Welcome to the future, Methodites! We're now officially one year away from finally getting the hoverboard I've wanted ever since I saw Back to the Future II when I was six years old. We here at Method hope you've had a restful holiday season and that you're looking forward to a productive 2014. 

But as we begin the new year, I find myself reminiscing on the year we've left behind. And since there's always something to be gained by casting our gaze back over what worked and what didn't, I'd like to share with you some of the best and brightest uses of social advertising we saw in 2013.

1: Nikon Rocks SXSW

During this year's South by Southwest Music Festival, the good people at Nikon decided to take advantage of the social media savvy of attending fans to get the word out about their new camera line. They gave away free WiFi-enabled cameras to select fans and ask only that they do what they were going to do anyway - take pictures and video and share them on social media. The result? A whopping 166 million impressions of overwhelmingly positive feedback over the three-day festival, all of which had Nikon tagged. It's a risky gamble putting your product and brand reputation in the hands of your consumers, but if you play your cards right it can really pay off.

2: Sprout It Grows Their Business

Sprout It is dedicated to helping new gardeners develop their green thumbs, and to prove it (and to announce the launch of their new iPhone app) they created a contest just for fledgling horticulturalists. They invited fans to take pictures of backyard areas in most need of a makeover - the winner received a free professional backyard design and landscape. So what happened? Home gardeners and DIY bloggers jumped on the opportunity, generating over 300,000 Facebook posts, 60,000 tweets, and at least 5,000 unique visits to Sprout It's home page. Targeting the right influencers, including top-end bloggers in their demographic, was a great way for a startup like Sprout It to establish themselves as a gardening-first company.

3: Starbucks digitizes coffee (sort of)

Starbucks is typically on the front line when it comes to marketing - from the design of their stores or the patenting of their unique beverage names.  But they're also tech-savvy, and they proved it in 2013 when they introduced the Tweet-a-Coffee program.  Just by following @starbucks on Twitter and connecting their own account to their Starbucks account (a quick and easy process) users were able to literally tweet a coffee to a friend in the form of a printable voucher or a redeemable coupon on their own Starbucks account.  This might not sound like much for a giant corporation like Starbucks to accomplish, but it's the flawless incorporation of social media tools into their sales strategy that really makes this entry shine.  It's also a great way to engage younger audiences and remind people the Starbucks brand is about more than just coffee.

Obviously, small business owners aren't going to enact the same sorts of plans as Nikon or Starbucks, for a variety of reasons. But it's valuable to look at the kind of thinking that brought them to these unique and successful social marketing strategies. Exactly how they acted on that line of thinking is less important than the way they decided to change it up and approach marketing in a new and interesting way. It's the kind of thinking you can apply to your business.



In 2014, make a point of learning how your business can grow through social interaction, how you can make new connections with existing and potential customers. It so happens I wrote a whole section of our documentation on the subject of advertising campaigns and how they can be tracked in Method CRM, so it might help to drop by and take a look there as well.

In the meantime, enjoy a productive January and we'll see you out there in 2014!

Alex, Documentation Specialist