Social Media Campaign Review: Klip created a Buzz with its Kwirky Blog Awards

Social media for products has been around for quite some time catching our fancy with some off-beat, curated products. Loosely following the model of Fancy.com, an Indian start-up Klip.in has launched a lifestyle product discovery tool to help people find "interesting and off beat lifestyle products" in 2012. To get the buzz around the website going, the startup has launched a fashion and lifestyle bloggers engagement campaign through its Kwirky Blog Awards, which I am going to review below.

Objective:

Objective of the campaign is to create buzz around Klip.in by engaging fashion and lifestyle bloggers, and to that end the lifestyle product discovery tool had announced an award that will be given to the blog in the segment with the most vote.

Execution:

On Social media, the Kwirky Award is being promoted through Facebook and twitter, and because of a voting mechanism there is a viral element to the contest. After securing a submission the blog needs to secure as many votes as it can to win an award.

Top blog with maximum number of votes will get a gift voucher of Rs. 3,000, and a gift voucher worth Rs. 1,000 each will be given to the next four blogs. The company has chosen Facebook and Twitter as social channels to promote the award.

Positives:

Inclusion of viral element and quite a handful number of awards are two positives that stand out in the campaign. Another positive is its clutter-free cover-page design, and to some extent its landing page design.

The viral element of the campaign has brought it some success, as participants have used social media to get move votes, an example of one such initiative can be seen in the image below.

Scope for Improvement:

Social media participation was something the startup should have worked a lot more on. Apart from a cover page, a couple of random posts on its Facebook timeline and twitter, nothing much has been done to get the community excited.

I was even disappointed with the Facebook posts. It was completely uninspiring. I expected a lot more, at least a visually appealing update, from an award that ventured to find top 7 excellent fashion and lifestyle blogs, and not just a verbose update with a cover page as its visual element.

Twitter effort was further disappointing. There was no spirit in tweets it sent out to announce the award. They conspicuously lacked hashtags. The company should have at least tweeted about the award with some degree of frequency.

You can count the total number of tweets and Facebook posts to promote the award on your fingers. The language uses in Facebook updates, tweets, and on the landing page is ill suited for an award in fashion and lifestyle niche. For an award to be successful in social media, the text should be persuasive.

Conclusion:

The award had a good potential, but in this case, it is a wasted one. If Klip.in had planned its social media activity for the award beforehand, they would have received many more entries and many more votes. They should be begun with an outreach program to widen its net, but in the absence of any serious social media effort, this campaign will only go so far.