Twitter-hunt!

Thanks Levis!

So you may have already read Tee’s detail re. ISpyLevis, but I’m so stoked about winning some Levis (and may have helped someone else win too) that I’m gonna blog about it too.

Using Twitter for ‘treasure’ hunts. It is a really nice idea. More than happy to be corrected on this, but I am pretty sure NZ Twitter-hunts all started with The Ring Hunt by @donoogle_com which you can read about here. Other ones that I know about have been the ‘find the 3G guy’ and HTC hunt by @vodafoneNZ, I believe that Snapper did one and now @iSpyLevis. The basics behind Levis is that the iSpyLevis guy is wandering around town (Wellington today, he was in Auckland over the weekend) twitpic-ing clues as to where he is. Work out his clue, find him, and ask if he is wearing Levis... and he hands over a pair or a voucher. Awesome.

It’s a nice little promotion for anyone who has a tangible product to give away. Jeans could have been quite tricky, however problem solved – give them a voucher. I never heard of how the Snapper card went, however I think you have to really assess how valuable the prize is. For example, $5k ring, Netbook, $1.1k phone, jeans all of these items are relatively sexy products and worth a decent amount of coin. Snapper cards though? Was that what they were giving away or were they the USBs? Either way, public transport isn’t the sexiest of prizes, I’m not sure I would go out of my way to try to win that.

So, what if you don’t have the most tangible, hand out on the street products? I am talking about products/retail here, what then? Well, I’m annoyed at myself that I didn’t favourite the story in my RSS feed, but there is also a video out there somewhere which details a story about a company in the State who use a bot to search Twitter at all times for mentions. A customer walked into one of their stores somewhere on the West Coast and as she sat down with her coffee and food she sent a tweet that she was in the store. Whoever was monitoring over on the East Coast, where head office is located, called the store she was in and asked them to find the woman in the store and in effect give her the meal for free.

So, obviously not the best branding exercise as I can’t remember what the company was, but maybe I would if I had heard of it before, but what something like that does is build a ‘warm fuzzy’ feeling around the brand. No doubt the person who received their meal for free would have told people about what happened, because it is a nice story. The video that I watched which detailed the events was an employee of the company, and she said that she had told lots of people, not because it was her company necessarily, but because it was such a nice story.

So here is my question, all of these lovely stories, good PR and free stuff, does that mean we are inching closer to Generation G? (If you can’t be bothered clicking on the link to read about Gen G, don’t make the mistake I did and think it is Generation Greed – which is what I would expect – it is instead Generation Generosity. Isn’t that sweet?