Last year, skincare brand Kiehl’s decided to launch its first store in Mumbai after a successful run in Delhi in 2010. The beauty giant wanted to publicise its advent in the metro, but there was just one hitch — how would it promote itself? After all, the 150 year-old company has never had a brand ambassador and works solely on word-of-mouth publicity. That’s when the brand’s think tank decided to tap the social media, albeit in a different way. It organised a tweet up wherein ‘influencers’ namely bloggers or tweeps (people active on Twitter) — spoke about the store launch online.

Spreading the word online
Zafar Rais, founder and CEO, Mindshift Interactive (social media research and marketing firm) and the brain behind Kiehl’s tweet up, explains how the idea works. “The objective of a tweet up is to create a buzz about a particular product or a brand by getting influencers to talk about their offline event online. Usually about 15 to 20 influencers are invited for an event. For the Kiehl’s store launch at Malad, we introduced influencers to the brand and explained to them why it was unique,” he says. Over 350 u00a0mentions on Twitter and 270 tweets using their hashtag followed.

The brand was so enthused by the response that it decided to have another tweet up at Mehboob Studio, Bandra in March to launch a new product. Anurag Tyagi, brand manager, Kiehl’s says, “We put up a screen which was broadcasting the live Twitter feed from the hashtag we’d created — #KiehlsMumbai. The Twitter influencers were constantly tweeting, even while they were at the event.” u00a0It was the number of tweets, not their content that counted. The hashtag trended for a couple of days and the beauty giant got its 48 hours of fame in the digital world.