Please ReTweet Me

Background

The Meningitis Trust was created in 1986 and since then has generated grants of £1.5m to help people rebuild their lives after meningitis.

It relies entirely on voluntary donations to do its work.

For the Trust, social media looks beguiling as it can be a way of engaging hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people at relatively low cost. The trick is finding an idea that would direct people to their Facebook page.

Idea

“Please ReTweet Me” is an ironic reworking of Engelbert Humperdinck’s 43-year old hit “Release Me”. The lyrics were changed to include all the major social network and digital media names, thus:

Please retweet me, let me post

for I don’t Digg you any more.

To waste Myspace would be a sin,

Retweet me and let me blog again.

A video of the choir singing the anthem was uploaded onto YouTube and onto www.meningitis-trust.org and a PR, blogger outreach, Facebook and Twitter campaign was supported by pay per click search marketing.

Traffic was driven to the Meningitis Trust’s Facebook and Twitter pages, where people could learn more about meningitis and how to deal with it. They could also join the group.

Many charity campaigns are designed to shock audiences but this approach was designed to create shareable content aimed at a hard-to-reach target audience of younger people.

Results

So far:

• 23,450 You Tube video views
• 128 You Tube video likes
• 17 Comments

Facebook:

• 2,500 views of the “Please ReTweet Me” tab on the MT page
• Around 400 new Meningitis Trust page likes taking the total to 6,955.
• Facebook page views on average at about 100 a day. However this went much higher after launch

Twitter:

• 177 new followers
• 678+ tweets

Our Thoughts

There is something of a Facebook theme in this section of Directory and this was voted in by the editorial committee as another example of the sort of ‘anti-marketing’; that Facebook allows some marketers to get away with.

No surprise this campaign was created by a PR agency rather than an advertising shop. It is so softly-softly that when you click onto pleaseretweetme.com, it’s a bit of a shock to go straight to the Meningitis Trust’s Facebook page.

At first I wondered what the real objectives behind this campaign were. There is some sort of explanation in CEO Sue Davie’s remark: ‘We want to reach out to a young audience and make them aware of the signs and symptoms, and what they should do if they are concerned. ‘Please ReTweet Me’ appeals to an at-risk group; if it helps save one life it will have worked.’

Agreed.