Week 3 Discussion Post

Reading Dana’s blog about 5 gum’s “truth or dare” was actually the first time I’ve ever heard of the campaign! After researching more, I discovered a few commercials on YouTube that end with the line “play the 5 gum truth or dare challenge and you could win a sensory adventure”. That alone is an incentive right there to buy 5 gum. I would suggest that 5 gum “blows” the campaign up on Twitter. First, they can do that by placing a promoted trending hashtag or ad that will show up on trends and feeds, even if they aren’t following the company. That would at least garner some attention on the campaign in the social media world.

But mostly what I discovered about 5 gum is that the lack overall engagement with consumers on social medial. Their official Twitter account has less than 600 tweets (as of 9/19/14), and there seems to be minimal interaction between the company and people who are hashtagging #5truthordare. The more engagement with consumers, the more likely those consumers are to retweet and hashtag about the campaign, reaching hundreds or thousands of people with every tweet. “Companies that can foster communication, not only between organization and consumer, but also between consumer and consumer, will reap the greatest benefits of the most connected world we’ve ever had” (Kerpen, 2011). So in my opinion, 5 gum’s first step to gain more attention towards their “truth or dare” campaign would be to engage and interact (a lot!) with people who are tweeting about it.

Researching 5 gum’s marketing campaign reminded me of a new brewery that was opening this summer in my neighborhood and attempted a great marketing campaign on social media. It was a similar contest to the Frito Lay chip flavor contest, but this was referring to the brewery naming their “house brew”.  I’m always intrigued with local companies making a name for themselves, so I frequently searched twitter for the companies specific hash tag request that people would post their brew names with. There was a surprising number of people who contributed awesome, creative names to this new craft beer. But, I was very disappointed to see hardly any interaction between the brewery and their contestants. It was somewhat frustrating to see this company build up excitement and encourage everyone to participate, but didn’t contribute much more to the actual process. Had they interacted more, even just by simply retweeting, the company could have garnered so much more attention in so many ways.

Kerren, Dave. (2011).  Likeable Social Media. San Francisco, CA: McGraw Hill