Ordinary Event Creates Fun Contest

Located in Michigan, regional outdoor apparel store, Moosejaw, knows the importance of customer involvement in order to retain clients and promote their reputation. Moosejaw’s creative director, Gary Wohlfeill boasts their ability to connect to their clients:

“The Moosejaw brand has always been all about real conversation with customers,” Wohlfeill said of the Michigan-based company. “We were doing social commerce before it existed. For years we’ve been focused on creating ‘engagement events’ through e-mail, daily trivia, texting, contests, voting and the Madness section on our Web side. Each event is orchestrated using the unique, quirky voice of the Moosejaw brand.

“Twitter and Facebook are natural extensions of that approach… Our strategy is simply to bring the same level of customer engagement and conversation to these channels.”

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As a result, Moosejaw went above and beyond the call of customer service by involving their network of customers in a social media contest in order to provide a new jacket to a cold college freshman.

Oakland University student, Shelby Reynolds, misplaced her hat and coat one afternoon in the middle of a Michigan winter. Needing to survive the freezing treks between her dorm room and classes, Shelby reported her belongings missing. Through OU tweets, Moosejaw’s creative director Gary Wohlfeill found another opportunity to start a fun contest via social media.

“At 1:35ish, we announced that we would be helping Shelby out, but we wanted our Twitter followers to chose which jacket she would be getting. The voting wuld begin at 2:00 EST. At 2:00, we announced the start of the voting. I tweeted 3 different options and asked our followers to retweet the jacket they liked best. The response was great, and we were blown away that so many of our customers were taking an active part in helping Shelby out. We had over 100 votes in the first 20 minutes, and the overall vote count was nearly double that.”

Moosejaw turned the very common occurrence of a college student losing her belongings into a very special event. Fun surveys and other form of customer involvement does not have to be a grand affair. Businesses can use any excuse to have a little fun using social media!