Berjaya’s Success in Embracing New Social Media
Big applause to any brands that can create their own social media site and make it successful in a country that is still holding dear to traditional means of doing things like watching tv and listening to the radio. Malaysia is a country like this where people are not excited to embrace change in lifestyle in the name of advancement but fortunately, things seem to be improving.
There is one brand that has successfully embraced the new media and used it to their advantage. The company is called Berjaya Resorts that created a contest to allow users to pick their favorite wedding couple online by voting so that the winning couple enjoy free wedding photography and celebration in one of the beach resorts. Plus the winner can invite 3 of their favorite friends who voted for them to attend the wedding for free! What better way to create awareness to your travel locations through a contest like this but the best part is not the prize but the mechanics of the contest that requires participation from the voting public that created virality as the contest would have generated huge word-of-mouth from couple who are tryong to garner votes to win the coveted prize! There was 4 phases to the contest starting with the filtering of more than 500 applicants to just the top 50 so that users can vote for their favorite. This has triggered the lovely couples to spam their friends with pleas to vote for them as the winning couple to enjoy their dream wedding. Yours truly got an email from an ex-classmate of mine whom I admit looked beautiful with her groom but when I had the time to vote, the voting window was not open yet. And when the window was opened, I was too busy or impacted by the recession to vote. Sorry, pal.
Anyway, back to the story, after the voting has ended based on the videos created by the couples, 7 couples with the highest votes got selected from the 50. The top 7 couples were given the privilege to dress up in their gorgeous choice of wedding gowns in Colmare Tropicale, another resort by Berjaya which I am sure they are trying to promote to increase numbers of visitors. The 7 couples were invited to blog on their experiences and what better way to create virality to the website than to have the excited couples posting their beautiful photoshoots and brag about their experiences for all to see? While all this is happening, voting is still open for the best couple so the couple with a blog that readers can relate to or with the most numbers of supporters will surely win. Well, it got a huge enough traffic as this social media site promoting wedding couples was the first of its kind. Apparently, this contest was run on a tight budget which I feel was doable what with the prize sponsor being the brand itself and the only media buy being the single free newspaper in Malaysia - theSun. The social media site tapped into the narcissistic nature of human when they are their happiest: the days that lead up to their wedding day. Thus, the apt motto being ‘If you’ve got it, flaunt it’. The print advertisement merely created the awareness of the website ‘Love Me Do!’ and all other traffic, virality and buzz are created online through voting and the blogs. There was also plenty of awareness created towards the wedding providers like Edmund Tham being the wedding photographer and Bespoked and That Special Occasion as the provider of the wedding gowns. What more can these sponsors ask for?
With this, it was fantastic to have accumulated over 830,000 page views with 21,900 being unique visitors. There are more than 1000 fans to their Facebook group which is a good achievement for a Malaysian social site. This to me is a successful use of new media with the least amount of marketing budget during the downturn, targeted and viral.
“The challenge really is finding a good balance of marketing returns versus prudent cost control and churning out innovative solutions. It’s a lot about being different and standing out, knowing the problems and how best to solve them,” as aptly quoted by Thang Han-Ni, Marketing and Communications director of Berjaya Hotels & Resorts.