How to turn the customary fashion sales period into a marketing opportunity? That was the challenge we had from our long standing client, Miista, a new independent fashion brand.

Solution: Discount products by getting customers to Tweet them, with the size of the discount dependent on the customers’ Klout scores.

I have made my favourite Miista shoes 3% cheaper by sending this tweet! miista.com/shop/batilda-t… twitter.com/loriannl/statu…

— Loriann Luckings (@loriannl) January 13, 2012

Klout is one of many services that purport to measure influence online. It’s hardly flawless, but it’s a far better and more sophisticated measure than simply counting Twitter followers, which can be gamed very easily.

Importantly we wanted to avoid the elitist way many Klout campaigns have been implemented, where only users with high scores get access to perks. Miista’s brand values is very much at odds with treating their customers differently depending on status. We wanted to turn Klout into a good for everybody. So the behaviour we designed for was to get users with higher influence to Tweet, as they could make the price drop faster for everybody.

We came up with an exponential discount drop, to reflect Klout’s exponential nature. It is much easier to move from 10 to 40 on Klout, than from 50 to 60 for example. And from there on upwards, it only gets harder.

So how did it go?

We got our exponential graph wrong at first. On the Tuesday when we launched we learned a few valuable lessons … like, how quickly people would catch on to it. Even though Miista is a small independent brand, this really took off faster than we had thought it would.

Many mid sized fashion bloggers with Klout scores of 40 to 50 had a big impact. And since customers were only limited to one Tweet per product, they quickly teamed up and moved from product to product to create sizable price drops.

So we did two things:

• We adapted the discount algorithm on day two, as per this chart. It does not look like a huge change, but it moved the percentage drops further down the line. There are not that many people with Klout scores above 55 and people that typically have these scores have much larger audiences.
• We limited users to one Tweet overall. This had exactly the desired effect. Twitter users started asking their followers to help them, thereby bringing new customers to Miista.

please tweet and make these @miistashoes shoes cheaper for me! wanna see how far they can go down! miista.com/shop/dina-blac…

— Kristabel P. (@fashionknitsta) January 6, 2012

Some stats so far.

Clever marketing in #socialmedia: in return for tweeting about the brand, you can get discounts from Miista shoes benlik.es/ztdQHD

— Ben Wagenaar (@BenWagenaar) January 9, 2012

We could easily count the potential reach of all the people who Tweeted and produce stratospheric numbers. But what really matters is who visited the Miista site. Miista has increased its unique users per day more than ten fold since the campaign, with 62% of the visitors never having visited the site before. Average time on the site has gone from over 3 minutes to over 8 minutes. Pages per visit is up from 2.5 to 5.2.

They have received coverage in the UK’s two premier digital marketing blogs, The Wall and The Drum. And many more in Fashion blogs. Many top fashion bloggers Tweeted the campaign, including 5 Inch and Up, Suzie Bubble, Cocorosa, What Katie Wore, Garbage Dress, Song of Style, Studded Hearts, Late Afternoon, Lulu and Your Mom, and Kingdom of Style. Drapers – the leading UK industry magazine in the fashion industry is doing a story. And we even had a Tweet from a celebrity, Paloma Faith.

Bribing customers to be brand advocates

This Tweet, by Facebook’s PR Burson-Marsteller was one of the funnier ones about the campaign. That’s one way of putting it:

Check out shoe brand Miista miista.com Good example of using #Twitter to bribe customers to be ambassadors for your product

— be more… (@bemorecomms) January 6, 2012

Full disclosure. Miista was founded by my partner Laura Villasesnin.