Twitter, baseball, and watching a game with your kids - it doesn't get much better than that for me.
My family and I recently experienced a Toronto Blue Jays game and their promotion for using the hashtag #twittertuesdays on a Tuesday home game. By following a simple playbook, the Blue Jays entered marketing nirvana by turning their customers into evangelists.
First - the Blue Jays promoted their #twittertuesdays hashtag on their website, with their own twitter account @bluejays, and throughout the stadium.
Second - They offered a contest. The
"Most Valuable Tweeter" as decided upon by fan voting, won a free luxury box suite to one of their September home games.
Third - The Blue Jays were social. Social media isn't about finding another channel to broadcast your message. It's about interacting, listening, answering . . . being social.
Before the game, #twittertuesdays announcements were on the screens and throughout the stadium. Using my iPhone (although any smartphone would work) I began tweeting about the experience, mentioned it was my kids' first time in Toronoto, and I even sent a few twitpics (pictures sent via twitter) about the good time we were having. Using the #twittertuesdays hashtag with my tweets, other fans at the game were able to see my updates and interact. The Toronto Blue Jays marketing representative even stopped by our seats to talk to us. She gave us a t-shirt, took our picture and just welcomed us to the game.
During the game the contest began and 100s of people were twittering with the #twittertuesdays hashtag. The @bluejays would respond to some tweets and continued to interact with all of the fans. During the 7th inning, the Blue Jays posted a twitpic of my kids (with ice cream all over their faces) on the giant video screen for 20,000 fans to see!
At the end of the game, the Most Valuable Tweeter was announced. It wasn't me, but I had such a good time talking baseball (over twitter), sitting with my family at a baseball game, winning a t-shirt and getting my kids picture on the giant screen that it didn't really matter. The Blue Jays didn't even win the game, but the experience was great.
The Blue Jays are scoring with #twittertuesdays. They are getting 100s of people at every Tuesday home game to promote their products. These are customers who already paid the Blue Jays for a product and are now sharing their positive experiences with the 100s or 1,000s of people who follow them on twitter.
The cost for this promotion is minimal. The Blue Jays give out a few t-shirts, talk to their customers, and award one person with their best product, the luxury box suite to another game. The marketing effort doesn't stop with the announcement of the winner. What will the Most Valuable Tweeter probably do? That person will continue to give positive comments on twitter about the Blue Jays and their most expensive/best product.
Twitter and Non Twitter Users
To search for twitter conversations and information about #twittertuesdays, go to www.twitter.com and type #twittertuesdays. This will bring a list of tweets using the #twittertuesdays hashtag. Another search is hashtags.org/tag/twittertuesdays. You can RSS any of the searches and add it to your RSS reader as another way to keep track of this hashtag or any other.
TweetDeck users can click the search icon in tweetdeck and type #twittertuesdays. This open another column (if you have less than 10 columns) and continually refreshes as long as you keep it.
I recommend using twitter hashtags for marketing all of your events. You may not be on twitter, but chances are, some of your customers are.
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