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Our “Best Of” series takes a look at Little Caeser’s Pizza and its hysterically brilliant social campaign over the 4th of July. Connect with them on Facebook and Twitter.

If you ask most marketers what they want to have happen with their social campaigns, it would be to have them go viral. Spread across the Internet like wildfire across the Blackwater Bay. That’s a very difficult thing to have happen, and it happens by accident than by design more often than not.

To that end, Little Caesar’s asked Americans to vote for their deep dish pizza as their favorite by shooting off fireworks during the week of July 1st. The results? Simply remarkable.

If you’re anything like us, you laughed out loud watching that. While this is done with tongue firmly in cheek, it does lend credence to a tactic that’s quite useful for communications pros. Newsjacking. This is the practice of taking the day’s headlines and finding an angle that your brand can either contribute to the story or capitalize on it in some way.

Another lesson learned here is to embrace humor. That’s easy for us to say as it plays a big part in our own social media efforts. Brands take a risk every day by attempting to be humorous, us included. Humor can help humanize your brand, encouraging your audience to connect and engage rather than simply consuming whatever information you dispense. As the saying goes, “Don’t take life so seriously. You’ll never make it out alive.”