Showing us something new
Social media campaigns continued to mature in 2011. It's not all about Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Getting a bunch of Facebook "likes" isn't the true measure of success.
The best campaigns of 2011 were different. They did something that hadn't been done before. Or maybe certain aspects had been done before, but they were done differently and in new ways. The true measure of success for some of these is not yet apparent, but time will tell. Here are my top marketing picks in social for the past year.
Internships.com
Every year has one social media campaign that is so out of the box (sorry to use that cliché, but sometimes it just fits -- it really fits) that it deserves the crown as the most creative of the year.
This year, Internships.com hopped on board the crazy train and rode it to success.
Where some saw a Hollywood star's high-profile meltdown, Internships.com saw opportunity. As Charlie Sheen split from "Two and a Half Men" and began his Twitter rants about tiger blood and #winning, the year-old company paid for Sheen to seek out an intern via an Ad.ly tweet.
It remains to be seen whether Internships.com can last for the long haul. Compete.com data show a huge spike in March (Sheen's tweet went out March 7), and bit.ly statistics show more than 481,000 click-throughs to date on the link used in the tweet.
What impresses me most about the campaign is that the company took a risk. No one really knew how the whole Charlie Sheen brouhaha was going to turn out, and attaching your brand to a celebrity in these circumstances isn't always the wisest move. But Sheen persevered, and in the fall, his Comedy Central Roast got that network's highest ratings ever, even up against his old show.
And so Internships.com hitched its wagon to a #winning campaign.
