The Campaign

Filipinos are among the most social media-savvy people around the world. Every day, they log on to their Facebook accounts, post Tweets, check in at Foursquare, and share photos on Instagram. So when Facebook recently suffered its longest outage in years, Filipinos were at a loss. Overcome with confusion and annoyance, they started to vent on other social media sites, notably Twitter. KIT KAT immediately saw this narrow window of opportunity to encourage netizens to have a quick break and fired off the clever Tweet that “broke the internet.” The “Look who’s having a BREAK right now. Have a BREAK too! #FacebookDown” tweet sought to put a lighthearted spin on the social media site’s crash, and quickly cottoned on to netizens, who started sharing it on their own social media sites.

The Brief

The “KIT KAT Moment” aims to promote earned media given its cheeky way of riding on to an existing trending topic, and the goal was not to make it as a short-lived success only. This clever bit of real-time marketing is expected to set a new trend among brands to continuously keep their eyes and ears open to what is happening around the world, in order to join in conversations and even create new ones.

Results

In just a few hours, it got 2,334 retweets, 1,296 favorites, 220 replies, and 771x its normal reach. In two days, @kitkat_ph followers grew by 12.45%. Reactions to the KIT KAT tweet were mostly positive, turning the wave of frustration over the “catastrophic” crash of Facebook, and effectively distracting disgruntled netizens. Local blogs and news outlets such as GMA News Online and Rappler, immediately picked up the story, and soon enough, the world stood up and took notice as well. The tweet has been picked up by news outlets worldwide, from The Guardian to Forbes. The tweet was also featured heavily on 53 local and international blogs and news sites. Even Facebook Africa joined in the fun by posting a photo of themselves holding KIT KAT bars.

Execution

KIT KAT Social team saw an opportunity for moment marketing by tweeting a screenshot of FB during its downtime with a caption: "Look who's having a BREAK right now."

The Situation

Facebook crashed on June 19, 4PM Philippine Time; 10 minutes after the crash, the KIT KAT Social team saw an opportunity for moment marketing by tweeting a screenshot of FB during its downtime with a caption: "Look who's having a BREAK right now." Reactions to the KIT KAT tweet were mostly positive, turning the wave of frustration over the “catastrophic” crash of Facebook, and effectively distracting disgruntled netizens. Local blogs and news outlets such as GMA News Online and Rappler, immediately picked up the story, and soon enough, the world stood up and took notice as well.

The Strategy

KIT KAT – being an advocate of breaks in all its communications and activities saw the opportunity of jumping on to a topic that has caused so much buzz among the netizens. It simply listened in to the mostly negative reactions of people online, and provided a light-hearted break via the cheeky tweet, knowing that most of them will go to Twitter with Facebook being down. The Community team seized that moment and maximized the netizens’ use of that medium.