Denuo - denuology.com

It started with a phone call to our offices in Chicago.

The next step involved several meetings in New York and Montvale, New Jersey.

From there, it sent me to Tampa for a team training session and send off party.

And finally Tampa to Dallas, culminating in 4 cars, 4 starting points, and 3 days of cross country travel.

The denouement happened last week at the Chicago Auto Show where I stood, still exhausted from the journey, and answered questions during their inaugural Social Media Day.

One of the questions that continually came up is “How did you get people so engaged in this?”

My travels were half the answer.  Ultimately it was a digital experience that was rooted in humanity and the physical world.

If you’re not familiar with the Mercedes-Benz Tweet Race, I apologize for the vague intro.  I still like to pretend I write for Rolling Stone from time to time.  Eric Bee sums it up here.

The consumer facing side was this.

A straightforward web/mobile experience that allowed you to track the race from your snowed in living room or your office while on mute during a boring conference call (hypothetically).

But it was more than that.  These were actual people driving from point to point.  They passed through our neighborhoods, they posted videos from familiar locales, they tweeted out things that we all experience on a road trip.  There were moments of joy, there were moments of pain.  It was 3 days of sharing highs and lows with people you probably never met, but could relate to.

For all the pontification you hear about what makes a digital experience engaging and successful, you rarely hear something as simple as “it catered to our humanity.”  We all have needs and desires.  Highs and lows.  And frankly, we want to experience them.  Even if it is through a proxy driving a Mercedes-Benz CL through Tennessee.

When the fate of that proxy falls in your hands, the engagement skyrockets.

There was no better example of this than the Scavenger Hunt Challenge.  On the last day, each team received identical sets of clues for 8 items.  The catch was that they weren’t expected to find these things, their followers were.  Their most ardent supporter might have tweeted 50 times a day, but it doesn’t matter unless they live near or own the object their team was looking for.

A few Google Docs and several hours later and Team E narrowly beat out Team S in the challenge.  They had won a “digital” challenge that required a trip to Heinz Field, Lambeau Field, Sun Life Stadium, The Mercedes-Benz Classic Car Center in Irvine, and Mercedes-Benz Dealerships in Tampa, Chicago, LA, Manhattan, and Union, New Jersey.

It wasn’t just a matter of clicking “like” or printing a coupon.  It demanded that you go out into the world and connect with someone to achieve a shared goal on behalf of this team you had lived and died with (in a gaming sense) for 2 days.  The reward was intrinsic, and the response was staggering.

Watching the feed as the challenge progressed, you could feel the tension around completing the task.  No one wanted to lose.  It was digital drama created in an analog world. This screenshot from Team E’s Google Doc sums it up best.

There was no prize for the people in the Team E community who finished the challenge.  The reward was helping two guys from Chicago get from Tampa to Dallas and complete some challenges along the way.  It had nothing to do with pixels. It had everything to do with miles.  And as we forage deeper into the digital world, that’s something we should never lose sight of.