Page One Social Media Launches Titanium with 3,500% Traffic Spike posted by Shelly Milam at Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Beta launches rarely attract much hype. But when a company shifts strategic direction and runs onto the competitive playing field with the big guys like Adobe, Sun and Microsoft, then you want some buzz. Okay, a lot of buzz! Would a 3,500% increase in website traffic on the day of the launch be nice? That's what we did with Appcelerator.

Appcelerator wanted to make a big market splash with their launch of Titanium, an open source Adobe AIR killer. They wanted to reach traditional media publications, but also developers and social media communities. Most PR launches only target three communications channels - media, bloggers, and analysts. Our launch of Titanium targeted seven different communications channels in parallel, relying heavily on a coordinated social media campaign.

We started out securing a strong messaging platform, which allowed us to effectively position Titanium in each different communication channel we targeted and let us build a strong base to launch our social media activities. Following the messaging, we organized an intense media list and began outreach. Page One does media and blogger outreach different than most PR firms. First, we don't spam. We begin conversations and relationships. We quickly lined up 12 media briefings in the weeks before the launch and we were asked for embargoed launch materials by every publication in our top 20 list. We also directed, produced and promoted a sophisticated vision video featuring the CEO and CTO, and promoted a series of screencasts that gave reporters a more technical look under the hood of the platform with demonstration applications. On announcement day, we coordinated a community email and a more technical blog post for the Appcelerator blog, manned the Appcelerator Twitter feeds, and monitored the blogosphere, directing the CEO when it was necessary to comment on specific blogs.

The results speak for themselves. Not only was there a 3,500 percent increase in website traffic on the day of the launch, but the coordinated PR and social media outreach drove qualified Web site traffic to 'money' pages for Appcelerator: 40 percent of all traffic hit the product demos, downloads, documentation, or product FAQ. There were more than 10,000 page views to the vision video in the first week, more than 10,000 product downloads, more than 44 unique stories placed in the media and a four-fold jump in Twitter followers.

That's buzz for a beta launch that you can bank.

HP, Cisco, no-knead rising twists and sling monkeys posted by Bret Clement at Monday, December 15, 2008

Contests have been a fun marketing tool for decades. Take Theodora Smafield. In 1946, Theodora was the first winner of the Pillsbury Bake-Off competition.

Decades before Jeff Howe at Wired or the folks at Dell got excited about crowdsourcing - Pillsbury saw the power of mobilizing a community around its product through a contest.

Pillsbury wanted to excite a generation of homemakers and chefs about its flour - so it invited people to submit their best recipes for the chance to win $50,000. Theodora won for her “No-Knead Water-Rising Twists,” which involved a unique process of wrapping her dough in a tea towel and submerging it in warm water.

At Page One, we have seen the value that contests have with our clients - especially those eager to take advantage of social media strategies.

In 2008, we managed a number of contests for our clients to help excite and grow targeted communities. A couple of examples:

• SourceForge - When SourceForge, the world's largest repository of open source software, needed to increase their interaction with their community, they turned to Team Social Media at Page One PR. Before contacting Page One's social media group, SourceForge's major award of the year, their Community Choice Awards (CCA) had maxed-out participation at 38,000 people. After launching several contests including free tattoos and yes, a free sling monkey - Page One's integrated PR, Twitter and YouTube video campaign more than tripled voting participation in the SourceForge CCA contest. More than 150,000 community members submitted ballots.

• Cisco - Shelly Milam and the team at Page One are currently managing the Cisco Developer Contest. Strategically, Cisco is promoting the concept of the network as a platform. So they are offering up big money prizes to have developers build applications based on the Cisco Application Extension Platform (AXP). Much like Pillsbury looked for creative recipes - Cisco is looking for creative software applications for their routers.

These are just two of the exciting contests we ran at Page One in 2008.

As we look around the technology space, we continue to see fun contests that others are doing. Intel is running its "What's Inside You Campaign" and HP/Microsoft are running the "Magic Giveaway".

We don't know who is behind some of the projects we see out there (such as Tac Anderson at HP or Ken Kaplan at Intel?)

But we'd be happy to meet with you and talk about the opportunities that contests and social media will bring in 2009.

Happy Holidays from Page One PR! posted by Jenna at Monday, December 08, 2008

We've been working to build social media campaigns for our clients this year, but decided to turn the camera on ourselves this holiday season. Get ready for our 15 seconds of fame – lights, camera, action!

Rather than design and print our usual satirical holiday cards, we decided to save a few trees by dusting off our singing voices for your viewing pleasure.

We hope you'll check out our videos and maybe even smile. And, yes, that is a penguin in the photo! Let us know how we did but, above all, please accept our warmest wishes for a merry holiday season and a happy new year. Here's looking to 2009 from our team to yours.

Sincerely,
Your friends at Page One PR

P.S.– If you like crazy reindeer, don't forget to check out this special feature from our Santa Barbara office. Boy, that guy can deck the halls!