Help Me Honda! Personalised Campaign Nets Good Vine-brations

Honda's campaign was simple: tweet the reasons you hate your old vehicle and use the hashtag #wantnewcar.

The car giant then responded to individual gripes with entertaining videos posted to Vine and embedded in the company's tweets. 

It was a big hit, but just how did they do it?

1) Personalisation 

This very personal, but at the same time public approach to customer issues added a much-needed human element to a huge brand. Not only did the personalised mechanic encourage users into playful dialogue, it also prompted people to tweet in the hope of having a customised video created about them. 

2) Responsiveness 

The use of Vine and Twitter for the campaign enabled Honda to create snappy, real-time responses to users whilst taking advantage of rich media interaction. Not only did Honda reply to user tweets, but they also showed their ability to have fun and engage other brands in real-time. Take the Bejeweled Blitz tweet for example:  

3) Shaping the conversation 

The use of #wantnewcar helped the car giant track conversations in their own social streams, allowing them to select messages with the greatest mileage and respond with relative ease. Once they got rolling with a few fun and quirky posts, this helped direct the development of themes in the conversation. 

4) Visual content 

Rather than just reading responses on a stream, ther brand's social team cooked up a range of creative videos. As soon as the first couple of videos had been consumed, people were hooked and were eager to see what Honda would think up next, creating a real buzz. 

5) Humour 

Laughter creates memories because shared experiences build trust and affection. We all love to laugh and this was the key for Honda to get people sharing their content. In doing so, Honda was able to proliferate their message - #wantnewcar Summer Clearance sale -  with ease. Take this great Vine video  for example in response to one follower tweeting that she needed a new car because her old one was, wait for it...“a dinosaur”. 

It was great to see such a large brand shed some of the caution that we see with other large firms and embrace social in such a personalised and entertaining way. Now we have to see who follows suit...

Image (cc) Rachel So