4. Case Study Twitter and Advertising Chelsea Marti, Manager of Social Media, TurboTax and Quicken, Intuit | @QuickenChels
5. “Social”ism vs. Capitalism The Convergence of Social Media, Communities and Technology Twtrcon DC ‘09 –October 22, 2009 Chelsea Marti, TurboTax Social Media
- Powerful brand.20M strong –customers are already talking about you.- We did our traditional advertising campaign with NBC as well, but we needed something more to drive awareness about our free TurboTax offering among a younger demographic.Taxes aren’t sexy – how to utilize the power of these 20 million conversations to build awareness about our brand.Transition: Twitter is one place we’ve got folks talking about us already. In order to succeed we felt Twitter would be an important part of our campaign ecosystem for eaching younger tax filers.
Freeloadernation: Got it’s name because this campaign is geared toward building awareness of our free TurboTax offering. Generally this product fits those with simple tax filing needs (cough, cough, me). So the Freeloader Nation campaign had two parts: build awarness and drive conversations about free and TurboTax.With MySpace and Tay Zonday (chocolate rain) we worked on awareness with our target demographic, and with SuperStatus, we utilized the power of status updates and Twitter to drive conversations and have folks enter out contest. Transition: First, let’s chat quickly about the MySpace piece of the Freeloader Campaign.
TurboTax sponsored five secret shows across the country, and in order to attend the concert, people “friended” the Freeloader Nation Page and automatically got entered into a drawing for VIP access.Tay Zonday attended each of the 5 shows as our campaign host and helped us spread the word about the campaign throughout his networks.- Attempted to be “sexy” here by using the power of some great musicians, i.e. sponsored Lily Allen’s album release concert in New York.- Transition: Next I’ll talk a little bit about how we used Twitter in our SuperStatus portion of the Freeloader Nation campaign.
So we were first out of the gate on this – no one had ever used status updates and tweets as a means to enter a contests before. To create conversations around the idea of FREE and our brand, we leveraged our great relationship with NBC to get some great prices (i.e. Superbowl tickets, etc.) to incent people to participate and update their status or tweet.Each day, we’d ask a question of the day using our widget and other social channels like Twitter. Participants needed only to use TurboTax in their answer to enter the contest.
We offered to triple one winner’s refund up to $25K We got amazing response, and were totally blown away by the creative ways folks were using both our brand name and answering our questions.Transition: So how did it go?
So our triple your refund winner actually won using Twitter. The user said “I like Twitter because people can follow me – just don’t follow me to the bank whenI win $25K from TurboTax.” The campaign drove 5 times the average clicks than other banner ads. We didn’t break this out specifically for today, but we did notice that more than half of our entries came in via Twitter.Transition: The campaign was going so well, we started thinking of other ways to utilize the power of our customers stories and conversations about TurboTax.
We approached Mashable about a paid advertising spot, and basically took a two-pronged approach with their partnership here. First we sponsored a mini-series by Mashable on the evolution of the the status update.-Next we put up an ad that featured Tweets about our brand (you’ll see us participating in the upper right here – but this add was user-generated, and tweets from the contest and other mentions of our brand ran real-time.You might ask – how risky is that? We did build in a kill switch just in case – but thankfully – didn’t have any reason to use it.This was a win-win for us. First, we literally had an ad written by our customer running real-time. Second, we managed to do this with Mashable, a great place to spread our message to influencers throughout the social community.- Transition: So how did it go?