Case Study: DiGi Pimp My Broadband

23 November 2009 • 8 Comments

In September 2009, telecommunications company DiGi launched their Pimp My Broadband contest in conjunction with their new mobile broadband service. The contest was promoted completely through the web and participation was completely web based as well.

To participate, contestants had to express why they wanted DiGi to pimp their broadband through user generated videos and photos. These videos and photos would then be submitted as entries to the campaign site, where visitors could vote on their favourite entries. The winning entries stood to win attractive prizes like MacBooks, HP minis and free 3-month subscription to DiGi Broadband.

Campaign Results

The contest resulted in over 30 videos and close to 100 photos. Here are a few of the submissions:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9BfWYbDksE[/youtube]

Winning entry by Trevor Thum – view blog post

desperate

Winning photo by Kong Yen – view blog post

As you can see, the contestants spent a lot of time and creative juice to come up with their entries. I submitted a video myself and I can personally testify that it took me a week of racking my brains and 2 whole days of filming and editing.

Contestants also plastered Pimp My Broadband banners all over their blogs and Facebook which carried DiGi’s promise of ‘Broadband Done Right’.

Beyond the engagement though, DiGi had close to 130 evangelists telling their friends and anyone who could listen to ‘Pimp My Broadband’! Here are the click statistics for the shortlink I promoted throughout the campaign period.

By myself, I generated 873 clicks to my entry page, with an additional 41 on the aggregate bit.ly link. I had just under 1,000 followers at the time.

I also promoted my entry on Twitter, my blog and my Facebook profile (twice!). DiGi got a lot of mileage just out of me, so imagine how much word of mouth they generated from their 130 participants?

A few more stats:

The follower count for DiGi’s Twitter account @digi_telco has hockey-pucked following the contest, and overtaken @maxiscomms.

Yahoo reports their campaign site URL has got over 800 incoming links as of today. Not bad for a 2.5 month old website.

DiGi’s Facebook page, which they cross-promoted on the Pimp My Broadband site, now has over 12 thousand fans. (I couldn’t get a graph for the Sept-Oct period).

This means that on top of the short term campaign buzz, DiGi now has managed to cultivate relationships with a large number of engaged individuals, and are well on their way to building a strong community. In the long run, I suspect that DiGi will find this community much more valuable than any single campaign result.

Marketing Leader Moves

User Generated Content campaigns face the possibility of being a flop, especially when not supported by any traditional media. DiGi took the time to contact influential Twitter users and bloggers to give them the heads up and prepare them the upcoming campaign. This allowed the campaign to kick off with a few relatively high quality entries right from the start, which in turn spurred the competitive nature of other Twitter-ers and bloggers leading to more entries.

Why was the campaign so successful? DiGi leveraged on a simple idea – make the customer the star of your campaign. Every blogger dreams of their 15 minutes of fame, and Pimp My Broadband provided an excellent vehicle. The campaign mechanics also took advantage fully of the contestants personal network and word of mouth.

Many brands don’t take a long term view to social media, resulting in dead campaign sites and losing touch with their fans. However DiGi seems to buck the trend as they now transition their fans and followers into a more customer service relatioinship with their Twitter account. I have no insight into DiGi’s internal strategies but they appear to have long term plans for their social media presences. They have even launched a 2nd campaign on pimpmybroadband.com.my, and I would be very interested to see what they do once this 2nd campaign ends. Perhaps they will turn it into the focus point of their community efforts like MyStarbucksIdea.com?

In any case, I take my hat off to DiGi for genuinely embracing social media. They’re doing extremely well and they have managed to reach out to someone like me who’s been weaned off traditional media.

Takeaway for marketers

DiGi’s Pimp My Broadband campaign gives marketers a good checklist of best practices:

Making your customers the star will encourage them to talk about and evangelise your contest or product.
Word of mouth cuts through filters for traditional media because individuals don’t filter their friends out.
Seeding some entries helps to ensure that user generated content campaigns don’t lose steam early on.
Having a long term social media strategy is essential to ensure that the relationship between brand and consumer become mutually beneficial in the long run.

This is the first in a lot more case studies I hope to publish on Buzzmedia. Let me know what you think of it. I would have very likely left out many important points. Please share them in the comments below and I will update the post or address them in a future post.

Disclaimer: I was also given the heads up of this campaign by a friend working in DiGi. I’m also one of the consolation prize winners.

http://tribe-up.com/ Jason Gan

Thanks for putting up this post, pretty comprehensive to analyze the campaign in a macro and micro view.

Overall I think the campaign did well in creating hype but as I observed it didn’t reach its targeted number of videos and photos (please correct me if am wrong as I remembered the consolation prize is up to 50th?). Maybe DiGi can lower the entry level of competitions, same goes to their Penang Bridge Marathon contest for fun runners, a bit complicated.

Another thing I think DiGi did well is their customer service via twitter. Althou sometimes they’re a bit slow in acting but once they got on an issue they usually solve it pretty quick as I experienced a few times with them.

Overall DiGi actually came in later than Maxis and Celcom as I observed but did better than the rest. Next time if DiGi would wanna create a bigger hype for their social media marketing campaign, maybe can consider giving prizes to voters too.

