Thoughts About MBTeamS and the (First) Great Tweet Race
I haven’t checked, but I might have lost quite a few Twitter followers last week. Why? Because I participated in the Mercedes Benz Tweetrace (MBTweetrace).
The Tweetrace was a pretty crazy idea and an even crazier experience. Mercedes Benz fans submitted videos about why they and a partner should be chosen to drive a Mercedes to Dallas for the SuperBowl. Each team was assigned a celebrity coach to help out. Four teams were chosen and each team started out in a different city, heading to Dallas and converging at the big game.
The idea was that during the days they were driving, they’d mobilize their Twitter followers to tweet about the race. Hashtagged tweets enabled the teams to fill up virtual gas tanks and accumulate points. During the race, each team had challenges to complete—take a photo of Mercedes dealerships in towns they were passing through, for example. And their followers were assigned challenges, such as tweeting photos of signs supporting their team. The winning team members were awarded for their efforts with a new Mercedes—not to mention fame and glory. And, more importantly, a substantial donation to a charity.
Anyone who knows me knows that I’m not at all interested in sports, don’t really care about cars, and am pretty much skeptical about brands conducting this kind of activity in the first place. Not to mention the fact that I value my Twitter followers and don’t want to tweet more frequently, about more largely irrelevant things, than I already do.
But all that changed when Todd Sanders (@tsand) created an amusing, authentic, and sly video and won entry into the MBTweetRace. So I became one of a large number of people who tweeted on behalf of MBTeamS—led by Todd, his partner John Pederson and fueled by 1453 other folks who included the #mbteams hashtag in their tweets on February 2, 3, and 4, when the race was conducted.
In the process of participating in the race, I learned a few things about how to conduct these kinds of events—and how to succeed.
1. You need a compelling cause.
Todd and John were raising money for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital, a charity chosen by their team coach, Pete Wentz, Chicago-bred bassist and frontman of the band Black Cards. Their own followers coalesced to raise $5,000 for St. Jude’s; Mercedes will contribute $25,000—and more if MBTeamS wins. A compelling cause for all who participated.
2. You need a compelling leader with a unique voice who’s able to engage people.
Todd works in student affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. I’ve met Todd and count him as a friend. We met him about six years ago when he won a CASE award for his innovative use of YouTube in communicating with students. He’s still pushing the envelope in student affairs, as Eric Stoller noted in a terrific profile on his Inside Higher Ed blog.
But, more important, Todd is well known for his warm, amusing, unpredictable, sly, and totally authentic presence on Twitter (where I and about 4,000 others follow him). He’s amassed a large number of Twitter followers who work in higher ed and, as Tim Nekritz pointed out this week, Todd is beloved by this community. Like many others, I appreciate the fact that Todd is an original. I’ll do a lot for him.
3. Three days is a long time to participate.
Some people (I’m not mentioning names here, but you know who you are @juliafallon, @timhoff, @epsteadaS, @jesskry, @ganyardp, and @andrewcareaga) tweeted a lot during the race.
Fortunately, one of the days was a snow day for a lot of people, so they could participate from home and that probably boosted support. Though I did notice a lot of tweets on Friday. For myself, I was on the road and in meetings and did what I could. It’s very difficult for people to pay attention and tweet for this length of time. I give Todd a huge amount of credit for being such a powerful voice and keeping us all focused. He was a masterful leader. Without his humour and engaging presence, it would have been a lot less fun.
It was tremendously exciting for those of us who were involved in the race supporting Todd. On the other hand, it was asking a lot of our Twitter followers to be involved along with us. I don’t know if I lost many followers, but one person left, tweeting: “I’m tired of the #MBcrap.” I was as absorbed in the race as I could be, given other commitments and responsibilities. But not everyone was.
4. It helps to have a tech-savvy community supporting you.
I haven’t done much investigation into the other teams and as I write, this, I don’t know who won. The winner will be announced tomorrow: follow @MBtweetraceHQ or join [url=http://www.facebook.com/mercedesbenzusa]the Facebook group[/ur/].
I do know, though, that if you look at the analytics on tweets alone, it’s hard to imagine any other team pulling ahead of MBTeamS, Todd & John’s team. At the start of the last day of the race, I tweeted this: “Here’s where we start: @tsand #mbteams = 65,485 pts; other 3 teams together = 73,564.”
