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"Exactly seven years after their controversial split on Valentine's Day in 2004, America's favorite plastic lovebirds reunited, sending the socialverse down memory lane.\nIn celebration of Ken's 50th anniversary and just in time for the Valentine's Day release of its Sweet Talkin' Ken doll, Mattel launched a grandiose marketing campaign to reunite its iconic doll couple, Barbie and Ken.\nWe spoke with Lauren Bruksch, director of Barbie marketing at Mattel, to get the inside scoop on the success of the campaign's social media components.\nThe Campaign\n\n\n\n\nAs with all integrated marketing programs, the Barbie and Ken reunion campaign took a village to produce. Attention, Ketchum Public Relations and Mattel's internal marketing, design and digital media teams worked together to pull it all off.\nBilled as Ken's new year's resolution to win Barbie back, the campaign was heavy on social media marketing, utilizing Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and YouTube to spread its message.\nBarbieandKen.com was the hub of the campaign, where users could vote on whether Barbie should \"take Ken back\" or not. The site features a Love-O-Meter, gauging voters' feelings on the topic. (Now that the campaign has ended, the page now redirects to Barbie's Facebook page.)\nMattel managed separate social accounts for each doll across various platforms during the campaign. On Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, fans could follow Ken's adventures as he attempted to woo Barbie back into his arms.\nOf course, this love story isn't complete without a damsel in distress. Barbie's Twitter and Facebook accounts were flowing with updates about Ken's grand gestures and requests for suggestions about how she should handle the situation.\nSince reuniting, the two now share Barbie's Twitter and Facebook accounts, \"hopefully forever,\" tweeted Ken. To minimize confusion, Ken's updates are signed with \"-Ken.\"\nMattel also launched a web series on Hulu called Genuine Ken, featuring host Whitney Port and eight \"Ken-testants\" competing for the title of \"The Great American Boyfriend.\" \nIntegrating Online &amp; Offline Efforts\n\n\n\n\nMattel's campaign to reunite Barbie and Ken was one of the most integrated campaigns in recent months. In conjunction with the digital and social media tactics employed, the brand put on a slew of offline stunts, including a \"Catch Me If You Ken\" outing that featured a pack of smoldering hot Ken doll models at last year's NYC Fashion's Night Out event. Ken was also spotted at New York's Magnolia Bakery, designing a special cupcake for Barbie, which was available for purchase through Valentine's Day.\nKeeping up the sweet trend, Mattel went all-out at famous candy shop Dylan's Candy Bar. The windows of Dylan's Manhattan flagship were decked out in Ken-branded Valentine's Day candy, and the store carried a number of Barbie and Ken products for the holiday.\nThe brand paired its online efforts with a mix of traditional media buys. Billboards of Ken professing his love to Barbie were erected in New York and Los Angeles, and a two-page spread was placed in Us Weekly, published on Valentine's Day (pictured at right).\nDiving Into the Online Dating World\n\n\n\n\nDuring the campaign, a video (embedded above) was posted to Barbie's YouTube page, showing Ken creating a profile on the dating site Match.com, only to find that Barbie is his perfect match.\n\"What we love about the Match.com video in particular is that it allowed us to, again, showcase the realness of the relationship between Barbie and Ken as romantic dolls in 2011,\" says Bruksch. \"Barbie and Ken, being the modern dolls they are, would have checked out online dating sites. They, of course, would be on Facebook, browsing through their upcoming Facebook events and checking out the occasional Facebook ad \u2026 just like the rest of us!\"\nThe video was the icing on the cake for this campaign. Mattel approached online dating with realistic ideas of how people meet and communicate on the web. Bruksch explains why digital dating played such a role in the duo's reunion:\n\n\"The way the reunion came about was not unlike many other modern romances that are often documented and shared via many social media channels. Many can likely relate to many of the moments that Barbie and Ken shared \u2014 such as writing a flirty status update in hopes of gaining the attention of an ex-boyfriend or girlfriend, running into an ex at an event and tweeting the surprise encounter, testing out the online dating waters \u2026 these are all common social actions in today\u2019s dating world.\n\"What did Barbie do today? Has she run into Ken? How did she react to the cupcakes Ken commissioned for her at Magnolia Bakery?\n\"All these aspects of Barbie\u2019s and Ken\u2019s lives are displayed through YouTube videos, Foursquare tips, TwitPics, Facebook updates, blog posts \u2026 where one would expect to find them in their own lives. If someone created cupcakes for you with a delicious bakery, would you not show them off on Facebook?\n\"The Barbie and Ken modern love story was a delightful (doll-ightful!) one to tell through social media, and we\u2019re ecstatic that the two are \u2014 rightfully \u2014 united once again.\"\n\nThe Results\n\n\n\n\n\"The strategy was to leverage Barbie and Ken\u2019s various social channels to authentically share moments and insights into their romance as they began to find their way back to each other and emerge as the ultimate Roman-TECH couple,\" explains Bruksch.\nThe campaign was a huge success across each social platform it employed. During the reunion courtship, lasting from early January to February 14, Barbie's Facebook Page experienced a 34% increase in fans and a 200% increase in engagement, through comments, likes and shares. Bruksch notes that this enhanced engagement has sustained post-campaign.\nMattel utilized Twitter to share tidbits from Barbie and Ken's romantic journey. Bruksch says, \"Whether it was a Twitpic of Barbie noticing one of Ken\u2019s grand gestures in Us Weekly magazine or Ken sharing his Match.com online dating search with his fans, every key moment in their romantic journey was captured and shared via links, pictures, tweets, video clips.\" The flowing content got followers excited about sharing the couple's news. On February 14, the reunion day, the words \"Barbie\" and \"Ken\" were tweeted every two minutes, and #BarbieandKen was a trending topic in 15 cities, including New York City, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago and San Francisco.\nBarbieandKen.com, the hub for the campaign, \"was a great destination for [fans] to learn about the Barbie and Ken romance, share their own content around the romance and help determine what might happen next,\" says Bruksch, noting that \"the crowdsourcing of the voting was central to the narrative of their journey.\" The page garnered more than 5 million pageviews, and hundreds of thousands of users voted on whether Barbie and Ken should rekindle their flame.\n\n\n\n\nMore Business Resources from Mashable:\n- Twitter + Random Acts of Kindness = A Successful Social Campaign- How Social Media Helped Toy Story 3 Win at the Box Office- Lessons Learned From The Old Spice Campaign &amp; Its Imitators- Was the Charlie Sheen Tweet a Win for Internships.com?- Mattel Launches Digital Campaign Aiming To Reunite Barbie &amp; Ken"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/05/05/barbie-ken-social-media/>