A look at recent campaigns: Influencer to Evangelist

Lately there have been couple of brands doing something that I find very interesting in the India social media space.

Puma – you probably have seen their FAAS contests around Twitter at some point in the last few weeks. They have connected with social media influencers and have sponsored giveaways for them if they had a #FAAS contest. The contest can be about anything depending on the influencers field of interest. So I saw atleast 3 such contests,
by @beeayeanoowhy on F1, @mulchand on photography and @thebigbhookad on mumbai local foods. All these contest were associated to a #FAAS and #Puma tags on Twitter.
They were all very popular and at one point there was also a world wide Puma trending topic.

Pepsi – Pepsi has been following a similar format with #pepsiT20Football. They have sponsored giveaways for contests on other communities like Zapak and Sportskeeda.

This is very similar to something I had done many years back with @inkfruit. Initially I tried connecting with bloggers to review the website, but that didn’t get such a good response so we sponsored Inkfruit Tee giveaways for their contests – and this approach worked much better and we were able to run various contests on many popular blogs.

Sometime back I came across a Travel campaign #GoJordan
Again in this campaign social media travel influencers have been brought in to evangelize the destination. The difference here is that all these influencers are paid for their effort.

I do not have exact stats but by taking a good look at the content and buzz generated by the various above mentioned campaigns then I think that the Puma contest was more or atleast as popular as the #GoJordan one.  So while one brand sponsored giveaways for contests, the other brand had actually paid or hired the influencers involved.

Now the question is: Would each of the models for buzz generation have worked for the other brand?

There are many factors involved but one of the thoughts I have: India being a relatively newer social media space we find the influencers most of whom have atleast a few thousand large community evangelize a brand in a big way without really looking to be compensated. I do not think the same model that Puma followed would work in GoJordan’s case because the travel bloggers are a lot more serious influencers many of whom live/travel off the income made from their online presence. Hence, if they were to be roped in for a social media campaign then it would have to be an official paid campaign.