Zócalo Group town square blog

As mentioned in Friday’s post, we knew social media was going to play a larger role in the Big Game last night. From the Twitter Ad Scrimmage commercial voting to the USA Today and Facebook admeter, websites were prepping for the prediction that up to 60% of mobile users plan to use their phones during the Super Bowl.

Twitter confirmed that Super Bowl XLVI became America’s most tweeted sporting event, with an average of 10,000 tweets per second in the final few minutes of the Big Game.

While a few ads included QR codes (GoDaddy) or Hashtags (Hulu #MushyMush), it doesn’t appear that most of them had much of call-to-action to get online. As reported by Mashable this morning, Zeta Interactive reported that Honda’s CR-V ad featuring Matthew Broderick was the most-buzzed about ad – - but it didn’t have any social media activation within the ad itself.

Nissan, a Zócalo Group client, did not run a Super Bowl ad but did participate in the social conversation with a relatively straightforward Twitter campaign aimed at competitive blunting.

Nissan (@NissanNews) posted reactions of the ads in real-time as they aired, encouraging users to check out relevant Nissan ads from the past few months. Searches for terms in popular ads including “Jerry Seinfeld” popped up with a Nissan response, and users favorably reacted to the Nissan tweets generating a high engagement, strong click-through and a couple hundred new followers for the brand. Overall, it cost less than $0.19 per impression.

Why this worked:

• Simple execution to not bombard followers – The goal was to create relevant conversation around the brand during a peak conversation event.  Goal of the small budget program was to always be relevant to the conversation rather than hijacking it and annoying followers.
• Humorous and timely tweets – As with most things that catch-on in social, adding a bit of humor to the responses prompted more sharing of the content.  And, timing our posts to the appearance of our competitors’ ads was key.

Check out some of our favorite tweets below, and the tweet responses complimenting the campaign! What do you think about this approach?