I’m probably one of the few people in the world who still watches commercials. I admit, I don’t do it often. But, occasionally, I will tune in to see what brands are doing. Last night just before switching channels to watch the absolute best show on TV ever in the history of television, HBO’s Treme, I caught a commercial for Tempur-Pedic that really sums up the power of social media beautifully.
The campaign is called Ask Me and through TV ads, banner ads, billboards, print ads and more, the folks at Tempur-Pedic are putting their new customer outreach squarely in the hands of existing customers in social media.
The television ad tells people considering Tempur-pedic mattresses to go online and ask people about how well they sleep. The ad specifically says to “check out twitter” and to “try your friends on facebook” to learn more about their mattresses, even citing the 12,000+ people on their Facebook page who will share their stories.
This is a large gamble for a such a high-end product, but CEO Mark Sarvary is confident that his customers love his product enough to sell it for him. And, given the recent Nielsen survey indicating that 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations (friends, virtual friends) and 70% trust opinions posted online from people they don’t know (bloggers, general reviews, conversations – whereas only 12% of consumers polled said they trust a brand’s advertising message – I’d say this campaign is going where the influence is.
Sarvary says that the average Tempur-Pedic customer tells 14 people about their product, so the idea is that the “Ask Me” Campaign gives a megaphone to those people by driving others to seek them out. Sarvary also indicated that 9 out of 10 people would recommend a Tempur-Pedic mattress to a friend.
I wanted to test to see if this was true. So I went to their Facebook Page and looked at interactions on their wall over the past week. Here is what I found:
28 Comments were posted
20 Positive
4 Neutral
3 Negative
40 Replies to comments
27 Positvie
8 Neural
5 Negative
Five people expressed an intent to purchase. One person asked a question that got replies from actual customers sharing their personal experiences.
So, it looks like this campaign may end up being worth the gamble. It certainly spawns consumer engagement and drives discussion. I like that they are also driving people to Twitter but would have loved to have seen the Twitter feed integrated into the Facebook conversations. Regardless, this is the perfect example of how brands can get their customers to sell for them through social media.