People were talking a lot of sh*t about smart on Twitter. The car’s size, safety and style were all 140-character punch lines. So we had a choice. We could ignore the haters. Or we could use our unique voice to change their minds. As part of a larger program geared to humor our haters, we struck back at a tweet that said, "Saw a bird had crapped on a Smart Car. Totaled it." We used elaborate math and even called farmers to see just how much bird crap it'd take to dent smart’s high-strength safety cell. The stats became an infographic, and we sent our reply. Three days later, we’d turned the sh*t -talking into respect. A simple interaction between a brand and its critic became a worldwide phenomenon. @adtothebone, once a critic of smart’s safety, retweeted our response to his thousands of followers, and followed up with a glowing blog post detailing how smart had earned his respect. His followers immediately began sharing and celebrating it on their own. From there, the content spread organically – without smart having spent a single media dollar – across global news sources, Twitter feeds, and blogs. It hit the #1 spot on Reddit twice in 24 hours, winning the admiration of its notoriously hard-to-impress users. BuzzFeed called it “brilliant." Forbes applauded our willingness to have some “attitude." And Mashable said, “This may be the best response from a brand yet." Soon enough, it was making global headlines in newspapers from London, Australia and Ghana. And it was featured on CNN’s morning news program, with its hosts barely able to contain their amusement at the brand’s use of “funny yet impeccable math." Yet beyond the humor, the Poop Tweet accomplished a major goal for the brand. After years of being a punch line for a perceived lack of safety, as the Daily Mail pointed out, a single tweet helped “millions [become] aware of smart’s tridion safety cell." In fact, organic searches for “tridion safety" cell spiked 333%. In just three days, the Poop Tweet generated over 22 million impressions. The brand’s Twitter page saw a 1,755% increase in follower growth. The infographic received over 15,400 clicks, which amounted to 82 times the brand’s average Twitter reach. It also helped change online brand sentiment, with smart’s positive sentiment increasing by 27% and its negative sentiment dropping by 13%. Now, smart’s unique voice is changing the minds of more and more critics, as we continue to humor our haters the way only smart can.
