Here are some examples of several brands that thought outside of the box with their social media campaigns and achieved great fan and customer response as a result.

Duck Dynasty-Beard Yourself on Facebook

The show has a 25 person social media team that has come of with some innovative, clever and successful ways to promote the show and the brand behind Duck Dynasty. They launched several successful social media campaigns that helped them reach the milestone of the #1 show across cable.

You can “beard yourself “and your friends on Facebook and share with your friends. It even to so popular for people to “beard” photos of celebrities and then Tweeting those photos at the celebrity. The tech was fun and easy to use. Although the result of the photos is terrifying (at least it was for me), it was a fun activity and perfect for the world of social media, where sharing and engagement is key.

The Duck Dynasty Season 2 Premiere Campaign was a nominee of the 5th Annual Shorty Industry Awards Nominee

Duck Dynasty had a strong and growing presence in social media. The Season 2 campaign aimed to give audiences a chance to connect directly with the Robertson family and become the #1 most talked about show on Facebook in 2012.

The campaign began with their first ever Google+ hangout, identifying six superfans and providing them a once in a lifetime opportunity to virtually “hangout” with the Robertsons. They launched Jointhedynasty.com, allowing fans to tweet why they deserved to be an honorary member of the family and flying the winner to LA for the ultimate Robertson-for-a-day experience.

A “virtual duck” call was put together on Twitter, which was the first time that the social platform had been “gamified.” They offered free rides in tricked-out camo limos around New York for social savvy fans that tweeted #DuckMyRide. They implemented the first ever LIVE social response lab, pinpointing uber fans, pulling their photo from Twitter and seamlessly integrating them into key art.

The Response

The overall campaign drove tune-in and grew ratings from the Duck Dynasty Season 1 finale, engaging fans in a new and unexpected ways.

Duck Dynasty was the #1 show across cable and #2 cable and broadband combined, following The X Factor, in terms of social rank. We generated over 250,000 social interactions during the broadcast, second only to the X Factor, which is a record high for A&E.

#DuckDynasty, #Duck, and #JohnLuke trended consistently throughout the night. @DuckDynastyAE grew over 25,000 followers in one night. Our Facebook community grew by almost 100,000 fans in 24 hours.

Duck Dynasty broke it’s season one premiere rating with 2.4 million (A25-54) and was the number one telecast on Wednesday nights for three consecutive weeks (excluding sports and news).

On Facebook, Duck Dynasty closed out the 2012 year as they #1 most talked about show. The December Season 2 finale brought in a rating of 3.8 million (A25-54), setting a new record for A&E. (Source)

Prius Goes Plural

Business are finding lots of different purposes for social media. Toyota did an excellent job with their campaign “Prius Goes Plural” in order to change the conversation people were having about Toyota. Instead of to use social media for Change the conversation

Toyota’s key to social media success for their “Prius goes plural” campaign was understanding that nothing gets conversation going, attention and engagement than controversy (even if its false controversy).

Instead of launching a campaign focused on the new models of the hybrid vehicle, Toyota promoted a campaign on the grammatical debate over the plural of the word “Prius.”

Toyota used several different tactics and platforms to promote the campaign, including creating a web video, doing outreach on their Facebook page, and using promoted tweets to help spark conversation.

When promoted hashtags are usually bland and uninteresting, Toyota was able to stand out and spark actual conversation and interest from people in the social media world. The trend caused a fair amount of debate while pushing people over to Facebook, YouTube and their official webpage for you to learn more, share, and take part in the debate.

During a time when Toyota was suffering from some serious PR problems, the campaign was perfect – sometimes it is just better to change the conversation than keep responding to it. Toyota made a fake controversy and got people interested and excited about it. The real topic is a complete non-issue and simply starts building up buzz for the new Prius V with one question. No response to recalls, no PR, just a simple question. (source)

Heineken Brazil – One Like One Balloon

Heineken Brazil wanted to direct more people to their Facebook page at the beginning of 2012, and developed a clever and popular campaign in order to do so.

Dubbed “Um Like Um Balao” in Portuguese, the campaign promised to blow up a new green balloon every time the page got a new Like. Starting with an empty office, the space was quickly filled with green balloons in just one day.

Heineken Brazil staff also made fun, informal videos they posted on YouTube throughout the day the campaign ran. The affordable, short campaign generated thousands of new likes in a short amount of time; got mainstream media attention, and the videos got tens and thousands of views on YouTube. (source)

Cadbury Eggs – Chocolate Facebook Thumbs Up

Cadbury had the same idea, by adding chocolate with each new Facebook like to create a “Thumbs Up”

A real-time video feed of the construction process drove tremendous fan engagement. The result was a whopping 250,000 people actively involved in the campaign with a bonus of 40,000 new fans gained.

Oreos

When it come to social media, there is a certain amount of planning that cannot be done. It is about reacting to what is going on in the world, in your industry and whats trending locally, nationally and globally. Now, you can’t be on the ball all the time, but when you happen to be paying attention and respond in a smart way, you can hit a homerun. Oreo is one of the brands that is hitting them out of the park, over and over again.

Tweet during the Grammys

Tweeted during the Superbowl “black out”.

The clever post quickly had Twitter abuzz, with Oreo becoming a trending topic. As of noon on Monday, the twitpic had nearly 15,000 retweets and had been favorited more than 5,000 times.

Mashable’s Real-Life Facebook Wall

Mashable encouraged Facebook fans to connect by sharing their profile image which would be used to create a physical Facebook wall. The response was overwhelming.

When we started this project in November 2010, Mashable had slightly more than 300,000 Facebook fans and about 10 million monthly readers. Since then, our vibrant Facebook community has grown by nearly a half million people to about 800,000, and we’ve more than doubled the amount of people who read our site every month to 25 million monthly readers.

Conclusion

Brands participating in social media need to be, SOCIAL. That is, created with the goal of engaging with and making meaningful connections with your audience. Creating campaigns that your audience will participate in no easy task- but it can certainly be done as in the case of these brands. None of these campaigns involved sharing “buy this” “download this” language that social media users run from. Each campaign offered something original and worthwhile for the participants, or in the case of Oreo, being relevant to what is going on culturally.