Social Media Campaign Review: ITC Grand Chola's Tweet for Treats

Objective

A simple marketing campaign that aims to spread the word about ITC Grand Chola, Chennai through Twitter. The objective here is to lure the tweeters with prizes to tweet about the hotel and share it with their friends.

Execution

The Tweet for Treats campaign asks the users to tweet their views and opinions about ITC Grand Chola through their own microsite. The sharebox on their microsite is where you have to add your text. It will automatically add the hashtag #tweetsfortreats and a URL back to the microsite and tweet it out.

For every tweet, the 'Glory Point' counter goes up be one point. This Glory Point counter reflects the number of tweets from the entire Twitter community including yours.

This Glory Point counter has milestones which, when reached, unlock milestone treats. These treats can be anything, such as gourmet experiences, spa sojourns, luxury stays, gift certificates etc. The winner are chosen by a lucky draw.

Also, in between the milestone treats there are some hidden treats. Whenever a person unlocks it with his/her tweet, he/she stands to win treats.

Positives

I find the campaign good. Having a microsite helps and it's an easy way to spare people the need to manually add your hashtag in their tweets.

Also, it's nice to make the crowd work towards the milestones and hence generate some feedback. But this is where the positives end.

Scope for Improvement

Just glance at the tweets for the hashtag and you will see people are simply copy-pasting the sample tweets provided on the microsite. Now, this presents a pretty sad picture because this will result into spamming of timelines. And I doubt Twitter will let this hashtag trend seeing that it is a spammers paradise.

Moreover, the brand will not get anything out of it from a customer feedback point of view because people are simply copy-pasting tweets and not sharing their real views and opinions about The Grand Chola.

Well, I doubt the brand even cared about getting genuine feedback, otherwise it must have removed the sample tweets seeing that people are simply replicating them.

It would have been better if they had kept this as 'Hotel Only' where their hotel patrons could tweet/share right from the premises using RFID technology. It might not have trended but the reach could have been much better with genuine people sharing updates with their network.

But in this case, people seem to be sharing it just to win prizes.

Conclusion

Could have been a great campaign, ruined by the desire to make the hashtag trend.