The story of Mason Ramsey, and the WalMart Yodel Boy Viral Livestream.
Building Fans For WalMart’s eCommerce Brand With Social Media
Walmart eCommerce is going toe-to-toe with Amazon to build brand awareness of their e-commerce platform. Critical to their effort is to dramatically up their social media game. In 2018, after a national review, we were brought on as social media AOR for Walmart eCommerce.
Our first assignment was to take advantage of a fast-breaking online phenomenon, Walmart Yodel Boy. On March 24, 2018, Mason Ramsey was videoed singing Hank Williams Sr.’s “Lovesick Blues” in the aisle of the Harrisburg, Illinois, Walmart. Posted to Facebook, in just a week it went viral with more than 11 million views.
We recognized the opportunity and on April 4 we connected with Walmart to discuss their response. By 11 a.m. on April 5 we’d sent our proposal and at 6 p.m., April 6, Walmart approved our approach.
Approach
We recommended that Walmart sponsor a Facebook Live concert with Mason at the Harrisburg Walmart but in today’s social media world “speed kills” so we knew we had to move quickly.
Achievements:
We engaged with influential social users and brands such as Kacey Musgraves, Kelsea Ballerini, Paris Jackson, Mike "The Situation" from Jersey Shore, Doug the Pug, the Boston Red Sox, the Sacramento Kings, Party City, Little Debbie, Vice and Nylon Mag on their love for Yodel Boy.
Across our social posts and our Yodel Boy Snapchat filter, we inspired over 853K engagements and nearly 40M impressions!
Our 20 minute livestream of the concert on Twitter and Facebook inspired a total of 3.6M viewers, over 5M minutes viewed.
On top of that, we received press coverage of our concert from top media outlets including Billboard, TIME, Thrillist and The Washington Post.
In the span of one week, we amplified the reach of a trending, brand-related video and constructed a real-time event to actively engage our customers across social.
We worked with the Harrisburg, IL Walmart store to host the concert and stream it live across our social channels. This was no easy feat, as WiFi signals in the rural area of Harrisburg, IL were intermittent at times and threatened to disturb the livestream.
We promoted the livestream event by engaging social users with #YodelChallenge, which asked users to share their own best yodel.
We engaged local and community officials to help facilitate the event and activated local partners to swarm the town with posters and information about the event.
During the concert we engaged with celebrities and influencers talking about Mason's mad yodeling skills in real-time.
We created a Snapchat filter featuring a caricature of Mason Ramsey yodeling and shared it with our followers ahead of the concert.
After reaching out to our partners at The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Ellen invited Mason to be a guest on her show the same week and Mason was able to plug the concert to Ellen's sizable television audience while receiving 26.7M YouTube views online.
Attained 3.6M views and 11.8K shares for livestream.
We garnered the most positive comment sentiment of any Walmart post ever.