Archive for the ‘case studies’ Category

Objectives First

09.03.04

A while back I wrote a series of posts on communications planning. One of the most popular posts within that series, which still gets a few hundred views per week, was on one on setting communications objectives. As I said at the time:

“As the old saying goes, you need to know where you’re going before you can know how to get there.”

Fast forward to this week, when Skittles re-launched their website with a completely new structure drawn almost entirely from other social media sites:

Naturally the bloggerati took notice, and began passing judgement on the website. The topic quickly shot to the list of top “trending” words on Twitter. While I was bemused that Skittles didn’t seem to be engaging on Twitter despite using the service on its site (Twitter.com/skittles is currently a locked personal account with very little activity), aside from that I tried to refrain from commenting on the effort itself.

Why?

Because we don’t know their objectives. All of the people ripping into this site are doing so with no clue what Skittles was trying to achieve.

  • Is it a short-term effort to kick-start buzz and discussion online?
  • Is it an attempt to position a 35 year-old brand as youthful?
  • Is it to simply raise awareness of the product?
  • Is it a genuine attempt to embrace social media?

We just don’t know.

While I’ve fallen into the trap of evaluating communications efforts in the past without knowing all of the information, this time I’m holding off.

To everyone else out there, who seem to know for sure that the site is a huge success/failure, I say:

“Do you have any idea what equals success in this project for the Skittles brand?”

Posted in: case studies, communications planning

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Capturing Canada’s Social Media Case Studies

08.10.18

Web 2.0 Examples in Canada wiki Dave Jones, the man behind the PR Works blog, the Shill podcast and (when he remembers) the Inside PR podcast, has created a new Web 2.0 Examples in Canada wiki to capture Canadian social media case studies.

The new wiki perfectly fills a gap in the social media space that has existed for a while now, and which I’ve noted previously – the need for good examples of social media use that we can use to show that this stuff really works.

Though I haven’t contributed (yet), I’ve signed up and plan to add some examples in the near future. You should too.

Nice work, Mr. Blognosaurus.

Posted in: case studies, social media

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Case Study: Using Social Media On A Small Scale To Raise Money For Charity

08.04.23

I’m a fanatical runner. I’m not particularly talented, but my dedication to my training enabled me to qualify for the 2008 Boston Marathon on April 21, 2008.

The Boston Marathon is the world’s oldest annual marathon and one of the world’s most prestigious road racing events. Besides the Olympic trials and the Olympic marathons, Boston is the only major American marathon that requires a qualifying time.

Exactly two months before the race I announced that I would use social media and the Boston Marathon to raise money for cancer research.

Objectives

Reaching the top of Heartbreak Hill in the Boston Marathon The objective for this was simple:

  • Raise $3,000 for the world-class Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation, based in Toronto (a somewhat arbitrary goal)
  • Raise awareness of my fundraising effort using social media, to see if these tactics would work for a promotional effort

Tactics

I threw my PR knowledge largely out the window for this effort. I’d decided up-front that I would use entirely online tactics to see how effective they could be.

The tools I chose to use:

When I announced the initiative, this blog had 278 subscribers. My running site had very few. I had around 500 Twitter followers (Twitterholic‘s stats only go back to March 1) and my Utterz account had just a few subscribers.

I wrote seven posts on my PR blog:

I wrote three posts on my running blog:

I also wrote dozens of Twitter messages over the two months, updating people on my progress and providing information on how to donate. Lastly, I recorded frequent posts through Utterz. The posts were a mix of video, audio, text and pictures about my training for the race. I posted all of the recordings to my running site – along with the route maps from my runs, these 31 posts formed the ongoing record of my training through this effort.

Results

Output

While my running blog continued to receive negligible traffic, several posts to my PR blog received more:

  • Using Social Media To Support Cancer Research – 643 views
  • Another Social Media Miracle? – 285 views
  • Auction – 217 views

Over these two months, this blog grew to over 500 subscribers. How much of that is due to this fundraising effort, I can’t say. I’m pretty sure it didn’t hurt, though. Meanwhile, my running blog subscribers remained relatively static, while my Twitter contacts grew to roughly 825.

My announcement of the fundraising effort also spawned a mini-fundraiser with Keith Burtis and Tommy Vallier, who generously volunteered their time and effort to set up an online auction to raise additional funds.

The effort generated some healthy interest on Twitter. Unfortunately, Twitter’s historical search is far from comprehensive, but you can see some recent posts here (for now).

Outcome

  • Raised $2,315 for Toronto’s Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation
  • I can trace 59% of the donations to people who only (or primarily) know me through my online presence
  • Oh, and I finished the marathon in 3:18:30


Success or Failure?