Thanks again David, great post!
http://tribe-up.com Jason Gan

Thanks for putting up this post, pretty comprehensive to analyze the campaign in a macro and micro view.

Overall I think the campaign did well in creating hype but as I observed it didn’t reach its targeted number of videos and photos (please correct me if am wrong as I remembered the consolation prize is up to 50th?). Maybe DiGi can lower the entry level of competitions, same goes to their Penang Bridge Marathon contest for fun runners, a bit complicated.

Another thing I think DiGi did well is their customer service via twitter. Althou sometimes they’re a bit slow in acting but once they got on an issue they usually solve it pretty quick as I experienced a few times with them.

Overall DiGi actually came in later than Maxis and Celcom as I observed but did better than the rest. Next time if DiGi would wanna create a bigger hype for their social media marketing campaign, maybe can consider giving prizes to voters too.

Thanks again David, great post!
http://joycescapade.blogspot.com/ Joyce

Thanks David for this bookmark-and-retweet-worthy post. Also, a must-be-commented-on post.

I’m not directly involved in the advertising / marketing / social media field of expertise.

Based on my understanding as a normal consumer, correct me if I’m wrong, traditional media incurs cost, often times a hefty amount of money in terms of print ads, billboards, TV & radio ads etc.

I’m not implying that these channels aren’t important. To a certain extent, traditional media still plays a certain role in securing a brand’s prominence and presence, tangibly.

However, since social media is gaining more and more prominence in Malaysia, especially among Generation Y’ers and Z’ers, the effort to ride on social media to run contests and campaigns is simply killing two birds with one stone.

Campaigns / contests using social media as the platform thrives on user generated content (UGC). Generation Y’ers and Z’ers love the buzz, hype, attention, and presence that they contribute to and receive from the Internet. So, UGC won’t become a big problem.

Coupled with the fact that by taking UGC as the upfront way to run a campaign / contest, the brand itself doesn’t necessarily need to invest too huge a sum of money except in preparing exciting prizes, they just need to sit back and see how great will the response be from the consumers’ participation.

Then, engage them via Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites, and voila! Mutual brand-consumer bond is created, numbers of fans increased, people start to talk about it, and the list goes on.

P.S.: I’m a long-time DiGi fan and avid Twitter user. I keep myself abreast with DiGi’s latest campaigns / contests / product updates via their website, Facebook, and Twitter.

Thanks again! Keep posting more case studies.
http://joycescapade.blogspot.com/ Joyce

Thanks David for this bookmark-and-retweet-worthy post. Also, a must-be-commented-on post.

I’m not directly involved in the advertising / marketing / social media field of expertise.

Based on my understanding as a normal consumer, correct me if I’m wrong, traditional media incurs cost, often times a hefty amount of money in terms of print ads, billboards, TV & radio ads etc.

I’m not implying that these channels aren’t important. To a certain extent, traditional media still plays a certain role in securing a brand’s prominence and presence, tangibly.

However, since social media is gaining more and more prominence in Malaysia, especially among Generation Y’ers and Z’ers, the effort to ride on social media to run contests and campaigns is simply killing two birds with one stone.

Campaigns / contests using social media as the platform thrives on user generated content (UGC). Generation Y’ers and Z’ers love the buzz, hype, attention, and presence that they contribute to and receive from the Internet. So, UGC won’t become a big problem.

Coupled with the fact that by taking UGC as the upfront way to run a campaign / contest, the brand itself doesn’t necessarily need to invest too huge a sum of money except in preparing exciting prizes, they just need to sit back and see how great will the response be from the consumers’ participation.

Then, engage them via Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites, and voila! Mutual brand-consumer bond is created, numbers of fans increased, people start to talk about it, and the list goes on.

P.S.: I’m a long-time DiGi fan and avid Twitter user. I keep myself abreast with DiGi’s latest campaigns / contests / product updates via their website, Facebook, and Twitter.

Thanks again! Keep posting more case studies.
http://buzzmedia.com.my/ David Wang

Wow, thanks for the great comments Jason & Joyce.

Jason, I missed the number of consolation prizes DiGi had prepared. You are right that the number of entry submissions were less than they had expected. Nevertheless, it’s difficult to judge the number of entries especially if it’s your first time running such a contest so maybe they were just being well prepared. At the very least it becomes a benchmark for them for future UGC contests.

Joyce you’re right about these channels growing to become more and more important to marketers. The reason why I want to start writing more case studies is to convince local marketers to get started or risk getting left behind. Thanks also for your encouragement, it means a lot
http://buzzmedia.com.my David Wang

Wow, thanks for the great comments Jason & Joyce.

Jason, I missed the number of consolation prizes DiGi had prepared. You are right that the number of entry submissions were less than they had expected. Nevertheless, it’s difficult to judge the number of entries especially if it’s your first time running such a contest so maybe they were just being well prepared. At the very least it becomes a benchmark for them for future UGC contests.

Joyce you’re right about these channels growing to become more and more important to marketers. The reason why I want to start writing more case studies is to convince local marketers to get started or risk getting left behind. Thanks also for your encouragement, it means a lot
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