Westin and New Balance also recently set up a social-enabled vending machine at The Westin New York Grand Central hotel to celebrate National Running Day on June 4. One hundred consumers used the machines to tweet specific messages before receiving free running gear.
The one-day giveaway turned into big social engagement for Westin. The campaign generated 183,000 impressions and 15,000 engagements from tweets mentioning either the brand or specific hashtags. “These numbers show that users were not only engaged with the activation but wanted to share it with their networks as well,” said Jon Amihud, social media specialist at Westin.
Despite some recent creative use cases, Jennifer Polk, research director at Gartner, questioned if social-enabled vending machines can become go-to tactics for brands, pointing to a lack in profit-generating calls-to-action. “Just putting up the vending machines and getting people to tweet about flip-flops might have given [Old Navy] some interesting quantitative and qualitative insight, but I don’t know if there is enough there to build a case on social commerce,” Polk said.
Article Appeared @http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/would-you-tweet-these-flip-flops-159382