Merry Christmas!

Let me tell you a story. Many years ago, I was hired by a luxury car brand to manage their social media campaigns in Mexico City. I can’t tell you which one, but I can tell you Elvis liked it a lot.

Well, I had been working there only for a few months when I decided it was time to have a Christmas giveaway. But I needed a prize first, so I asked my then-boss to whom I needed to talk to get one because depending on the prize the size and duration of the campaign would change.

I explained what I wanted to do and gave him all the details about this campaign. When I finished, he was just staring at me, as if I had committed a crime. He said: “You don’t know a thing about marketing. You never never mess with Christmas“.

Remember this happened in Mexico City, and Christmas there is something sacred, so you have to be very careful and try not to offend anybody. You can see many “Happy Holidays” campaigns, but none explicitly mention Christmas.

I explained to him that, the year before, I had a similar giveaway for another car brand – their main competitor actually – and that it had performed really well. As a matter of fact, that campaign gave such good results that it had landed me that job.

To keep it short, He agreed reluctantly to the campaign and I started doing what I needed to do to get it going. After a week, I showed my boss a report with all the metrics and all the results. It performed really great.

What happened next is not relevant to what I want to tell you, which is that, in social media and digital marketing in general, there are no rules, as we’ve been saying from the beginning.

This idea that I couldn’t have a campaign related to Christmas was so aberrant for me, that I had to show my boss that his concepts and his “recipes” on traditional marketing didn’t apply to social media. This was something new and we had to try new things.

If you want to have a giveaway or a dynamic of any kind on your social media, do it. Be respectful of all the different traditions, and try to include everyone, but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t do it.

All these old concepts and formulas that traditional marketing people have, need to change. With the internet and social media, everything changed, so we have to change the way we promote our brands. We have to change the way we interact with our audience.

So go ahead and try new things. Don’t be afraid and experiment with images, copy, platforms, and formats. Measure everything you can, so later you can learn from your results, whichever they are, but never refrain from having the campaign that you want to have.

Happy holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, or whatever works for you, just enjoy this season, hopefully with the company of your loved ones, and take care of yourselves.