New #SocialRoundup: Why Brands Are the Real Winners At The Super Bowl and GRAMMYS

Welcome to our latest #SocialRoundup blog series about new social media efforts and best practices. Today, we visit the stadium turf and the concert stage to see how brands leveraged the Super Bowl and the GRAMMYS to drive awareness and engagement with their audiences.

Brands Make Winning Plays During Super Bowl XLIX

The New England Patriots’ 28-24 victory over the Seattle Seahawks was the most watched TV show in U.S. history. The challenge for brands, which spent a record $4.5 million for a 30-second TV ad, was maximizing this investment on social media.

The answer? Lots of hashtags and real-time marketing.

McDonald’s, for example, used its “Lovin“-themed campaign in a TV commercial to promote new way for patrons to pay for their order – with an act of love.

The fast food giant also gave away every product advertised during the game, tweeting the offers out in real-time. The strategy worked — McDonald’s got 1.2 million retweets overall, and 25,000 new Twitter followers that day.

Brands Steal the Spotlight During GRAMMYs

The live TV event that is the GRAMMYs proved to be another potent venue for social media, with brands like MasterCard and Patron using Twitter to publish promoted tweets in real time in reaction to what was taking place during the show.

Cisco Takes The Court During NBA All-Star Game

You can’t forget about one of the biggest basketball games of the year –NBA All-Star 2015. This week, the Cisco Corporate Social Responsibility team followed Deborah Huyler and Andrew Torres, two Cisco Networking Academy Dream Team students, as they set up wireless access points and provided network troubleshooting in advance of the NBA All-Star 2015. They have been sharing their stories from Madison Square Garden, the Barclays Center, and other event venues through journal entries, photo slideshows, and videos.

Learn more about Cisco’s involvement at the NBA All-Star game and follow the #NetAcadNBA hashtag on Twitter to see real-time updates from Deborah and Andrew’s NBA All-Star 2015 experiences.