Saturday, April 11, 2015

To Catch a Dragon, HBO starts a Drogon Hunt



HBO, the creator of the hit cable TV series “The Game of Thrones”, is launching its 5th season premiere with a social media twist and a new themed Twitter hashtag. This hashtag, which will go live at 11 AM on Sunday, is #CatchDrogon.

For viewers not familiar with The Game of Thrones, Drogon is a dragon that terrorizes various neighborhoods of this fantasy medieval-inspired adaptation that has enough dark intrigue to resemble another hit HBO series, The Sopranos.

The interesting thing here is that Twitter followers are being asked to subscribe and follow #CatchDrogan and retweet in a certain timespan as soon as they see the hashtag. Those that catch it in time will be rewarded access to exclusive content, such as sneak peeks, previews, and even real physical prizes.

This social media strategy appears to be consistent with the best practices of viral marketing techniques. Social media followers are generally looking for free but high-quality content, new product announcements, previews, freebies, or product launches. This hashtag media campaign just about satisfies all of those criteria.


Here’s the amazing thing when you couple quality content with a large social media presence (15 million FB likes, 2.3 million Twitter followers). On hashtag launch day (which coincides with season 5 premiere), HBO will establish a war-room style command center staffed by celebrities, producers, and folks from 360i and Giphy (where GoT has an enterprise account) to drive engagement with all the hashtag retweeting that’s going to be keeping Google’s “currently trending” servers busy analyzing.

We look forward to catching a Drogan, or at least get a sneak-peek and maybe win some prizes.

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