Many brands have used social media technology in an innovative fashion by primarily using social applications which reside on popular social networks such as Twitter or Facebook. However, many brands want to bring together the online and offline worlds in an easy way.
That’s what Collab Networks, a startup plans to achieve by building collaborative networks which bring together the physical and digital social networks together.
For this purpose, they decided to deploy an interesting strategy for their client – Parachute where radio frequency identification (RFID) technology was used during Zoom’s Holi Party 2011. At the venue, celebrities that attended the event were given RFID enabled wrist bands which they integrated with their respective Facebook accounts upon arrival.
Every time the celebrity with an RFID wrist band would tap their wrist band on the RFID reader, a status update would go on their personal stream along with being visible on Parachute Advansed Facebook Page.
These updates would also include an image and a link to the Facebook Page. A snapshot of what the update would look like on the user feed:
An average Facebook user has 130 friends and around 2,000 people were expected to attend the event. This gives at least an exposure of the updates to 2,60,000 users who are connected to these people.
With this activity, the brand would want to achieve the difficult tasks of
- Bridging the offline and online world
- Fan acquisition at the venue itself – People at the venue had an option to like the page at the venue itself when they used the tag reader.
- Fan acquisition away from the venue – Friends of the people who were at the venue saw the updates appear on their news feed. From there, they had the option to like the page as well.
- Live activity feed – Multiple tag readers were set up throughout the venue with a different status update going out from each location. For instance, a different status update would appear when entering the venue and a different one when near the lunch location.
- Easy expression – People had the opportunity to digitally express themselves without doing anything beyond tagging the wrist band to the reader. Thereafter, the brand can use the social data collected to understand its customers.
Share with us any other examples where online and offline platforms have been brought together in an innovative form.
