Experience Marketing: Spredfast at SXSW17
"One of the tricky parts to hosting any event is encouraging social sharing and creating buzz in a way that feels natural and authentic. Spredfast set their attendees up so well, you almost couldn’t NOT share the experience to social. They set up well-lit, Instagram-friendly stations for you to take photos of your sugary concoctions, including a hashtag on the back wall of the station. A particularly clever addition was pink Scrabble-like tiles that allowed you to create your own little message in the photo."
from Keep Marketing Weird
The goal: activate the suite's space to invite visitor engagement & encourage social [media] sharing, which helps the digital team meet their brand awareness goals. Spredfast's customers and prospects are digital and social savvy folks, so we designed activations that would appeal to the audience and tie in to The Social Suite's theme, The Future of Social is Here. The hypothesis we started with for the Instagram Station was that if we gave people things to photograph and a set in which to take the photograph, that they would be more likely to shoot and post using our event hashtag.
My colleague Shannon and I did a little rapid prototyping session to walk through the visitor journey and determine key elements that could make this station successful. During this exercise, we determined things like min. / max table sizes and heights, height of backdrops, types of props and maintenance supplies we'd need. We also considered lighting and how to position the station within the space to maximize natural daylight from windows. We requested some LED production lights from our vendor to emphasize the 'studio' feel. We printed backdrops and procured props like live plants & florals, specialty plates, and scrabble letters with which to customize a message.
We also considered the role a human guide (staff person) could play in guiding the visitor through the experience, which prompted us to reach out to a local food blogger to act as the 'teaching expert' for a few hours each day.
Insta-success.
