It’s not every day that us Virgin folk get the chance to all work together under one roof. Spread out all over the UK we sometimes meet for meetings but never before have we met in one place to work towards one common objective for the good of the brand.
Enter, the Virgin Social Marathon! The very day after the Virgin London Marathon, on Monday 18th April 2011, Richard Branson kicked off a day of social interaction with a difference with a video tweet.
Virgin Media turned charitable private member’s club The House of St Barnabas in London’s chic Soho into ‘Our House’; the ultra fast 100Mb fibre optic broadband came in very handy with all of us tweeting for 7 hours non-stop!
Virgin’s digital teams tweeted and Facebooked their collective fans and followers to build brand awareness, grow fan bases, start the Twitter trend #ifvirgindid to encourage new ideas for the Virgin group and to give away the Ultimate Virgin Lifestyle Prize which included amongst other things a place in the 2012 Virgin London Marathon, flights to New York, balloon flights and free Virgin Active gym membership (lucky Tom Chalet won!).
Richard Branson’s famous ‘RB
T’ mugs were dished out to people who tweeted photos of themselves with their boring old office mugs or who actually came to Our House for a cuppa with us. The guys back at the office got stuck in too.
Nobby the pilot and his passengers achieved the accolade of ‘highest tea break’ with a photo of his passengers enjoying a tea break in the sky.
Even singer Josh Groban made an appearance and got tweeting too…
Virgin Balloon Flights gave away prizes to people who got involved online including David Cruise from California who only seemed to sleep for a few hours before waking and tweeting us again, local Social Media expert Jan Minihane who published a blog post on her site about the event and Michaela who tweeted that she would most like Alan Carr #inmyballoon.
We particularly liked the post by one budding entrepreneur who tweeted #ifvirgindid Olive Oil, which made us chuckle.
The day was a great success in scoring yet another Virgin first, raising our profile across the social media networks, increasing all of our fans and followers online but most of all we would like to say how amazing it was for all of us to just work together in one place, let’s hope it’s not the last time.
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Kathlyn Cracknell of Halstead Essex took to the skies with pilot Chris Wood last week and became the oldest passenger to ever fly in his balloon.landing, and was particularly pleased to see a herd of deer. Kathy’s sense of humour came to the fore when she claimed to have seen her bloomers hanging on the line as we passed over Halstead.”
