Social Media engagement programs often use games or contests to promote new products or to increase brand recall within its target audience. However, with brands increasingly targeting the same group of customers with frequent and undifferentiated social marketing programs, both the quality of engagement and the affiliation towards a brand is decreasing. Moreover, such campaigns can be easily manipulated and with SEO already ensuring selective targeting, marketers may not be able to gauge the market sentiment comprehensibly.
Techies and Social Media junkies pulling all nighters playing games or chatting in front of flat screen monitors, while being bombarded with advertisements don’t really conjure an image of a real brand building exercise.
Geocaching is a global adventure treasure hunt that combines outdoors, technology and digital media. Geocachers navigate to a specific set of GPS coordinates using their GPS-enabled devices to find a geocache (container) hidden at that location. Once you find the Geocache you write in a log book saying “I was here” and exchange a small toy or trinket (give one take one). Currently there are more than 6 million geocachers globally tracking more than 2 millions geocaches.
Anyone can a make their own geocaching account at http://www.geocaching.com, download their tracking app and start searching for geocaches near your location or by size and difficulty.
This is a huge potential opportunity for marketers to create a highly engaging promotion campaign for their brands at virtually zero costs as geocachers create and propagate the challenge themselves. Companies can create their own geocaches which contain their merchandise and ask geocachers to enter their experiences in a log book. The hunt will involve passionate people who can then be asked to post images and experiences to create a buzz about their brand.
In one such brand building exercise geocaching.com created a customized, digital, all-inclusive marketing program for DoubleDay, publishers of John Grisham, to promote his new book ‘The Racketeer’. The challenge required participants to keep 5000 golden John Grisham Geocoins moving across US. When one participant finds a geocoin he moves it to another location. The participants were asked to upload photographs of their geocoins and eleven best photographs won personally Autographed exclusive copies of the book and a real gold coin. DoubleDay gained 72,000 new real Facebook fans and increased their reach by 220% in just a couple of months!
In another similar and ongoing challenge by Jeep’s Travel Bugs campaign,
geocachers are moving miniature Rock Crystal Pearl Jeep Commander models across
US. The company placed approximately 8,000 Jeep Travel Bugs in caches across
different terrains. Geocachers locate and move the Jeep travel Bug to its next
destination. The current locations of some of these geocaches can be tracked at http://jeep.geocaching.com/track/history.aspx.
Geocachers are asked to upload creative photographs of these models to their
website and Jeep uses these for its branding program and to keep the challenge
alive.
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