Post by Bridget Egan
A few weeks before Make-A-Wish’s transformation of San Francisco into Gotham CIty, Stefania Pomponi read about the upcoming event on a local SF blog. Pomponi is the co-founder of the California company: Clever Girls Collective. Clever Girls Collective is a content and social media agency that, lead by Pomponi, took the reigns on running all things social media for Miles’ event. Within a blink of an eye, Pomponi and her team had come up with a plan to help make the campaign go viral. They collaborated with Twitter and secured different handles including: @SFWish where all the internet could find out all the details about the event and @PenguinSF so Batkid’s nemesis could live tweet throughout the day. Pomponi also implemented adding #SFbatkid to everything on social media regarding the event. Clever Girls Collective works with different social media platforms, such as Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, and Facbook. For Batkid, they decided to focus almost solely on Twitter and a small amount on Facebook. The agency used their network of more than 6,000 paid influencers; having them behave as “social media food soldiers” and get the buzz going. The company’s network of influences are usually paid for their participation, however, for pro bono campaigns (such as Batkid) it is strictly voluntary to take part. For this event, the voluntary participation was through the roof. The agency’s last key element to their plan was to have a twitter chat begin the morning of the event. Twitter chat is made up of a pre-arranged hashtag used to link tweets together in order to create a type of virtual conversation. Impressively, #SFBatkid was trending before the chat was even created. The agency had two members of their staff follow Miles around and document his day through the @SFWish account. With the help of other agencies, Clever Girls Collective worked to keep the best #SFBatkid tweets surfaced.
Between the time Clever Girls Collective began working to two weeks after, when the event took place, there were an astonishing 1.7 billion Twitter impressions and 600,000 tweets. The spike in interest towards Make-A-Wish caused their site to crash due to receiving 1,000 hits per second at one point in time.
Make-A-Wish stated that they rarely have the opportunity to involve the public in their granting of wishes, but what happened in San Francisco was well beyond anything they’d seen before. They had originally hoped that around 200-300 people would show up at city hall to watch Miles receive his key to the city. However, thanks to social media and Clever Girls Collective, the crowd was measured to be around 20,000. This looks to be just the beginning of the relationship between Clever Girls Collective and Make-A-Wish, whom hope to collaborate on many campaigns in the future. When commenting on Make-A-Wish’s take on the social media reaction to the event, Pompini stated,
The Uses and Gratification theory is structured around the idea that people thoughtfully decide and use distinct channels of media in order to appease varying needs. Although this theory displays that media does have a limited effect on users; being that individuals are able to exercise control and choice over media, Clever Girls Collective works to control the users’ control. Just as people are able to understand humans reasoning for using media, this type of agency is also aware and uses that knowledge to their advantage. With Uses & Gratifications, which involves what people do with media, Clever Girls Collective strategically used Twitter because they believed it was best equipped to get word out and gain participation in Make-A-Wish’s Batkid event.
According to PRSA.org, public relations is: “a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics”. Public relations involves a communication process between, and bringing together of, an organization and the public. Make-A-Wish needed the help of Collective Girls Collective to expand publicity of Batkid through social media channels. Despite doing this pro bono, Collective Girls Collective gained a huge amount of publicity and interest towards their company by helping with this event. At the same time, they were able to help create what is highly likely to be one of the most memorable days of Miles Scott’s life, as well as bring smiles to the faces of nearly all the internet world on November 15th.
- “What Is Public Relations?” PR Definition: PRSA Official Statement. N.p., n.d. Web. 08 Dec. 2013.
- “Inside The Social Media Strategy That Made Batkid Go Viral | Co.Exist | Ideas Impact.” Co.Exist. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Dec. 2013.
- “Clever Girls Collective | Welcome!” Clever Girls Collective Home Comments. N.p., n.d. Web. 09 Dec. 2013.
- Marshall, Jack. “Inside the Plan That Helped Batkid Win Twitter.” Digiday.com. N.p., 20 Nov. 2013. Web. 05 Dec. 2013.