Successful Public Relations Campaigns

Successful public relations campaigns no longer have to stop at billboards, store greeters and newspapers. In this age of social networking, media and technology, there are numerous opportunities to explore various methods of implementing effective public relations campaigns and a variety of companies have been capitalizing on these different methods. Following, you will see examples of employing the Internet, nature and a host of other methods in order to catch the eye and attention of consumers. In this day, the options are so vast that marketing, advertising and PR professionals have their work cut out for them.
In February 2011, Rayovac initiated a Rapid-Response Twitter campaign to engage consumers who likely had spare time on their hands due to the snowstorm that a big part of the country was experiencing. The campaign was essentially a virtual snowball fight that included consumer changing their profile picture to a Rayovac-branded avatar and each related tweet utilized the hashtag #snowball. The virtual snowball fight lasted for roughly 48 hours and thereafter Rayovac hosted a two hour snow day tweet-up where Rayovac followers could tweet about the weather in their area, activities they partook in and weather related trivia complete with prizes. This particular campaign was seemingly successful, generating 1188 click-throughs to retrieve the branded avatar, becoming a worldwide trending topic (#TT) and a 30% increase in Twitter followers.
With the popularity of Twitter, this was a genius marketing/public relations plan. It gave consumers something to do while home on their snow days and one could assume that some participants were introduced and others may have become more familiar with the brand Rayovac. There’s not much that I would have done differently. I think that the only component that was missing was something to target the non-Twitter users. Since this was solely an online public relations effort, this same campaign could have been