They say a picture is worth a thousand words, how much for these videos?

Soft Drink companies seem to be the ones that are engaging with their fans in more elaborate and innovative ways. This week’s social media brand chart shows that Red Bull and Coca Cola are dominating social media chatter. This is unsurprising given the enormity of both stunts, particularly Red Bull.

Red Bull sponsored Felix Baumgartner’s free fall from the edge of space which was streamed live on YouTube and was viewed by 8 million people. The page saw outstanding engagement with the posts it published in the lead up to the event, with the top post gaining 525,328 likes; 69,868 shares and 15,395 comments.

(https://www.insidefacebook.com/2012/10/17/red-bull-lindt-chocolate-usa-coca-cola-and-more-among-this-weeks-top-ptat-gainers-for-foodbeverages-pages/)

Although Coca-Cola may have been dominated by Red Bull this week, it too had strong engagement and consistent growth in its fan base.  It was also aided by a creative Coke Zero PR stunt in promotion for the latest 007 film Skyfall.

Although understandable it didn’t achieve anywhere near as much notoriety as Red Bull’s dropping stunt it still has racked up a respectable 3.6 million views.

What’s great about Coke is that they are making a continuous and active effort to connect with fans, such as myself for example after commenting on how cool the stunt was within minutes I was tweeted back;

The two videos show the importance of creativity in marketing and how important social media is in implementing and supporting fan engagement. Moreover it shows how important it is that stunts are relevant to the brands identity.  Although many brands probably don’t have any where near as much budget for publicity stunts, they can take inspiration from the creativity that both brands have used and how they engage with fans. For example Bodyform last week proved that you don’t need a huge budget to make something go viral in its response with ‘the truth’ to a comedic Facebook rant about ‘that time of the month’ by Richard Neill

The gauntlet has been thrown…is your brand creative enough to rise to the challenge?

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