Forbes: The Best-Ever Social Media Campaigns

The Forbes article talked about how social media compaigns have changed and have gotten better over the years. It starts out bringing up some of the more popular campaigns like the Facebook/Bing Farmville money reward and Burger King "Subervient Chicken" promotions.

(the Chicken still freaks me out man!)

The article states these promotions work because it generates enough interest that people want to show it to other people or they want to participate in what the promotion is doing. To do this, creativity is needed. If a regular boring ad is shown on tv or the internet, people will just pass it by without giving it a look. A viral campaign needs to be simple and to the point. This is a great article to explain how viral campaigns work because it says how simple it is to make a hugely successful campaign.

My favorite viral campaign has to be the one done for "The Dark Knight" in 2007-2008. Warner Bros. used both the internet and social gatherings to help promote their movie. They combined all these different elements to make a sort of "alternate reality" game. They used the internet to set up mass gatherings for Joker fans, phone numbers, actual "voting" for political offices in Gotham City and an actual news network set in Gotham City that reported on what goes on in the city before the movie comes out. It really hit home with fans and it made the anticipation for the movie grow even more.