Social Media in Action: Olympus PEN Story

Camera-maker Olympus clearly understands a few of the main tenets of social media marketing:

• Content is King
• Simple is always better
• It’s important to consider your audience’s ROI
• Content is King (worth repeating)

One of the rising videos on Digg today is the PEN Story, which features brilliantly produced stop-motion footage taken from the new Olympus PEN E-P1 four-thirds camera. Already the clip has been dugg 513 times and just crossed a million views on YouTube:

After seeing the clip I did a blog search and found that another marketing mind was echoing my sentiments before I even had them:

The ad features a superb piece of stop motion work that hooks you line and sinker. Relevant to the product, interesting (I was gripped) and ultimately motivating (I want one…)

It doesn’t take much to grasp the incredible use of this compelling content to drive awareness, and that pretty precisely sums it up. But there’s more.

A click through from the YouTube page lands you on olympus.eu/penstory, which is Not a landing page you can purchase from.  It’s simply offering Exactly what the average viewer is investing their click for - a widescreen version of the video, free downloads of the mp3 and ringtone for the video’s theme song, and a link to find out more…IF you’re curious.

Right there, a perfect illustration of thinking about what your audience wants in designing a marketing campaign. And there’s more.

Clicking through a few levels takes you to all the information you’d want on the history and specifications of the camera. Along the way you’ll find creative asking if you’d like to Test-a-Pen.

Here Olympus is reaching out and offering the target audience their own return on investment - something we discussed on the site last week. Creative photographers around the world will most certainly apply for a free camera, and in doing so offer Olympus a wealth of marketing ideas they can use for future campaigns. Our of this will come the creation of compelling content just like the PEN story, and by investing in their audience, Olympus will undoubtedly see a worthwhile return.