Published on April 29, 2010 Insights from Yellow Pages’ Innovative “Hidden Pizza” Advertising Campaign
Heard of www.hiddenpizza.com.au? It was a 2-week experiment completed last week in Melbourne by Sensis as a promotion for Yellow Pages, to test the use of social media to launch and advertise a business. The premise was simple: offer free pizza at a hidden location in Melbourne that only takes orders by phone. The location was only advertised in the Yellow Pages, but a fanpage was available on Facebook to help promote the pizza shop’s existence.
Great idea, right? Definitely. How successful was it? There were lines outside the restaurant every night, the food was great and the price just right. The number of calls/orders reported by Yellow Pages for that two week period was in excess of 6,000. But in terms of its objectives in growing Yellow Pages listings or testing the success of social media in marketing a website, we would suggest that the results were questionable.
Why is that? Web 2.0 and social media is all about interaction with your target customer audience – getting them involved in what you do. Yellow Pages did not allow fans to post the location of the site on their own Facebook page, insisting that people instead go to the Yellow Pages website to get their phone number and location details. But they forgot about the power of Google: only four days into their two week campaign, two blog sites posting the location and contact details of the hidden pizza shop were reported as already outranking the Yellow Pages own site for the search term “hidden pizza”.
What can others learn from this?
The out-take for other businesses from this experiment are that interaction and recommendation are becoming even more important in people’s search for information on the web. A directory like the Yellow Pages is just one source of information but in the online space, people do consider recommendations and ratings. If you’re using social media back yourself and encourage interaction. Because less and less do people just look up things blindly. They take into account:
- Twitter posts
- Google and other search engine rankings (which are largely based on links back to the site and count as “votes” for that business)
- Blogs recommending your business (with the reasons why)
- Directories with ratings and comments
- Facebook posts
- Posts on other social media
- Social bookmarks
- ..and more..
Never discount the power of social media.
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