And I captured this screen showing the tweet volume this morning:
It was amazing to see how Todd’s support team used powerful tools to help meet challenges. One challenge was a Scavenger Hunt: supporters were tasked with coming up with images of Mercedes Benz-related locations and items. MBTeamS supporters built a Google doc to list the items and figure out how to track them down: at one point, there must have been 50 people editing the document simultaneously. It was thrilling to watch the Google doc being updated in real time and watch items being crossed off the list.
Being able to use technology in this way enabled Todd’s team to crowdsource the assets needed to meet this challenge.
5. In the end, community is everything.
Early on, bloggers with significant numbers of followers in higher ed rallied support to MBTeamS—chief among them Karine Joly, Andrew Careaga, and Eric Stoller.
Karine entitled her post “Let’s show the power of the higher ed community.” It was very exciting being part of the action, when I could be. There were a lot of ways to connect to this event—the support of St. Jude’s, doing something crazy with people you know, and a lot of people you don’t. I, and many others, definitely felt like we were connected to each other and do a larger community. Curtiss Grymala wrote, ” I think it’s amazing how well the higher education community (which made up the majority of supporters for Team S) bonds together for a cause.”
Or, as Alaina Wiens pointed out,
As I reflect on this experience, I’m sure I’ll have other thoughts to share. It’s been an amazing three days. And I want to thank Todd for giving me and so many others the opportunity to participate in a crazy, fun, and enlightening event. And to other MBTeamS supporter—thanks for a powerful demonstration of virtual community at work.
I’d love to hear your thoughts about the MBTweetRace—what you learned about the power of virtual community as you experienced it.
UPDATE 1, 5 February: MBTeamS won, and not just by a few points. The final total was 131,643 points, which means that Todd and John amassed more points than the second and third place teams combined. Mercedes is contributing $45,000 to St. Judes, which means that the total is more than $50,000 at this point. Truly amazing.
UPDATE 2, 7 February:
I’ll try to update this post to link to other posts about #MBTeamS:
Mark Greenfield
Mark aka @markgr wants to create a poster aggregating the avatars of all those who tweeted on behaf of MBTeamS to give to St. Jude’s. He tweeted about this on Saturday: it’s a brilliant idea and I urge everyone to support it.
Michael Klein
Mike @dezguy added his own observations in the contents, below, but offered more detailed observations in his post. One of them, about the quality of the user-generated content on this campaign, is spot on:
This campaign is hands-down one of the best uses/integrations of user-generated content that I have seen. The photos, videos, commercials and tweets not only made the journey entertaining it served as the glue to keep the community engaged; all without hiring fake bloggers or sponsored tweeters.
Lori Packer
Lori (url=http://twitter.com/]loripa[/url])stresses community, too. But I love this particular observation in her post, about how important people are:
I still occasionally run into a critique of social media that goes something like this: “Everyone just updates their screens all day. Why don’t you go out and talk to some actual people for a change?” To which I reply: Who do you think is posting all these updates and writing all these tweets?! PEOPLE! These are actual people, and because of social media tools like Twitter and Ustream … I can communicate with them even when we’re not in the same room or even the same city.
These people—connected through Twitter and phones or computers—formed the community that coalesced around #MBTeamS.
Patrick Powers
I loved this insight from Patrick Powers, aka @patrickjpowers:
We often use buzzwords to measure the success of social media efforts — content, engagement, influence, etc. They’re important measures to ensure we’re doing our job. But an effective social media campaign goes beyond these numbers. The most successful campaigns are fun.
He’s right. The whole thing was fun. At least for me and the others who supported #MBTeamS by tweeting, liking, videoing, etc. Maybe not so much for our followers. Which is why I hope instititutions and brands who want to use this model for an event are judicious about how they plan it.
Robin Smail
@Robin2Go offers a cogent observation about the “value” of the team celebrity coaches in this post:
But I think it’s fitting—and compelling—that tsand was able to leverage his own brand and higher ed community to do it on our own, without celebrity help or endorsement. This community was engaged and invested in the outcome of this race and that investment was, quite literally, how the higher ed community blew the competition out of the water. The only time there was a follower spike by another team was by Team CL, whose coach, @RevRunWisdom, actively called on his followers to assist their drivers. Without continuous encouragement from the celebrity coach, however, they simply couldn’t sustain a last ditch effort.
I’ll confess that I never saw Todd retweet something by Pete Wentz and I didn’t know who Pete Wentz was until I wrote this post about the race and looked him up!
UPDATE 3, 8 February:
Talk about a trial by fire! Twitter newbie Eric Page—@highedcm—describes his introduction to Twitter during the MBTeamS event. Welcome aboard, Eric! You saw how powerful Twitter can be.
