Go Back To Where You Came From: Using Digital To Build Bridges

Last night SBS aired, what it has been spruiking as a global television first, the reality doco Go Back To Where You Came From. A program that attempts to portray how the average Australian feels about refugees and ‘boat people’ and what the average Australian would experience if they were faced with a similar situation of having to escape their own country to seek asylum.

Unsurprisingly, the show was incredibly popular on social media channels, especially Twitter where at one stage it was the number one worldwide trending conversation. For me, the #GoBackSBS hashtag was updating too quickly to follow so I had to settle for conversing with those in my Twitter stream watching the show.

Its popularity, ratings (524K last night) and online discussion and engagement on Twitter will have SBS boss, Michael Ebeid feeling pretty chuffed this morning. It will also be interesting to see some of the social media stats from the show, such as number of tweets and keywords used in tweets, following the airing of the third and final episode on Thursday night…(watch this space).

Separately, I also mentioned on Twitter last night how I had stumbled upon an interesting campaign from NRMA which is currently using gaming as a medium to influence. NRMA’s Car Park Challenge game is a nice example of using digital tactics to engage consumers and educate them about what it considers a key issue, or PR play, beyond issuing a standard press release or hosting a media briefing. It’s certainly not a new idea, but it is a clever one. Plenty of organisations around the globe have executed similar tactics in the past, one example is Cisco with its binary game for students studying maths, science, IT, computing and programming. I would love to hear from NRMA about how this campaign goes.

So I wasn’t surprised when I logged onto the SBS Go Back To Where You Came From microsite this morning to see it too had created a simulation-type game to further enhance and amplify its message. By engaging its consumers online, the game, Asylum Exit Australia, is a great medium for SBS to use to establish a deeper connection between the audience and the brand, outside of the program’s 8:30pm-9:30pm television slots. In this case, the brand is the refugee experience and what it feels like to be put in unfathomable situations. The game’s players are allocated $9,990 AUD and are faced with making difficult decisions about leaving Australia, obtaining passports through the embassy or the black market, sourcing supplies, negotiating dangerous streets and leaving their loved ones to escape anarchy and instability.

Building a bridge and connection between the refugee experience and the Australian public is what SBS is attempting to do with Go Back To Where You Came From. Its PR and Marketing department appear to be doing this successfully by leveraging and integrating both traditional and online channels to connect to its audience and engage them in ways that simply weren’t possible 10 years ago (or even less). Something PR professionals should always consider as part of any communications campaign.

What are your thoughts?