The tweet was 15 persons on standby, a strategy that assembled such a team much earlier, and possibly a lot of money for so called social media experts even earlier.
So you call this tweet free? No, if you ever bought an cookie from them in the last (lets say) three years, you payed for that tweet.
sorry, don't wanna sound rude, but knowing the cost (in terms of consultants, human resources, et al) of advertising, marketing and the like, free seems to be such a wrong term to me.
I won't argue that it cost them precisely $0. But the marginal cost of this tweet was pretty close to free.
Let's be realistic -- there's no way they had 15 FTEs fully dedicated to social media. Instead, it's 15 people from Customer Service, and/or Marketing, who are already employed at the company. When the company spends $4mm on an ad, it likely turns into a Super Bowl party at the office, with free pizza and beer in the biggest conference room in the building. The 15 get a bit of training and access to Hootsuite, which is what @Oreo is using, and asked to stand by with their notebooks if things got crazy.
At a previous job, when we had a big marketing event like this, it was all hands on deck, and everyone, no matter what your normal job function, was to answer phones. Our 40-person Customer Service team was actually 2 Customer Service people, augmented by the CEO, all VPs, marketers, sales, etc.
So you call this tweet free? No, if you ever bought an cookie from them in the last (lets say) three years, you payed for that tweet.
sorry, don't wanna sound rude, but knowing the cost (in terms of consultants, human resources, et al) of advertising, marketing and the like, free seems to be such a wrong term to me.