How The Daily Star won 'Best in social media engagement' in South Asian Digital Media Awards 2017

Table of Contents:

• Emotional Insight
• Partner On-boarding & Preparation
• Most Effective Tactics
• Results

Emotional Insight:

On April 1st, Shuvashish Roy and I had joined The Daily Star's digital marketing team. For Shuvashish, it was his second term at The Daily Star.

Both of us wanted to start off with a big boom.

Mother's Day was coming on May 8th.

Shuvashish's wife had just given birth this his first child.

I remember Shuvashish coming to the office one day and saying, "My wife has a special name for our son - 'Ghupu Sona'. When I was a child, my mother also had a nick name for me."

"What if we design a campaign that allows people to share a photo with their mother and this cute nickname?" 

As Bangladeshis have an intensely strong bond with their mothers, on Mother's Day we especially look for ways to appreciate and respect our mothers.

We came up with some insights that we could use to design a campaign.

Partner On-boarding & Preparation:

When thinking of partners, we had to choose wisely. It came down to this particular niche:

After some scoping, we found CBL Munchees as our partner, a biscuit, chocolate & confectionery manufacturer.

We tweaked the campaign further under the supervision of the Head of Marketing at The Daily Star, Tajdin Hassan.

A microsite was developed where users could upload a photo with their mother and the special name she gave to her.

Every person who uploaded would get their own URL where they could see the photo and name.

There were buttons to help them share on social media platforms and a leaderboard to show the ranking.

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Most Effective Tactics:

To ensure that the campaign goes viral, we deployed these tactics:

• Launched it as a competition with voting option:
  To win the competition, users would need a high number of votes. And to do that, they had to share their individual post's URL on social media platforms.  
  In the book 'Contagious', the case study of 'No Shave November' was discussed to showcase the importance of making sure your campaign is seen by others.
  Similarly, when our users shared their own posts, it caught attention of other people who jumped in on the action.

• Made the shared post look like a regular post from The Daily Star:
  We've already covered this in the infographic, but it deserves another mention. In the book, 'Made to Stick', the writers show how much users like 'social currency.' Any campaign or product that makes you look smarter, cool, or rich, has the potential to go viral.
  We achieved this because of the UI.

• Influencer Marketing:
  We used 7 social media influencers who shared their stories and the special name their mother used to call them. Both photo and video content were made, uploaded, and boosted with the aim of driving traffic to the microsite. Their followers shared their posts and also participated. 77% of the traffic was generated from Facebook.

The videos can be seen here:

• Ayman Sadiq -Online Educator
• Zara Mahbub - Corporate CXO
• Arif R Hussain - Social Activist
• Prito Reza - Photographer
• Shahtaj Monira Hashem - Actress & Model
• Solaiman Shukhon - Vlogger & Corporate Leader
• Saif Kamal - Global Shaper

The campaign quickly caught fire and became viral.

During the campaign, we also encountered fraudsters and click-bot users, who were banned from the competition.

Once the campaign was over, a small prize giving ceremony was hosted and a press release about the campaign was published.