Looking strictly at the original objectives:

  • I failed to meet my original target of $3,000, but given that this was very arbitrary, I’m very happy with the money raised
  • Given the traffic to my site and the buzz generated on Twitter, I think the second objective was successfully achieved

This was a very small-scale effort, with zero budget and only occasional bursts of online activity. Was it a success? I’ll leave that to your judgement.

What do you think?

Posted in: case studies, social media

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Case Studies? Anyone?

08.01.31

For all the talk of openness, transparency and community in social media, there’s one thing missing.

Either be a good example or a horrible warningCase studies.

Social media is still an emerging area, and it’s moving at light speed in many areas – video and mobile, to name two.

However, the lack of fleshed-out examples of success has bothered me a lot recently.

For social media to progress beyond teenagers and a few niche agencies, we need widespread adoption. That means buy-in from senior executives.

For that, we need examples of successful social media initiatives that we can hold up and show to our bosses, our clients and our colleagues.

We need case studies of social media successes.

I recently asked my Twitter contacts why they thought there aren’t more case studies, and was met with an unusual wall of silence. The exception was Collin Douma, who pointed out that agencies need permission from clients to release data about their work. Without that, case studies aren’t going anywhere.

That’s fair enough, except I can’t believe that no organizations are willing to blow their own horn and show off their successes.

I’ve also noticed that case studies are one of the biggest gaps in contributions to the Social Media Training Wiki.

I’m beginning to wonder:

Do the evangelists really believe the market is big enough for all of us or are they keeping their cards close to their chest out of choice? Is all the talk of community really just hot air?

(That would be fine – I wouldn’t expect organizations in most sectors to reveal their secrets – were it not for all the talk to the contrary. I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a lot of talk without people practicing what they preach)

Is the lack of accepted standard measurement tools making people loath to publish their figures? I could understand that. Still, surely you’re using something to determine success or failure.

I have found a few case studies. Metrics are few and far between, but at least they’re putting this stuff out there:

Attending CaseCamp Toronto 6 in November 2007 threw up a few good examples too, including Vortex Mobile’s campaign for Levis and the Globe & Mail’s enabling of comments on its website.

Unfortunately, too many of these "case studies" are anecdotal, with little hard data to back them up. That’s what we need.

Have you found a similar lack of case studies? If so, why do you think this is?

What good case studies have you found?

(photo credit: Major Clanger)

Posted in: case studies, social media

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AlertMap: Cutting-Edge Emergency And Disaster Information Tool

08.01.17

If you’re even remotely interested in emergency information, check out AlertMap. This disaster-focused mashup pulls together data from some 600 sources to provide an amazingly valuable service.

The tool, from a Hungarian non-governmental organization, is an exceptional source for up-to-date worldwide disaster information .

AlertMap displays 55 categories of emergencies and disasters from fires, to avian flu, to biological terror attacks. Sources include the U.S. Geological Survey, the World Health Organization, the International Volcano Research Centre, and asteroid information is even provided by NASA.

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Clicking on an icon takes you to more information on the location, severity and status of the incident.

For example, I noticed an "epidemic hazard" shown in Toronto (turns out it was about 8 passengers of an Air Canada flight from Tel Aviv being quarantined recently), I clicked on the icon. This took me to an event summary screen with basic information on the incident and a whole series of tabs with more details.

For example, I was able to see the population within 20km of the incident location (4,612,191), the airports, ports and nuclear power plants within 100km and a Google map of the area.

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Right now, AlertMap is tracking about 50 recent incidents in addition to 13 earthquakes within the last 24 hours and 27 active volcanoes.

You can export much of this information easily. While the Google maps (bizarrely) aren’t embeddable, there are plenty of easily accessible RSS feeds and you can export data to Google Earth. For the less tech-savvy, you can get immediate email alerts of breaking incidents.

This is a topic I’ve become increasingly interested in. Last year I presented on California’s use of web 2.0 in response to the California wildfires, and my new job involves work in this area too.

Have you come across any resources similar to this? What are your favourite emergency information tools?

Posted in: case studies, crisis communications, web 2.0

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CaseCamp Toronto 6 Write-Up

07.11.20

Case Camp Toronto 6, held tonight, featured a series of fascinating presentations.

I live-tweeted the event, along with Joseph Thornley (here), Connie Crosby (here) and Wayne MacPhail (here) – together we managed a pretty good summary of the event. I’ve stolen memories from all of the above to generate this post.

Mobile Marketing for Levis @ Virgin Fest Toronto

Brady Murphy, Managing Partner at Vortex Mobile, gave a great presentation about how they’ve used a viral mobile campaign during the Virgin Fest music festival in Toronto.

