Strategy March 16, 2016
Brilliant Social Media Campaign Tries to Bring Back the Bees
Burt's Bees, an American personal care products company that prides itself on items made from natural, earth-friendly ingredients like beeswax, has recently launched a social media campaign to help save the honeybee.
Why? According to their website, the honeybee is disappearing at an alarming rate and if something’s not done about it, potentially one-third of the food we eat could also disappear.
That's a lot of food, which means we must be talking about a lot of bees. So to stave off this nightmare scenario, Burt’s Bees – who obviously rely heavily on bees for its cache of products, such as lip balm and honey – has launched an ingenious social media campaign called "Bring Back The Bees" that aims to raise awareness while planting wildflowers in honor of those who participate.
Which leads to the ingenious part: All you have to do to participate is omit the letter 'b' from one of your tweets and use the hashtag #BringBackTheBees, and Burt’s Bees will plant 1,000 wildflowers.
Example tweet: "Let's get off our eautiful utts and save the honeyees! #BringBackTheBees."
And if that wasn’t enough, Burt's Bees is supporting this campaign across many of their digital properties, including their website and social media, with much of their updates and posts devoid of the letter 'b.' Even their iconic logo, which includes the company’s name, has been altered to remove the b’s so that it now reads "urt's ees."
Not only is this campaign driving awareness to a serious issue – the alarming disappearance of honeybees and the possible consequences of it – but it’s igniting conversation in a fun and engaging way. By using Twitter as the engine to drive the engagement, users are able to be as creative as they want in 140 characters or less. It’s an endeavor that could take a whole 10 seconds to complete, but one that can have long-lasting effects.
Simple, yet rilliant. (That’s brilliant, minus the 'b'!)
For more about the campaign, watch the video below.