Case study: The Big Lunch

Aims

The Big Lunch, which took place in July 2009, was organised by the Eden Project. The idea was to encourage everyone in the UK to have lunch together in their streets on the same day, as a way of developing a feeling of community and companionship.

While the Big Lunch organisers already had a website to promote the event, they wanted to use social media to increase word-of-mouth and to encourage two-way conversations with people who were interested in getting involved.

Solutions

In order to drive word-of-mouth, FreshNetworks approached the project from two angles: creating a hub for social media activity and creating and managing buzz for The Big Lunch.

We created a blog site, www.thebiglunchers.com, to complement the look and feel of The Big Lunch website and branding. The blog was used to pull together existing Big Lunch videos, images and messages to engage users. We also created relationships with existing "Big Lunchers" and other supportive bloggers and pulled their content into the hub.

Twitter and Facebook were integrated with the blog site to enable direct interaction with people who were interested in The Big Lunch.

Results

Sunday 19th July 2009 saw up to a million people, thousands of neighbourhoods and miles of bunting take to the streets to celebrate The Big Lunch. The fact that so many people co-ordinated their efforts at the same time on the same day shows the power of word-of-mouth.

By using a variety of social media tools, including a blog site called thebiglunchers.com, Facebook and Twitter, we managed to engage, talk to and interact directly with nearly 5,000 individual people. According to research carried out by the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), an engaged person tells an average of 9 other people, which means that we successfully engaged 45,000 people either directly or indirectly thanks to word-of-mouth.