The story of #bachpanstyle

Myntra’s twitter accounthit a couple of milestones last week. For starters, it overtook me in terms of number of followers – not that I am way up on the charts or hugely active on twitter these days, but it’s good to handle a brand that has more followers than I do, especially when it has more than quadrupled in the last year. 🙂 Growing a personal brand is fun, but as a professional in the domain, growing a brand on social media is more fun because of the increased number of challenges and constraints.

We have focused mostly on getting the basic stuff right – Customer Care, (utilising GetSatisfaction to a fair degree) promoting interesting content relevant to our domain – created and curated, presence on the website, and when we were confident of taking it to the next level experimenting with various contest formats. Not the “let’s make it trend” kind, but ones that have some meaning for us as a brand/business and that’s fun for our followers on twitter as well.

And that’s what gave us our second milestone. Long before brands arrived on the scene, Ashu Mittal, (to begin with.. thanks Surekha for the correction) Surekha, Roshni, The Comic Project, b50, Aalaap had made Children’s Day a fun event on Twitter by getting people to change their DPs – to a childhood photo – for a day. I have participated too, at least for a couple of years. Though I didn’t inform them (because I am still unsure on how I should deal with personal relationships in a work scenario) this was also a hat tip to them. All users had to do was share a childhood pic of theirs with a description of it and use #bachpanstyle. We used our larger FB crowd for publicity, ran the contest on Twitter, and made a Pinterest board specially for it. It was a lot of fun, and also got us our second milestone – a little bit of coverage (courtesy Lighthouse Insights) for the activity. That was a first for us. 🙂

The cake had some icing too! The next day, my Twitter daily digest showed me a tweet from Surekha about #bachpan and changing DPs. Since the contest was over and done with, I sent her the board we’d made. And got this

we played #bachpan yesterday. the brilliant @manuscrypts and team @myntra ran a #bachpanstyle promo: bit.ly/TKHW8D those pictures! <3

— Surekha Pillai (@surekhapillai) November 15, 2012

Being appreciated is always a great thing, and more so when it comes from my twitter-childhood friends. 🙂

until next time, childlike glee 🙂