And before anyone makes a snarky comment, this isn’t intended to showcase the campaigns that delivered the best ROI. You’ll find no hard metrics here.

Instead this will hopefully inspire your own efforts and keep you informed of what’s going on in social marketing.

For more of the same, check out my posts from November and October…

Enjoy!

Heinz

Heinz has rolled out its ‘Get Well Soup’ campaign for the fifth year running, so Facebook users are able to purchase a can of personalised soup from the Heinz fan page.

There are a limited number of cans available each day and with each purchase Heinz will give £1 to charity.

Personalised products are hugely popular (as we’ve seen with the Coca-Cola cans) and as this is the fifth year Heinz has run this initiative it clearly sees good results.

Adidas

Football is a sport that generates a large amount of vitriol and hatred, and social media has given people a handy channel through which to vent their fury.

Adidas is making light of this in a new social campaign based around the slogan #ThereWillBeHaters.

It features Luis Suarez, Gareth Bale, James Rodriguez and Karim Benzema, giving an over-the-top depiction of their daily lives.

For example, the Bale ads show him lounging on a desert island that’s shaped like the stupid heart shape he makes after scoring a goal.

The provocative tone of the campaign is a new direction for Adidas as its ads have normally focused on footballers’ talents rather than their champagne lifestyles.

Snapchat Discovery

Snapchat has launched a new content service called Discover that gives users a new content package every 24 hours.

It has signed up publishers including Vice, CNN, ESPN and the Daily Mail for the launch, with the latter apparently dedicating a team of four to repurposing content for the app.

Snapchat is insisting that Discover “is not social media” because it relies on editors rather than clicks and shares to determine what is important.

But whatever you want to call it, it’s an interesting development in Snapchat’s ongoing search for a revenue model.

Sharp’s Brewery

Sharp’s Brewery has just announced an elaborate new brand campaign that focuses on the company’s Cornish heritage.

It only kicked off at the very end of January so we don’t know much about it yet, but I’ve included it here mainly because I love the brewery’s Doom Bar ale.

The campaign aims to “reignite Brits’ lost sense of every day excitement” by offering up various adventures as competition prizes.

The first competition is live now and offers people the chance to win a personal brewing session with Sharp’s director of brewing.

To enter you have to go to Sharp’s new responsive site and create your own beer by choosing several different attributes and then writing a supporting statement.

Four other contests will go live during the year with prizes featuring a rugby world cup winner and a pro surfer.

Twitter’s video editor

Much like Snapchat, Twitter has also announced a major new feature this month. It now has group private messaging and video capturing tools.

Users can now capture and edit video content of up to 30 seconds in length, similar to Instagram. 

It will be interesting to see what this means for Vine and whether the standalone app has a long-term future.

Bulmers

Cider brand Bulmers has launched a new website that aims to put social at the centre of the brand experience.

The responsive site collates user-generated content under the #LiveColourful tagline, with images pulled from Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

The selection of images is actually quite high quality and nearly all come from the same small group of users.

It’ll be interesting to see how often it’s updated and also how long Bulmer’s sticks by this hashtag.

The site also includes a company timeline, product information and the company blog (though it doesn’t appear to be updated that often).

Airbnb

I very much enjoy Airbnb’s ‘night at’ events, one of which took place at a Waterstones bookshop in central London. 

The latest in the series sees the travel site offer people the chance to spend the night in a cable car in the Courchevel ski resort.

The accommodation is for up to three people and will stop 2,700m above ground. The prize also includes flights and hospitality in the resort.

To win you need to visit the listing on Airbnb and tell the host why you would like to spend the night in the cable car in fewer than 100 words.

It’s great PR for the company, but the campaign doesn’t appear to have an associated hashtag, which would help it to own social conversations.

VisitBritain

I’ve got something special to end with this month – a social campaign with ROI data.

The bad news is that it wasn’t launched in January, so I’m technically breaking the rules here.

Anyway… VisitBritain, the official tourist board of Great Britain, created a Tumblr page last year that promoted a range of things to see and do across the country via animated gifs, images and original content.

The content was distributed through Tumblr Sponsored Posts and native ads within Yahoo’s content streams and digital magazines.

The results were as follows:

  • Organic interactions (such as likes, re-blogs or follows) with VisitBritain’s content doubled in the first month, with blog impressions tripling in comparison to the month prior.
  • The campaign garnered 15m impressions and over 200,000 organic interactions over a three-week period.
  • Earned media helped spread the word about what travellers can experience in Great Britain and helped reduce the cost of the campaign by 40%.

If you count reach and impressions as valuable metrics, then I guess you could call that ROI.