www.juxtinteractive.com

The battle that brands wage for the attention of users is often writ large with big production budgets and multi-million dollar media buys. For the interactive industry, this means an experiential website heavy on Flash and video, a Facebook fan page, a MySpace buy, assorted mobile apps that tie into the campaign, and a banner campaign that drives to the campaign site. This is all executed in the name of more click-throughs, more page views, and longer site visits. What gets lost in the metrics frenzy is meaningful engagement.

A simple Twitter campaign that United Airlines is currently running offers insight into how a small experience can reap much larger rewards. Every day, a single tweet is sent out that asks a United Airlines specific question. The first person to correctly answer back via Twitter wins a very modest prize. Simple.

The expense of running such a campaign is extremely low -- minimal administrative costs and the value of the prize. Fulfillment can be in the form of a coupon code. For the user, while the value of the prize itself is nominal, the barriers to entry for the contest are extremely low and the act of winning is a prize in itself. This is the digital form of the radio call-in contest (remember those?). To this day, my wife still talks about when she won an album from a random band by being the 8th caller to a local radio station. The salient fact is that she won, nevermind what the prize was.

The company running such a campaign creates an audience that becomes very receptive to the company’s marketing messages. As well, the messages are inadvertently echoed by the audience in the form of contest participation, and so what began as a single text-based message quickly ripples out to become thousands of very lightweight but high-value engagements. Easy peasy, right?