A few years ago I received a message from a friend saying, “can you re-tweet my OMB entry today?” I didn’t really know what was going on, but I’m always up for supporting my friends when it comes to their efforts online. I mean, if we don’t support each other, who will, right? That’s what started this whole journey. Just a simple message.
That friend now happens to be our Head of Content here at Social INK. Gareth Alvarez, or as you might know him, @alvo_muses on Twitter, was helping us with some freelance content writing for our clients at the time. He’d been involved in OMB for some time and wouldn’t stop ranting and raving about it.
I was curious, but back then I was busy running my business and building an online TV channel. I didn’t make the time to get more involved and understand what it was really all about.
Fast forward to 2019. Gareth is now part of the team full time. We came off the back of a crazily busy 2018, and as we started the new year we decided it was time for us, as an agency, to do things differently. We had ideas, lots of ideas, but OMB was the one that stood out to us, and the one we decided to move forward with first.
After talking with Nick, and coming up with a suitable brief for ourselves as a social media marketing & content marketing agency, we set to work getting ourselves ready to run our very own One Minute Brief.
Advertise the benefits of Social Media Marketing for Businesses and SMEs
To say we were blown away by the response would be an understatement. We received over 120 entries from the incredible OMBles and the community at large on Twitter. It was outstanding. Conversations were happening all over the place and we had an awesome time simply engaging with this creative group of idea machines!
Picking a winner proved harder than we could have imagined. It took us hours to narrow it down, get to a final 3, and finally choose the winner. To be honest, we thought all the entries were worthy of being winners.
After the buzz died down a little, and we had recovered from a Twitter day that saw us post hundreds of tweets and replies, I decided to break down some of the numbers. This is when we realised just how powerful an OMB campaign can be for businesses. Any business.
Let’s just take a look at the overview from the stats:
Website traffic spiked 5X our usual daily traffic
The 120+ entries on Twitter had 158,000+ Impressions and more than 10,000 engagements
Twitter following increased by nearly 15% on the day
You can find the full stats on the Social INK blog: OMB: A Twitter Campaign Worth One Minute of Your Time
Suffice to say, we couldn’t get enough of OMB as a team, and as such, we did a couple of things:
We agreed internally that, as an agency, Social INK would take part in OMB every day going forward!
This is a great way for us to showcase our own creativity, and at the same time, flex and train our creative muscles. As an agency, being creative is imperative, but we often focus so much on our clients’ work, that we don’t often think about ourselves or our own skill set. I would say all agencies and freelancers should strongly consider doing this internally. After all, it only takes a minute.
We reached out to Nick at OMB and asked if we could take over OMB for a couple of days. It ended up being 3, and we loved every second of it.
The OMBle community is made of truly great people, from all over the world, who all come together to have some fun and get creative. During our 3-day takeover, we ran a brief for Yachts, Muscle Cars and even Japan on national haiku day.
After seeing the incredible results, first hand, and after running 3 briefs for completely different products, we were left in no doubt that we needed to share this. Not just with other people to help them with their creativity, but also with our clients, to help them generate incredible content.
In May, we helped to organise the Eden Blue Sparkling Wine brief for our clients, as part of a week-long social media takeover. The results, once again, were spectacular. You can see all the Eden OMB Entries here.
We’re now more engaged with OMB than ever before. Since March, we’ve entered every day, and I’m so proud of the team. Together, we’ve had 11 OMB wins (so far) and now we’ve got our tickets booked to come and meet all the incredible OMBles in person at the OMB Live 6 event up in Manchester in October.
Needless to say, we’re sold on the idea. Our clients love the concept, and ultimately, we think every business, big or small, should run an OMB campaign, at least once. You’ll be amazed where it could all lead.
Chris Bruno
CEO & Founder of Social INK
@justchrisbruno