UPDATE 4, 21 February:
As I write this, @tsand is back to work (well: no today, a national holiday when he’s reported on Twitter that he’s making pizza). There are a couple more significant updates to report.
Michael Powers [url=http://museyroom.com/post/3228984954/the-tweet-race-epic-fail-for-mercedes-or-failing-like]muses[/ur] about whether the tweetrace actually boosted the Mercedes brand. I’ve pondered this myself; my own engagement in the race had nothing to do with the fact that Mercedes was sponsoring it and everything to do with supporting a friend—and contributing to St. Jude’s. Once I got into it, being part of a community was significant. I don’t feel increased affiliation with Mercedes, don’t lust after a Mercedes (even the hybrid), and don’t anticipate buying one. Ever.
I didn’t know until I saw the interview with Todd on HigherEdLive that he and his co-pilot thought the race was fixed and that they’d never win it. So they started as the underdogs and through organizing their community, they won. [Note: the interview is NSFW!]
John Pederson weighed in before the race and afterwards, too. I don’t know John, but I appreciate his statements about the power of social tools to organize a community.
I arrived at the whole thing a bit late, but picked up on the higher ed steam for Todd and the tweet race late last week and was astounded by what was happening. I was explaining the whole thing to a friend last night and told her that “I don’t think Mercedes knew what they were getting themselves into with him. He’s got a huge following and he’s a likeable guy in the community, those other teams didn’t stand a chance.”
I think the lesson here is about community and how when you cultivate community through your authenticity, you’re able to provide a call to action that would get folks who wouldn’t normally participate in something like this, activated and willing to go outside of their social (media) norms.
This was the right mix of a good cause (St. Jude’s), a character who could sustain the energy and do his part to activate an audience and participants who were motivated and denizens of the technology who knew how to use it and other tools to collaborate, motivate others and ultimately, become invested in the task at hand.
It was a perfect storm and demonstrates a lot of valuable lessons about the power of community, how a certain technology can cultivate relationships and help people in far-flung places achieve awesome things in real time.
Posted on February 5, 2011 by Ron
In just under two hours Mercedes Benz will be announcing who the winners are. Over the last three days I have been in awe of the higher ed community and the support given to Todd and John.
I agree that three days was a very long time frame to participate. I believe it was midway through day two that I tweeted, “God, I just feel so INVESTED, you know? Like, this has become as much my race as it is @tsand’s.” I think many of Team S’s crew felt the same and this is what kept us going strong for three days. Todd was able to create that feeling in his crew. Not everyone could have done that.
I remember a few days before the race started a few folks were commenting on twitter that Team S didn’t have as many registered crew members as the other three teams. I can’t remember who said it, but the point was made that quality trumps quantity every time.
*fingers crossed* that MB Team S (it looks funny with those spaces!) takes home the grand prize. But what that really means is that St. Jude’s takes home an extra $25,000, a cause worth tweeting for.
Posted on February 5, 2011 by Mallory Wood
Michael,
Great analysis of this campaign. I haven’t followed too closely but have certainly noticed all of the mentions and discussion.
I would add, it’s also a really good example of the power of hysteria in marketing. In this case Todd’s Twitter followers needed to make the snap judgment to join in on the fun and the real-time nature of this event caused people to get caught up in the excitement and spontaneity of it all.
I wonder how many times this type of campaign could be replicated though before it just becomes annoying though?
Cheers,
Mie
Posted on February 5, 2011 by Mike Klein
I think you’re right Michael, Todd’s personality made a huge difference.
I agree with Mallory - I think most people really felt as if it were THEIR race.
As I mentioned on Twitter, I’ve just finished a post with a quick analysis and a few lessons learned for higher ed.
Wanted to wait for the final results before publishing it, but it looks like I can’t wait to share my take with the class:
http://bit.ly/hbyE9q
Posted on February 5, 2011 by Karine Joly
You know that scene in the movie Hoosiers when Shooter (Dennis Hopper’s character) is in the hospital, drying out, and listening to the team on the radio, cheering them on? That’s how I felt at times during the great tweet race. Only with social media, fans of #MBteamS or any of the other teams could do more than Shooter could do. All of our virtual expressions of support—our tweets, our Facebook likes of photos, our fan sign uploads, etc.—were in some sense trans-substantiated* into fuel for the race. So we were fans, cheering on from a distance, yes. But we were also members of the team and contributors.
(Cross-posting this to Karine’s blog, too, as her commentary runs along a similar theme.)
