Reliance Communication: Roaming freely

The company's first digital-only campaign, launched during the final days of the football World Cup to showcase its free roaming facility, has just ended.

Reliance Communications (commonly referred to as RCOM), the Indian broadband and telecommunications company, has launched a digital campaign to promote its 'One India. One Rate' plan. The campaign aims to create awareness about the plan, which offers free roaming facility to users.

Launched during the final week of FIFA World Cup, the campaign titled #FreedomToRoam was conceptualised by digital agency World Wide Open (WWO). To demonstrate to users that they could now continue to make calls and use data without worrying about hefty bills, even while roaming, Reliance chose one social media influencer - @ghaatidancer (https://twitter.com/ghaatidancer/) - with more than 14,000 followers on Twitter, to travel across India and experience life without roaming charges.

@ghaatidancer travelled to four Indian cities in four days, uploaded pictures, shared videos and stayed in touch with her loved ones constantly. What's more, she used social media to crowd source the itinerary of the entire campaign by tweeting with the hashtag #FreedomToRoam.

According to the brand, the #FreedomToRoam campaign succeeded in achieving more than 6,500 mentions on Twitter and the brand profile @RelianceMobile (https://twitter.com/RelianceMobile) added more than 4,000 new followers within two weeks. The campaign also generated a lot of curiosity about the 'One India, One Rate' plan in the minds of Twitter-users.

The campaign also brought people together as it demonstrated how the plan ultimately helps users stay in constant touch with loved ones. The influencer, @ghaatidancer, got a huge surprise when a friend from Kolkata, paid her a surprise visit after seeing her tweets about her Kolkata trip. And then they took a selfie, of course.

Speaking about the initiative, Prasun Kumar, head, brand, communication & insights, Reliance Communications, says, "This is for the first time that RCOM drove a 'digital only' campaign (no other media support was provided) to deliver on some very ambitious business and marketing targets. While social media marketing has always been an important digital marketing tool, we took it to the next level by making it the primary driver of messaging and engagement."

According to Kumar, RCOM contextualised the entire social media plan around the FIFA World Cup fever (which was at its peak) to deliver the message. "We could not only reach out to the core TG of smart devices roamers, but also drove deep engagement," he says.