Winston, SA's most famous pigeon, has soared to high heights globally on the back of Social Media. He's made it all the way from Paris to Berlin. 

*Page Views on www.pigeonrace2009.co.za

And here is a map of coverage: 

So how did it come about?

It started with some encouraging words from Rob Stokes along the lines of: " You are insane." Thus the idea for promoting Winston was born.

After being approached by our IT department with the idea, we started working out how to promote Winston and get momentum in the media for race day. So we, along with our media agency Vuma, decided on a two pronged strategy:

 1) A Social Media plan, starting on GottaQuirk and BrandsEye, and then moving on to Twitter and finally to Facebook. This would all be underpinned by a viral video and a destination site.

2) A traditional media plan of invited journalists to cover the event. 

In this is blog post I will concentrate on the Social Media side and show you what we planned, what we did and why, and the lessons we learnt through the Winston promotion.

The general plan was to launch Winston on Twitter, generate early momentum, and then move the campaign to Facebook once there was sufficient mass for it to be popular within that network and so continue to generate its own momentum.

As with all plans, we followed this... sort of. Things ran away with us at times, and some planned items slipped through the cracks. I think the key lesson we learnt was that it’s "alive" and you have to react and simply go with the flow. 

Here is the full outline of what we did: 

1) Wrote a blog post on GottaQuirk asking for people to name the bird. In this blog post we gave enough information to get the curious involved. A $500 prize didn’t hurt either.

2) Respond via Twitter, and in the blog comments, answering questions and encouraging people to submit.

3) At the same time, we organised with Springleap to print some limited edition T-shirts for Pigeonrace '09.

4) On the closing date for the naming of the bird, I chose 7 finalists from the 41 comments, +-180 suggested names and went to #27Dinner in Durban.

5) At this dinner, I gave a presentation on what was coming to the assembled crowd, and asked them to pick the winner.

6) The people who voted for the winner, “Winston”, were then given some of the same limited edition Springleap t-shirts.

By this time, active engagement was leading to people "talking to" Winston and interacting with him on Twitter. In the interim, I built Winston’s race website, to give people and the media a place to go and see what was going to be happening.

This site, a Wordpress blog, running thesis 1.5, was as socially connected as I could make it. Plugins used were: 

• SexyBookMarks
• Subscription Options
• Facebook Connector
• Easy Retweet

Other plugins that really helped:

• WP-Cache 
• Google XML Sitemaps

Lesson: Build quickly, and don’t re-invent the wheel

In order to keep the momentum and give something to occupy people before we released news of the race, we decided to make videos of Winston. These videos were there to show the funny side of being a pigeon. We filmed on a simple handycam, and edited on Imovie. There were more planned, however we ran out of time to get them filmed.

The videos were edited and uploaded via Tubemogul which syndicated them to Youtube, Twitter, Facebook etc.

Lesson: Find services beforehand to do the leg work for you 

These videos gave everyone something to laugh at, especially in the tail end of the week, and I think this was a key choice. It gave something for people to point and laugh at.

Lesson: Make videos funny

Leave your dignity at home.  I also hosted the videos on the www.pigeonrace2009.co.za website. These gave me something to post about, and from there allow people to share them far and wide.

In Tweeting the links, I made sure to ask for the RT, and then thank people who did. I think this engagement was very important.

Lesson: Engage with your audience in integrity like you would speak to a friend

We then announced the race, and at the same time launched the Facebook  fan page. I chose a fan page over a group page, due to the fact that a page can attract a URL and allows Winston to message his fans directly, as well as having status updates appearing in news feeds.

After that, it was live and then it was race day. Having tested the live streaming, using the 3G card, we could not get the cameraman to get it working at the launch, so had to switch to live streaming on the landing URL.

Being able to live Tweet, and having engaged people on Twitter, the new URL was quickly passed around;

Lesson: Have a back-up plan to communicate with your audience & triplecheck the cameraman knows what he is doing

And the rest is history...

Winston beat the ADSL line in 2hrs, 6 mins, and 57 seconds, and then it just went crazy.

The story got picked up by Reuters and SAPA, and next thing we know, Zapiro chimes in, and we are on the radio in Vancouver, TV with Al-Jazeera, and the BBC.

Which brings us to the next point; Tracking.

When doing this, make sure you keep a record of activity and track your results. We used Brandseye from Quirk, as well as Google Analytics. We got over 1400 mentions online, and this would have vanished if we had used a normal agency, as many news monitoring organisations cannot track online mentions overseas. 

So, when all the feathers settled, was it all worth it? 

Yes.

1. It created awesome brand awareness. 
2. We now have a brand spokespigeon. 
3. We got unbelievable media coverage
4. We learned to be prepared for success. If it doesnt come, you can rest easily for that day when it will.
5. We are inundated with data providers wanting to solve our issues. 

So what's next... 

Well Winston now has a manager, and he is racing the Amashova Classic, and it looks like he is doing the Duzi!