Great content in the hands of an empowered team mean social media marketing success

Events unfold on social media in real time. That means your social media marketing team needs to have the know-how, the creativity and the authority to take advantage of events as they happen to create relevance and excitement around your brand.

Much has been said of how Oreo took advantage of the blackout at this year’s Super Bowl and became the most discussed ad campaign that night. Taking advantage of such opportunities is made possible only when you have a team that can develop an idea on the spur of the moment and have the willingness to run with it, despite the risks. In Singapore, one of the year’s most discussed events was when haze from brush fires in Sumatra caused unprecedented air pollution in the island state. A small number of brands jumped in with their take on events, including SingTel, who featured a hazy skyline on their Facebook cover photo.

SingTel reacts to social media moments every day, most of the time with helpful tips for customers or with an offer to help when they need support. Last April, SingTel’s social media team sent a special gift to a lucky cat, who had trouble adjusting to a new but smaller mioTV set-top box. The team sent the cat’s owner a brand new cat bed and a bag of goodies, together with a personalized hand-written note.

Big corporations like SingTel aren’t always associated with random acts of compassion and spontaneity. Thankfully social media allows such opportunities to be discovered regularly. And occasionally, companies also create these moments themselves.

In 2012, SingTel threw a free live concert by Korean pop band 2NE1. The event was promoted entirely via Twitter and hints to local fan clubs. Thousands of screaming fans turned up at the event in Clarke Quay, Singapore.

Earlier this year, SingTel invited customers to share how they intended to use the connection speeds of the newly-launched 4G mobile network via the Twitter hashtag #Need4GSpeed. These situations (e.g. “I want to watch my Korean dramas before my tears dry up”) were then converted into comedy skits by funnyman Hossan Leong and his team of actors. The campaign resulted in 23 videos uploaded within eight hours and #Need4GSpeed trending for two days straight.

In July, SingTel issued an invitation to celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, insisting that Singapore hawker cuisine deserved global recognition by challenging him to learn three popular local dishes. The campaign, centered around the hashtag #HawkerHeroes, set Singapore ablaze with discussion and speculation as to whether the Michelin-star chef could beat local hawkers. As the debate quickly became a matter of heritage and national pride, the story garnered coverage in local media and the #HawkerHeroes hashtag trended on Twitter for four consecutive days. The campaign reached its climax as Ramsay arrived in Singapore and thousands of fans were able to meet him and sample his cooking,

#HawkerHeroes was a rare example of great content around a celebrity and an enabled social media team are combined with an issue that audiences are passionate about. The result was one of the biggest campaigns of the year in Singapore.

View the entire presentation below. Presented at Spikes Asia 2013 in Singapore. 

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