It was more or less a couple of weeks ago when Corinne asked us to form a group and think about a campaign to promote breast cancer awareness online.
I know, I’m late, I should’ve written this post before and, I know, summed up like this it looks pretty simple. But it was not, at least for 10 reasons:
1) Our group was formed based on where we were sitting, so random people and a mysterious International Business student we just met. Strangers, because anyway we still don’t really know each other and this makes the situation both exciting and unpredictable.
2) The topic was the Pink October, the breast cancer awareness month. Every social campaign is a challenge, you are supposed to “sell” a new behaviour, but to speak about cancer and breast make the issue even more delicate and filled with taboos.
3) From the briefing to the actual thinking went by roughly 15 minutes, then 5 minutes to write down 20 ideas and 30 minutes to discuss them in our group with a positive approach (anything negative would’ve been literally “knocked out”).
4) Then 15 minutes to prepare a pitch introducing what we were supposed to work on for the next Thursday.
5) We had to use lemons, for their similarity with the breast shape.
6) And It had to be a viral campaign online. A real one.
We came up with an “IceBucketChallenge-style” campaign. We would’ve picked some guy up off the street giving him two lemons to hold while we would’ve asked questions like “what do you know about lemons?”, “and about breasts?”, “and about breast cancer?”. This should’ve been a video posted online and other girls, that we would’ve nominated through some social media, had to do the same to keep the viral campaign going. And here comes the 7th reason:
7) I went to Central London on a Sunday to test our idea on the field. Of course it was embarrassing, but only doing it I realised all the difficulties: to stop someone filming with your phone while you’re holding two lemons and then ask weird questions about cancer. All this trying not to scare him to death. Moreover, we found out that to be filmed seems to be a problem for a lot of people.
8) When we met again with our team we had to quickly think to an alternative. The temptation to pick the first thing coming to our mind was significant, instead we brainstormed again. We were aware of all the barriers this time but ideas still flowed freely.
The new concept we came up with was a single viral video: 13 men (not that tuned) singing one line each of the popular song “Lemon tree”. Link and hashtag of the campaign had to be shown just in the end, to tease the watcher nothing too specific had to be said.
9) So again we went hunting participants, explaining to each one what we aimed to do and why in the most convincing way. Filming and singing are not the average guy’s favourite activities, but we made it anyway!
This is our #knowyourlemons tree video:
It scored 226 views during the first 24 hours.
The short URL of the official website has been clicked 70 times so far.
And 687 people have been invited to the facebook event.
Obviously, it’s not a stunning success in the web marketing world but it taught me a lot.
I recognised all the Lean Start Up phases we went through – Thinking (1-6), Testing (7) , Pivot (8) and Trading (9) – but, moreover, I discover that people can always surprise you as you can surprise yourself. With short time and strangers coworkers coming from unknown backgrounds it’s easy to think “It’s impossibile, we won’t come up with anything valuable”, but if you only let this prejudice go and your mind free of experimenting you can get unpredictable results. So, my conclusion comes with the 10th reason:
10) It will never be simple to work seriously on something new, as it will never be simple working with people who (surprisingly!) live outside your head but in the end it’s far more satisfying than anything else. And the best part is that each of these experiences teaches you something about yourself, who you can be and what you can do.
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Campaign update and reflections
Media & Numbers
We posted our video on Pinterest on an pre-existing targeted board.
We posted 15sec of our knowyourlemons video on instagram with some trending hashtags.
We tweeted and retweeted posts about our campaign with different hashtags and teasing sentences during the first week and some people followed.
Our campaign went pretty viral on Facebook during the first 2 days. Many of our friends shared the link to the video, but some of them forgot the link to the main website.
Facebook event
We created a facebook Event inviting all our friends. They spread it reaching up to 671 invitation. Even though just 53 people clicked “Going” many of them shared it, saw the video and visit the website.
YouTube
The video on YouTube scored 333 views so far, 226 of which during the first 24h.
Personal email campaign
I personally emailed some people I thought could’ve been interested on the topic, people that I know are not that involved with social medias.
Google Shortener
Our short URL has been clicked 75 times, from Italy, Russia and Britain mostly. Social medias played a role, but 36% of our visits have been direct.
Shortcomings
Language – the website and the campaign in general are in English and the majority of our connections are not English speakers. Having everything translated in other languages could’ve been more engaging for them.
Video – The video was funny and went viral among our friends because of the people involved, common people they could know. Despite this the link to the campaign was not that visible and the one at the end of the video couldn’t be clicked directly. We should have focused more on strategies to lead people to click.
Target – With more time to target the campaign, picking out which of our connections and Groups could’ve led to a more interested target, could’ve been more effective in spreading the campaign.
Time – Posting and reposting many times and at different time on all our social media, testing different approaches and keywords, could’ve helped us to “pivot” our campaign.
thoughtfromthemace 
