RadioShack #24dealsin24

The Situation
While Black Friday was still about retail sales in 2012, RadioShack wanted to create buzz among shoppers on Cyber Monday. Knowing that social would be key, we created a “24 deals in 24 hours” promotion that featured a new deal every hour on the hour to drive awareness of RadioShack’s Cyber Monday sales and also drive people back to our website.

We setup our Cyber Monday promotional hub page with Twitter integrated directly into it using a fun and friction-less gaming component: every hour, a hint about the next hour’s deal was tweeted with a link back to the website and the hashtag #24dealsin24. By following the link in the tweet, shoppers could visit the #24dealsin24 site and make a guess about the next hour’s deal, as well as purchase the current deal of the hour. RadioShack used Promoted Tweets in timelines to amplify engagement with these Cyber Monday messages throughout the day.

To incentivize people to participate in the “guessing game” and drive return visits, every guess that was made on the site – whether correct or not – qualified as an entry for a chance to win one of forty-eight $100 RadioShack gift card. Winners were announced on Twitter every hour on the half-hour. Whenever someone made a guess on the site, RadioShack made it easy to share that they had participated in the giveaway with a pre-populated tweet.

The Results
Our #24dealsin24 campaign created tremendous awareness and engagement on Twitter that far exceeded RadioShack’s business expectations. We saw a 1,200% increase in daily mentions of @RadioShack on Cyber Monday and a 2,000% lift in unique conversations around the brand.

Despite strong competition for share of voice on Cyber Monday, our #24dealsin24 hashtag trended organically for 20 out of 24 hours. According to Data Sift Inc., the RadioShack promotion was the most-frequently shared coupon or offer on social networks during the shopping days surrounding Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

3 Keys to Success
1. Plan for real time – with the #24dealsin24 giveaway, we focused on developing a strong strategy weeks in advance of the campaign. As we were laying out the strategy, I took lead in pre-crisis planning – thinking through every kind of scenario that could go wrong during the promotion and every response we might need to be prepared to tweet. This formed the foundation of a strong set of rules that helped minimize scrambling during execution. We also used Promoted Tweets from the RadioShack brand handle to build anticipation for the contest a few days before Cyber Monday.

2. Listen and adapt – during the early hours of the giveaway, I led a team who monitored conversations about #24dealsin24 on forums, blogs, and on Twitter. As a result of this monitoring, we quickly realized that there was confusion about whether or not a guess had to be correct to be considered a valid entry. By listening to consumers in real time, we identified a potential issue and sent a few tweets that clarified the rules for everyone playing.

3. Make it easy to participate – One of the key tenets that we focused on while creating the #24dealsin24 was that we had to keep the barrier to participate as low as possible. To allow more mass audience to participate and stay engaged throughout the day, we worked with our legal team to allow any guess – not just correct ones – to qualify as an entry to win the hourly gift card giveaway. This fun and simple approach worked: most users interacted with the giveaway for 3 or more hours on Cyber Monday.