknowledges the fact that running a campaign real time means that the usual checks and balances present in usual marketing campaigns are not available. “It means taking a small group of people in the organization and empowering them to make decisions on the spot.”
“The decision to work with Hossan Leong was not only because of his popularity but also because of the edge and irreverence that he brings to the table. The last thing you want to do is hold back that creativity in any way,” Bernas said.
The campaign was a collaborative effort between SingTel’s Digital Marketing team, media agency MEC and digital agency OgilvyOne.
