How to use The Bay Bridge, Coding Babies & Cat Jumpers For Customer Acquisition

At Brand24, we like to think outside the box and seize the opportunity to spread brand awareness whenever it’s possible. We enjoy creating positive buzz and surprising people at the same time. Sounds like a cliché, but it takes a lot of creativity to get past the standard promotional techniques (and I’ve got to admit it’s kind of lucky our CEO rocks at this).

Take a look at this very cool marketing stunt our CEO Mike Sadowski pulled off last week.

The Story

When Mike realized his 2014 “Silicon Valley Happy Moments” video got featured on Konica Minolta Business Innovation Center, he shared the news with his Facebook followers.

In the post, one of the commenters Ryszard Szymanowski pointed out that it was possible to change the video thumbnail on Vimeo, which would automatically change the thumbnail displayed on Konica Minolta’s site (thank you, Ryszard!).

Here’s a snippet from Vimeo’s guide on how you can change your video thumbnail:

In fact, Mike did exactly that, and enriched the original video thumbnail with a message telling the world how cool we are – which, in all fairness, is 100% true.

However, it didn’t take long for the image to evolve. Mike added an image of his daughter doing some serious programming work, as well as a picture of himself in an outrageously cool cat jumper. He also added a caption saying “Still, love my Minolta. My first digital camera was Minolta!”. Here’s what it looked like on the site: 

Source: Konica Minolta Business Innovation Center

Soon, acknowledged Polish blogger Maciek Budzich jumped in and asked Mike to feature him in the image. In fact, Maciek jokingly offered to pay for the advertising space Mike was in charge of.  

The greatest thing is that Konica Minolta left it on their site for approximately 24 hours. What is more, Konica-Minolta Poland went along with it – they checked if we’re practicing what we preach by posting a Facebook comment with a phrase our CEO is known to monitor (“Chodz tu, Sadek” meaning “Sadek, come here”).

On Friday, Konica-Minolta Poland published a meme by Marcin Paczuski (One.Px) focusing on how similar we are when it comes to effectiveness:

Results

As a result of the Konica Minolta stunt, we saw a spike in the number of mentions of our brand with an estimated social media reach of almost 200k users on Friday, January 29th.

Now here’s a really cool twist: apart from all the buzz Mike managed to create, we actually ended up getting a very cool client. Konica-Minolta Poland – welcome and enjoy our app, we will surely be taking very good care of you. This is probably the coolest beginning of a partnership we could possibly imagine. 

What are the coolest customer acquisition stories you have heard of? Let me know in the comment section below. 

I strongly encourage you to try Brand24 for free here to see how social listening can help you grow your business – come on, it’s on us 🙂

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