Editor’s note: Guest contributor Andrew Machado is the founder of Open Home Pro, which empowers real estate agents to give their clients a new type of experience when shopping for a home with just an iPad. Open Home Pro is a Dogpatch Labs Palo Alto company. As I read Joseph Puopolo's article regarding the WWE/The Rock and Social Media this weekend I was taken aback to see one key name missing from the article...Amy Jo Martin. She carries with her 1.2 million Twitter Followers, has beaten breast cancer and most importantly she's humanizing brands.
Amy founded Digital Royalty which works with great brands like Fox Sports, Nike, but most importantly people like Dwayne Johnson, Shaq and Dana White to improve their social media presence. Her team has developed some extremely clever uses of social media over the years and I wanted to highlight three of them.
1. Hunt For UFC
Over the last few years the UFC has not only grown it's business ($465 million in ppv revenue in 2010), but if you look up their CEO on Twitter @danawhite you'll see he is insanely active on twitter. Nearly 12,000 tweets from him. To put that into perspective that's nearly 2x my Twitter volume and 3x Ryan's.
Why is he so active? Because Twitter is a platform that allows Dana to not only grow his business but it allows him to "humanize his brand".
My favorite of their social media strategies is #hunt4UFC where they give away UFC merchandise and tickets in random locations simply by having Dana tweet out clues about where they are hiding. The video clip below is especially powerful. You get to see what happens within 60 seconds of the tweet hitting twitter.
2. Shaq's Retirement
A lot of people saw Shaq's original video on Tout detailing his retirement. In fact over 500k of you watched it within the first 3 hours, but of course the real magic behind all of this was Amy who is seen in the video above with Shaq before he drops the video.
My favorite part of Shaq's retirement was not only did fans find out first, but he leverages social media to remove the red tape thats usually involved in an announcement like this. Instead of seeing a press conference clip on Sportscenter, fans got to hear it first from the man on an overcast day in Miami.
3. Team Bring It
Wait didn't I just see that t-shirt on Facebook. I uttered these words to myself as I watched The Rock roll on out to the WWE ring on RAW wearing his Boots To Asses shirt we had seen previously that morning on his Facebook page.
Previously and probably my favorite of The Rock's social media innovations was when he took to YouTube to do a "shoot" interview about John Cena to increase buzz about their rivalry. It's filmed in a way that feels real, raw and resonated with viewers (500,000k). It's 11 minutes of pure unedited bliss.
As brands continue to adopt great tools like Instragram, Tout, Facebook and Twitter they'll need to continue to find innovative ways to leverage each platform. Social Media presents brands with an entirely new, more visceral way to interact with their customer.
Be innovative. Be real. Humanize your brand.