Best Buy was seeking a way to give added value to their customers outside of their physical store locations, so they decided to develop a running promotion on Twitter to answer an array of electronic and computer related questions. They expected that by finding a service that their competitors could not provide and essentially giving it away for free, it would vault them into a much higher overall market share within their industry.
Qualified employees were asked to volunteer to answer questions on Twitter
Each response was catalogued so that other users could find information faster
Over 2,900 employees have answered 40,000 questions since the program launch
While it is tough to gauge the productivity of a free service, Best Buy has seen their @twelpforce account skyrocket with followers over the past twelve months. It also had an unexpected side-effect of boosting employee morale by making average workers the voice of the company; all on an extremely limited budget. You can read more about this case study here.
I’m a huge fan of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Besides being an avid fan, I used to work there as a national host and producer for its CBC Radio One network. So it came sort of naturally that I started a fan page on Facebook for it. Not even two years later, and the Page now has 48,000 very engaged fans — far more than any other CBC page (official or not). Sometimes it’s so busy that within 15 minutes of posting something on the page, more than a hundred people have commented on it.
If you’d like to grow your page zero to 48,000 fans, here are some tips I recommend:
Set Up an Auto-Publishing Twitter Account
Facebook lets you automatically tweet out page updates onto a Twitter account, so I established @aboutcbc on Twitter and it serves as a promotional channel — whenever I post something on the Page, this account tweets out the post with a direct link to the post. This reminds people to check the Page and, if they’re not already following the page, to Like it.
Follow Lots of Obscure Content Sources
In my feed reader, I have a tonne of sources that publish content about the CBC — sources like the CBC’s official news web site and some program web sites. But I find the links that generate the most engagement come from sort of obscure sources. For instance, I follow this great (but horribly designed) blog about the Canadian radio industry, this blog for a band calledPeter Mansbridge and the CBCs (totally unrelated to the CBC), and follow an RSS search for CBC on eBay. I find the more random and offbeat the content, the more engagement happens.
Here’s an example of a recent eBay find:
I wish eBay had an affiliate program — usually things I post from eBay on the Page sell within minutes. Here’s another example: Note the last comment of someone telling everyone they’d bought it:
Actively Engage
A few hours after I post something on the page, I usually try to go back and engage in a little conversation with some of the commenters. This, of course, drives more comments and the engagement loop remains solid. Putting a little bit of you in the page goes a long way to humanizing the content. .
While most social media campaigns tend to be developed from a marcom point of view, the potential reach for collaborative and sharable tools goes much deeper. Enterprise 2.0 case studies may be more rare, but they can have fundamental implications for business. In an age where baby boomers are retiring, and taking their years of experience with them, solutions that help share and preserve at least some of that knowledge in-house are worth exploring.
A lightbulb moment happened for Toronto’s Dr. Bruce Ferguson while reading Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams‘ Wikinomics: he connected the dots and realized that a collaborative space could be of great value to the community of doctors working with The Child and Adolescent Functional Assessment Scale (CAFAS):
The Child and Adolescent Functional Assessment Scale (CAFAS) is a rating scale, which assesses a youth’s degree of impairment in day-to-day functioning due to emotional, behavioral, psychological, psychiatric, or substance use problems. CAFAS is used to determine whether kids improve as a result of mental health service.
Working with Socialtext, this doctor from The Hospital for Sick Children developed a space where physicians could access resources and share best practices. They also used it to develop events and even to co-author a book. A closed space, accessible by invitation only, the CafasinOntario Wiki remains an active collaborative space, almost two years after its launch. At the time the case study was written, there were “over 400 members in Socialtext CAFAS workspace, with around 25% actively participating during any given week.”
A study conducted to measure user satisfaction with regards to ‘Communities of Practice‘ compared physicians who accessed the CafasinOntario Wiki with those who did not. CafasinOntario Wiki users reported higher levels of practice change, greater CAFAS knowledge, and greater satisfaction with CAFAS implementation supports. Not only did they feel their learning curve had been accelerated thanks to the wiki, they felt more comfortable with transition.
It’s a little light on content, but this short four-minute video is an excellent example of a well-produced case study. Interesting to note that they’re acutely aware of how many employees have active Twitter accounts.
Found a great interview with the team behind the wildly successful Old Spice campaign. In the interview, they talk about how they decided to employ various social media strategies, and which people to send personalized videos to.
One interesting disclosure was that Old Spice had built a custom application that ranks the influence level of people tweeting Old Space, providing the team with a shortlist of people to produce customized YouTube responses to:
We’ve built an application that scans the Internet looking for mentions and allows us to look at the influence of those people and also what they’ve said. They’re working in collaboration with the creative team that are there to pick out the messages that: 1. Have creative opportunity to produce amazing content; or 2. Have the ability to then embed themselves in an interesting or virally-relevant community. It’s not just picking people with huge followings, it’s a really interesting combination.
(NOTE: During this beta period, this is the only case study using the Regions category. Case studies will be categorized by region by the end of February.)
The Great Bear Rainforest is one of the few truly wild places remaining in B.C. until a few years ago, there were no concrete, long-term plans in place to preserve it.
To try to pressure the provincial government to ratify a protection agreement, Greenpeace Canada, ForestEthics, and the Sierra Club of B.C. launched the “Keep the Promise: Save the Great Bear Rainforest” campaign in fall 2008. Capulet Communications was brought onboard to run the social media components, which included a Facebook group that attracted more than 4,000 members and became the hub for online activities. Other tactics used included a “Bear Your Soul” Flickr Contest, local blogger outreach, and both Twitter and YouTube presences.
In the end, the government promise to protect one third of the globally significant rainforest was fulfilled. Full Case Study
Tod Maffin, COO and Senior Strategist at tMedia Strategies, is a digital marketing strategist, specializing in social media, mobile marketing, and viral marketing. [keynote speeches | bio]
While most social media campaigns tend to be 
Found a great interview with the team behind the wildly successful Old Spice campaign. In the interview, they talk about how they decided to employ various social media strategies, and which people to send personalized videos to.
CaseStudiesOnline.com on Twitter
CaseStudiesOnline.com on Facebook
Case Studies by Email
Subscribe via RSS
Tod Maffin, COO and Senior Strategist at