Follow Us and We’ll Follow You
Mellow Mushroom is a pizza place with a laid-back hippie mentality and a rather stoned-looking mushroom for a mascot. To get more followers on Twitter, we told people if you follow us, we'll follow you. We didn't mention we'd be using your social info to do it in real life, in the company's creepy mushroom costumes. The campaign was featured in the print edition of the New York Times, named one of Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 3 Marketing Masterworks," and for years Twitter used it as an example of how best to use Twitter.
A lot of people followed @mellowmushroom. We followed a lot of people back.
As the campaign spread, individual stores across the country surprised their local followers by following them in mushroom costumes.