Murphy outlined the four main features of the campaign:

  • User-generated content
  • Mobile marketing
  • Strategic sponsorship
  • Social networking

The campaign was essentially a glorified model search – winners of the model search would be featured on a prominent advertisement for Levis.

The company brought a full photo-shoot crew of stylists, photographers and graphical artists to the event. Attendees received a consultation with the stylists, had a photo shoot, then received a customized lanyard with their photo on it, along with a unique user ID.

People could vote for their favourite model by texting that person’s ID number to the company. Vortex made the competition more interesting by:

  • Sending a return text message with a tally of votes to each voter
  • Providing ‘instant win’ prizes to people who voted at a certain ‘bulls-eye time’
  • Providing an option to download contestant photos to mobile phones via MMS, which people could then forward to their friends
  • Keeping voting open for two weeks after the event to allow people to stir up support

Interestingly, 57% of votes happened after the festival ended – the competition went truly viral. People started using Facebook and MySpace to campaign for votes. Over 1,000 people downloaded the photos onto their phones. Altogether, 22,000 people voted for their favourite model – a higher number than in 2006, and 800% higher than in 2005 (the campaign has run for several years now).

Truly a social media/new media success.

Growing a Global Online Community – Treehugger

Treehugger is one of the largest environmental communities on the web. Lloyd Alter presented on some of their experiences as they’ve grown.

Treehugger focuses on the message that, as Alter says, “you don’t have to be in a poncho to be green.”

Since launching the site they’ve gone from two writers to 40, and now post about 30 times every day, around the clock.

The main take-away from Treehugger’s presentation (apart from their cool site) was the importance of Digg to their success. 25% of visits to their site come from Digg. Considering that they receive (from memory) two million visits each month, that’s a significant number.

Alter says they spend a lot of time working on their Digg strategy. Treehugger actually launched its own version of Digg, aptly named ‘Hugg,’ although that seems to be winding down.

Engaging the Community – Globeandmail.com

Angus Frame, editor of Globeandmail.com, gave a great presentation on how the Globe & Mail engaged its readers by enabling comments on its articles back in 2005.

At the time, this was a pretty ballsy move for a conservative newspaper, but the engagement seems to have been worth it. The site received over 5,000 comments in the first month alone, and last month received over 100,000.

One example Frame gave was of when the government (he didn’t specify which) was talking about trying to entice expatriates back from overseas. The paper quoted a minister talking about how their policies would bring people back. Within half an hour the article had 50 posts from expatriates detailing why that wouldn’t happen.

To deal with the huge volume of comments (and users who were becoming frustrated with delays in posting their comments), the Globe introduced a tiered system of moderation – fully moderated, semi-moderated and closed. Some posts are completely open (although users must register on the site to post). The Globe now has 30 editors who spend part or all of their time moderating comments.

Frame says they’re not done yet – he’d like to see a better conversation between the different communities involved – reporters, newsroom staff and consumers. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out. He also indicated they are playing around with some social networking-esque features.

Frame also dealt well with some pointed questions about the Globe & Mail’s continuing use of subscriber-only content. As he put it, the subscriber-only content underwrites the operation if there’s a downturn in advertising. He does see that evolving, although he gave no indication the Globe is considering following the NYT and WSJ in making all its content free.

Building Compelling Identity In Social Media Spaces – Will Pate

Will Pate gave the evening’s last talk – a very cool presentation talking about how he’s developed his own personal brand.

Pate is one of the pioneers of the ‘Social Media Evangelist’ position (at age 25!). In 2005 he co-founded Raincity Studios, a new media agency in the Vancouver area. He also worked as the ‘community ambassador’ for Flock (the social web browser). As he put it, he was ‘the voice of the company outside the organization, and the voice of the community inside the organization.’

Pate describes himself as “a small town guy with a few thousand friends.” He has a few tips for managing your online personal brand:

  • Be authentic
    • People can spot a phony on the web faster than anywhere else
  • Be present
    • The web is like a great party until the marketers turn up
    • If you’re a marketer, show up with something of value
    • Know the house rules or you may get kicked out (or beaten up!)
  • Be passionate
    • Find what you’re passionate about, and connect with people based on your shared values
  • Be accessible
    • Pate’s cell # has been on his blog since 2001 (he’s been blogging since 1999)
    • Keep the conversation going
  • Be consistent or prolific
    • If you put out crap, people will ignore you
  • Be an active listener
    • Turnaround time is important – quick responses are much better than slow

Overall, a very good night – I learned a lot from these four sessions. Thanks to Eli Singer (website seems to be down right now… oops) and the rest of the organizers and sponsors for organizing the event. A job well done.

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Posted in: case studies, unconference

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