Hugh Garry: Rewarding the Love

Rewarding the Love

Rewarding love is something that we've always tried to do at Radio 1 via our social media channels. And why not? It's so easy. Retweeting and replying to tweets can have a huge impact on your audience. Recognising their appreciation of you makes them feel good about your brand, and when they feel good about your brand they'll share the love with their friends. Do that with 1000 True Fans and you're doing well.

Last weekend we went to the T In The Park festival in Scotland and did some digital shout-outs via Twitter and Facebook. The idea was to get photos of our audience's favourite bands holding up hand written personalised 'shouts outs' to our followers. It went something like this...

When the digital world and the 'real world' collide in real-time like this I get a little giddy, even more so when some major stars began playing the game. The result looked something like this. Here's heartthrob Jared Leto from 30 Seconds To Mars rewarding our audience with some Leto Love...

And the reactions went something like this...

And some people liked it for other reasons...

So, our audience told us who they liked, we got photos of them saying 'hello' back, they felt amazing and told all their friends. We rewarded the love of our 1000 True Fans with a digital autograph.

Three days later Old Spice owned social media with a brilliant follow-up to their genius advert. The shirtless Old Spice man asked you to submit questions to which he would respond... personalised and in real time. The results were incredible. Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher, Jason Calacanis, Kevin Rose, Perez Hilton, Ellen Degeneres, Christine Applegate, Biz Stone and more scrambled to get their questions answered. His responses were hilarious and the tidal wave of retweets shook the foundations of Twitter for 24 hours.