Best Technology Social Media Campaign

The Storage Community
The goal of the Storage Community was to bring together into a carefully targeted Community, senior storage executives in large organizations (2,500 employees plus) regardless of their current product vendor. Despite the fact that the community is sponsored by IBM, in order to achieve this we realized that we had to provide a content rich and feature rich environment focused on the issues of greatest importance to them, not products or sales information.
We researched the group to understand both the key issues and the key people that were highly respected in the community. We reached out to these people to persuade them to provide content and preferably unique content for the community members.
Within a few months many of the leading storage bloggers as well as highly respected storage Executives were providing and continue to provide unique content for the community via best practices. We monitored the discussion groups to highlight additional issues that were important to members and focused our experts on these issues.
This content was then marketed to Storage executives via Twitter, LinkedIn etc. With unique content, the community began to create a reputation as one of the places to go to gain knowledge on the leading issues affecting storage executives.
With virtually zero marketing budget, the community grew from its launch in Mid May 2011 to the end of 2011 from zero to over 1100 registered community members. Page views grew from zero to over 8,000 views per month and the community continues to grow and attract leading industry experts offering their contributions to the community. Importantly we are beginning to attract a significant percentage of members who are not currently IBM Storage customers.

Contributors:

Community Manager for IBM:	Mary Hall
Community Manager for Baptie Group:	Stacey Tabor

BAPTIE & CO

Location: US