Starbucks is a love brand and has millions of fans around the world. So designing a Starbucks campaign in Social Media shouldn’t be much of a challenge. Still, try to do this in Romania. This is the story of the first Social Media campaign ever done by Starbucks in Romania. To make things more difficult, Starbucks didn’t even have a Romanian Facebook account, nor a constant interaction with consumers. So, creating a buzz in social media for Starbucks was seen as a real challenge. The elements of our social media communication solution were: a smart, simple, relevant creative idea, 10 successful bloggers, 4 real life events. Moreover, a lot of PR tools put to work. We succeeded to get hundreds of comments, status updates, pictures about/on the campaign on Facebook and get 10 bloggers that never interacted with Starbucks to be our voices in Social Media, true “Starbucks allies”. We used large scale social media & PR tools and succeeded to put Starbucks in the Social Media spotlight and generate relevant and beautiful consumer interaction and engagement with a ridiculously small cost per reached contact.

1st wave: We chose 2 bloggers to implement our creative idea: the most credible women bloggers and a man, the most beautiful blogger as all the girls say. They were treated as journalists and given the unique opportunity (NO Romanian brand had EVER done that) to spend one week at Starbucks.

After generating dozens of articles, the bloggers launched a challenge to their readers: “Why do you love Starbucks?”. The winners received a day with the blogger, enjoying the Starbucks experience. And the consumer engagement was at its best.2nd wave: 3 events were organized in 3 cities, at Starbucks coffee shops. Bloggers and their readers met to share a cup, share a story. The events took a long time as long stories had to be shared. Then, it went further, on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, people posting pictures and stories from the events.

With a creative idea, courage to open up to bloggers and consumers, our social media campaign got great results.We reached our objectives by creating that special emotional bond between customers and the brand, real conversations with real people. Moreover, Starbucks received hundreds of love letters! For the first social media campaign for Starbucks in Romania it was a big thing to make fans speak!In social media, the results proved that we generated real buzz. More than 300,000 people were directly exposed (double the most optimistic estimation), 50 substantial blog posts, 250 status updates on Facebook sustaining the campaign, 500 comments = love letters for Starbucks, 600 photos from the event uploaded, 800 status updates on Twitter containing the hashtags #starbucksromania and #tellastory, 10:1 Return on Investment. Learning? Never underestimate the power of a good story and the importance of great allies!