Viralogy

You need to give your consumers a reason to become a fan or follow you on Twitter.  Small and medium-sized companies often make the mistake that the simple action of building a FB Fan Page will instantly allow them to have tens of thousands of fans.  Depending on your company brand and culture, a strategy that you might want to engage in is to be bold, controversial, and sexy.

American Apparel is no small brand.  They are well known and have an excellent following.  At the same time, they are a perfect example of how to push the envelope and generate buzz by using “sex” as the hook but always making sure that the campaign is true to their company culture and brand.

Their latest campaign, Best Bottom in the World, is one of my favorite campaigns that I’ve seen in a very long time.  Lets dive into the campaign to see how they’ve marketed it and how I would improve the campaign.

Buzz and traction through large online publications

American Apparel has reached out to large publications to post the news of their competition.  These large publications include:

1. Style List
2. The Frisky
3. New York Fashion

Value: The most obvious value is that you’ll reach a large, targeted audience by having your competition posted on these large, highly trafficked publications.  The residual value is that smaller fashion and entertainment blogs, such as Street Level, will pick up the news and post it on their site as well because they want to keep their community in the know.  In essence, you pay for the big boys and you also get the little boys to post about you as well.

What about Sugar Inc, Mashable, Elle, and Glamor?  Heck, I’d sponsor Fashion Toast first and foremost

I did not find the American Apparel contest featured on Fab Sugar, Mashable, Elle, or Glamor online.  But I think one of the biggest opportunities that they are missing is the personal fashion bloggers niche.

The first thing that I would do is sponsor Fashion Toast. She is a hugely trafficked fashion blog who advertises on her sidebar for American Apparel.  Furthermore, she is well connected to the other fashion bloggers online, so there is a strong way to leverage her sponsorship to influence others to participate.  I would have made the marketing of this campaign focus purely on the fashion bloggers.  By getting them, Sugar, Elle, New York Fashion, and Glamor would all follow.

Reach out to the YouTube pop culture through a web celebrity

American Apparel was recently featured on the Philip Defranco show.  I’m not certain whether this was a paid sponsorship or not, but what is important is that Philip is a hugely watched show that hits a targeted audience.

Value: People love to watch Philip talk about Pop culture.  He has a die-hard community and that will take action to do whatever he tells them to do.  By becoming featured on the show, American Apparel reaches not only reaches an audience that would vote for nice bottoms, but more importantly, submit their own image.

Facebook and Twitter

I think American Apparel dropped the ball on FB and Twitter.  Yea they wrote a note on their Facebook Fan Page and made an announcement on Twitter, but they could have made it so much more engaging!

Facebook Application:

AA should have created a Facebook Application that allows fan to upload their image directly to the FB page.  Fans can then vote through the Facebook Fan Page and tell their community who they voted for.  I think this would greatly spread across Facebook.

Twit Pic Submission:

Twitter users should be able to upload an image directly from Twit pic to the AA main site.  In this way, you’ll generate more buzz from the Twitter community and allow for an easier submission process.

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There is so much potential with this campaign!  Remember, if you’re building a social campaign, make sure to leverage the power of the personal blogging community and to build a Facebook App when relevant.