The Standard Chartered Breeze Twitter Campaign

Cameron Ng is a citizen of the World Wide Web. He once gave up actual food just so that he could do Stratholme one more time. The first thing he does every morning when he wakes up is to check his Twitter account and his Facebook profile. The Internet is his life.

In today’s wired world, everyone has a Twitter account. Everyone. Even your mum.

Companies everywhere are finally realising that having a Twitter account actually counts as a part of an overarching PR campaign.

KFC Singapore has realized this and has leveraged upon Twitter to reach out to its fried-poultry-loving masses in Singapore and has done a mighty fine job in interacting and engaging with its finger-licking followers. And with that I segue charmingly into the story of one bank’s epic journey into the world of social media.

This is the story of the Standard Chartered Breeze Twitter campaign.

Standard Chartered Breeze is essentially an online banking service offered by the Standard Chartered Bank as an iPhone and iPad app. It is also possible to use the service via the web. It is pretty much just like every other bank’s online banking service, with the exception of this feature called the Bank Cheque which allows the user to issue an electronic bank cheque. But other than that, Standard Chartered Breeze is nothing truly special. What is special is how the bank chose to market this new online service, namely, through the magic of Twitter.

By now, many of you would have seen tweets from your peers along the lines of “Standard Chartered Bank is giving away an iPad!” The contest mechanics were simple; all you had to do was to follow @StanChartBreeze and retweet that tweet in order to qualify for a brand new iPad. Needless to say, consumers love it when they can stand a chance to win something, especially when they can do it with the least amount of effort. I personally did it, along with scores of my friends. This simple exercise in social media marketing saw the numbers of @StanChartBreeze followers increase exponentially within a short period of time.

Couple that with a simultaneously ongoing campaign, The World’s Coolest Intern, and you have a surefire social marketing hit on your hands. This campaign, also powered by the social media platform known as Twitter, basically offered any recent graduates or undergraduates in their final year across Asia with a Twitter account a 6-month-long internship programme with total remuneration of SGD30,000 (approximately 23k USD) and the right to forever tell their friends that for six months, they were paid SGD5000 a month to tweet and check their Facebook pages at work. According to their official site, the submission deadline has been extended to the 31st of October 2010 due to an overwhelming response which includes submissions from other parts of the world. And note that all applications have to be submitted via Twitter.

To put everything into perspective, using the mighty power of Google, I have scoured the wilderness of the Internet to compare the reach of the different Twitter pages of various banks based in Singapore. At the time of writing, the official Standard Chartered Twitter page has 108 followers, DBS Bank has 489 followers, OCBC Yes! Card has all of 2 followers, and Standard Chartered Breeze has 1735 followers. This may not seem like much, but do keep in mind that this a bank-related Twitter account that we are speaking of.

The marketing team behind the Breeze campaign deserves much praise because they knew that they could leverage on social media and how to do it. This is due to the fact that they recognised who their target audience were and what their media consumption habits and preferences were.

Targetting a younger audience through digital means in order to promote a new digital banking service made to work on Apple iDevices by giving away Apple iDevices and an awesome internship on a social media platform? Sheer genius.