*Sorry for the religious allusion but the race was at times almost a spiritual event. ;)
Posted on February 5, 2011 by Andrew Careaga
What did I learn??? Whew…that my son, John, has some pretty darn neat friends. And my friends are hard to teach!
In the end I see so many applications for the technology displayed. That Googledocs thing blew my mind. I had to work to focus on what I did know how to do to help #MBTeamS after seeing that! But I kept dreaming of what could be in this world…WOW! That is when I started to tweet songs and the news!
I am part of a number of on line social networks and have learned from them over the years. They are email based, still function although each has evolved greatly since inception. I now see Twitter as a GREAT place to discuss even tho there are just 140 characters. FB is slow…wow….is it slow after the MBtweetrace. Email is like an old book. Each have a place, a use, a purpose. Now I have to figure out Googledocs.
The new age is exciting but having followed the “computer age” and the thinking of those over 50 from the get go….there is so far to go. Most of it requires acceptance not of THE technology but that technology will change as fast as we learn it. The horizons are huge….limitless!
I am troubled by the attitudes of those who don’t understand and are weighing down these horizons. Good change comes slowly, yet I feel we are not teaching our kids to accept change, to learn, experiment, move forward. We can’t get there if at first we don’t have the dream.
I reported back to my “group” this morning on my three days of absence. They were amazed and found it all mind boggling. They see the technology. I see the higher ed crew we have and I think my generation is leaving things to pretty darn good people.
Thanks for letting me play. Now back to the reality of 9 dogs and 4 cats, laundry, dog shows, making a meal….man, was I happy I had a few things in the freeze that took the turn of a dial to have ready! Whew!
So much was learned by all of us….on so many levels! Thank you !!! Thank you !!
For the kids….For the FUTURE
Posted on February 5, 2011 by Barb Peterson
@Mike Klein - I agree with you that this may be a one time thing - the once in a social media lifetime perfect storm of everything coming together. I too hope that it does not become an oft-occuring thing.
Posted on February 5, 2011 by Mike Richwalsky
@Mike Richwalksy
The ‘one off’ nature of this reminds me of the Old Spice campaign in that it’s unlikely that it can be ever replicated again to the same affect.
I wonder if this is where digital marketing is headed?
Congratulations @tsand!
Posted on February 5, 2011 by Mike Klein
Interesting comments, Ron, Mallory & Karine: I think that Todd’s personality made a huge difference here and, like Tim Nekritz, I would say he’s beloved. For many reasons.
I thought your comments were right on, Barb. I’m over <ahem> 50 </ahem> myself and participated in those social networks you reference, and still do. The scale and reach is becoming broader, though, and therefore the networks are more powerful.
And to the Mikes: I wrote a blog post about engagement fatigue last year. If this kind of thing happens too often, for too long, people will turn off to it and it will be just like spam email: there will be a lot of unfriending and unfollowing going on when someone announces that they’re doing something like this.
It’s pretty clear to me that the novelty of the endeavor helped someone who was highly thought of among the boarder community. It won’t be so novel the next time someone tries it and the person who’s leading it may not be as esteemed as @tsands is. So it will be harder to replicate.
Posted on February 5, 2011 by Michael Stoner
I agree on all counts, especially on the final thoughts about community. The point I’m having the toughest time processing though is the fact that not everyone in my life—on Twitter and off it—was as invested in or even aware of the MBTweetRace, so how do you balance something that you are really super excited in with the people who are not?
For what it’s worth, I’ve posted my thoughts of The Great Twitter Race here: http://goddessofclarity.com/2011/02/07/lessons-learned-from-the-mbteams-twitter-race/
Posted on February 7, 2011 by Lori Packer
Lori, I know what you mean. I was at a dinner on Friday night with a lot of people and kept looking down at my phone. I don’t feel the need to be connected all the time—in fact, I enjoy being offline—but it was really hard not to keep wondering what was happening.
Posted on February 7, 2011 by Michael Stoner
Sometime during the second day of the race, I wondered if @tsand’s brand had actually supplanted Mercedes-Benz in this campaign. I can’t speak for other teams or even other MBteamS followers, but I hardly ever thought about Mercedes-Benz—and when I did, it was more like an entity supporting Todd and not the other way around.
I wonder what MB thinks of the campaign overall, and what their takeaways will be?
Posted on February 8, 2011 by Heidi
Heidi,
You’re describing my experience exactly. I thought about Mercedes during the scavenger hunt when I was trying to help assemble images of various assets, but I was mostly focused on Todd and John. Your point about Todd’s brand being stronger than Mercedes is right on.
Posted on February 8, 2011 by Michael Stoner