AdAge Highlights 1-800-FLOWERS.COM Social Media Campaign
May 8th, 2009Author: Allison Blass
As PR professionals, we spends countless hours, days, weeks and sometimes months working on a campaign for our clients that we hope will be a smash success, a break-through, a needle-pusher in their objectives. We never know for sure what’s going to be popular with the media, with bloggers and with consumers, but we do our best to make an engaging campaign with unique, creative elements, like microsites, blogs, podcasts, blogger campaigns and traditional events and media outreach.
In the month’s leading up to the biggest floral holiday of the year, Mother’s Day, MWW Group’s 1-800-FLOWERS.COM account team and Dialogue Media have worked together to create an integrated traditional and digital media campaign called Spot a Mom. We created a microsite featuring gift ideas for different kinds of moms, utilized our Facebook and Twitter page, and reached out to mommybloggers in the effort to raise awareness about Spot a Mom and 1-800-FLOWERS.COM as the go-to resource for flowers on Mother’s Day. 1-800-FLOWERS.COM’s Facebook fans quadrupled and the Twitter followers jumped from a little over 400 to more than 900 in just six weeks. Nearly 50% of 1-800-FLOWERS.COM’s online conversation actually happened via Twitter, showing the power of social networking in brand awareness. MWW Group’s blogger outreach has yielded more than 60 blog hits, in addition to the conversation through word-of-mouth.
Today, we were pleased to see AdAge publish an analysis of our campaign versus Teleflora, focusing on how each campaign readied each company in anticipation of Mother’s Day.
According to reporter Antony Young, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM rated high on most categories, including social media, online, website and mobile, winning 4 out of a total of 5 stars, compared to Teleflora’s 2.5 stars.
Young says, “1-800-Flower wins my bouquet for best media strategy. In almost all categories we evaluated, it delivered a comprehensive and creative solution. Clearly, they had a bigger budget, but they did more than just out-voice Teleflora, they outplayed them. Its communications came across as well integrated — every part of the plan seemed to build off all the other parts. It used digital not only to drive traffic to their site, but play a role in building the brand. Its social media strategy was well-executed and scalable. Teleflora had some high points — notably its TV creative, magazines and well targeted online programs. But as a challenger brand in the category, it needed to be much better than just solid to compete.”
Kudos to the 1-800-FLOWERS.COM team!
