





The Reddit community has grown substantially in the last year, and links that hit the front page can send boatloads of valuable traffic to interesting, valuable or funny content. But brands have traditionally found it a tough nut to crack.

Unlike more mainstream networks like Facebook and Twitter, there's no "following" or "subscribing" to other users or entities. Karma — the points awarded when users upvote links and comments — generally don't influence the success of new content the way a well-followed Twitter account might (though this has been debated).

Thus, marketers have no way of establishing an overt presence, and those who attempt to "game" the community are quickly sniffed out, downvoted, or worse.

"For most marketers, Reddit is a weird foreign country," says Erik Martin, general manager at reddit. "Unless they actually visit reddit, they just don't understand it."

That's why the post at the top of the front page on Tuesday was so interesting. Bear Grylls, the UK adventurer and star of the popular Discovery Channel survival show Man vs. Wild, was doing an AMA ("Ask Me Anything" — a forum where Reddit users pose questions directly to celebs or interesting public figures). An Internet meme about Bear Grylls drinking his own pee for no reason has been popular on Reddit for some time. Grylls recently had a laugh at his own expense via Twitter, much to the delight of his fans.

The Q&A thread, which was upvoted to the top of Reddit within hours of appearing, is pretty compelling from a marketing standpoint, for a few reasons:

Grylls responded to the AMA questions via YouTube videos, which were linked and hosted on a website called The Adrenalist.

The Adrenalist is a content site created by Degree Men, a brand of antiperspirant. The videos were uploaded to Degree Men's YouTube channel.

The personalized video responses from Grylls confirmed his identity, but also sent readers away from Reddit, which is not typical for an AMA thread.

A bit of sleuthing revealed that the Degree Men Twitter account was also playing along, and sending its followers to Grylls' responses. It became apparent that Degree Men (and its agency, Weber Shandwick) had instigated a perfect storm of content marketing — that is, placing its content at the top of a high-traffic destination where users were thrilled to find and interact with it.

"[Weber Shandwick] had been tracking the existence of the Bear meme for some time," Aaron Calloway, senior brand building manager for Degree, tells Mashable. "The format was brought to Bear under the conditions of being upfront with redditors, having a sense of humor, as well as a lack of branding on the videos and overall AMA."

"In this case, some of the people involved [with] Degree were Reddit users and set this up," says Martin. "They actually contacted us about how to do this the right way. There was no money involved, we just answered questions and gave some basic advice. More importantly, Bear Grylls has a lot of interest on Reddit. The fact that he was a good sport about the ubiquitous 'better drink my own piss' jokes made it even more interesting."

It's clear that Degree understood the Reddit community before attempting the campaign, and that's the clear takeaway here. "Redditors are good people, and so is Bear," says Calloway. "We knew they would appreciate [him] taking the meme in stride, having some fun with it all, and showing everybody what a classy guy he is. He was game from the start, and loved the questions."

And the payoff?

"We anticipated an enthusiastic response, but the amount of traffic was incredible," Calloway notes. "The initial surge even temporarily overwhelmed the site, so we quickly switched to our 'Plan B' and continued the conversation through our YouTube channel without missing a beat. The site was soon back up, and suffice it to say, we had our best traffic day ever. We saw some numbers any media site would be proud of."

Watch Bear Grylls' AMA Video Responses