Kmart and Social Media Exposure

So if you haven’t heard, my team at the illustrious co. I work for, IZEA, launched a blog outreach/social media campaign for Kmart a few weeks ago with enormous success. (You haven’t heard? WHERE have YOU been?). The campaign had some compelling elements: A few influential bloggers were given a $500 gift card to Kmart and they chart their buying experience at the store and create sponsored blog posts about it. They then hold a contest to give away another $500 gift card to one of their readers, who is chosen at random from either a comment left at the post or from retweets done on twitter, mentioning the item they wold buy at Kmart if they won and linking back to the post.

Thousands of tweets were done, pushing the brand Kmart into the dynamic realm we call social media. A huge amount of buzz was generated for Kmart, encouraging consumers to give Kmart a shot for their business this holiday season. Take a look at the graph that displays Kmart’s SMI (Social Media Index). SMI is a tool which provides a snapshot in realtime that helps measure conversations about a brand. Notice the huge jump after we launched the campaign.

So why does this work? At IZEA, we strive to drive deeper and more connected relationships between Brands and consumers. This in turn builds brand and product advocacy resulting in what really matters – growth, competitive differentiation and affinity. In this economic climate, it’s something ALL brands need.