In the PR tech landscape, there’s no shortage of content. Between white papers, blogs and social media posts, our audience has their choice of content, making it difficult to stand out. This award-winning campaign should win a Forrester Groundswell Award because its creative, eye-catching design, campaign hashtag, interactive contest and thought-provoking content made this e-book perfect for sharing and discovering on social media, leading to more business opportunities for Cision and positioning us a the software solution equipped for the future of PR.
About
In partnership with Cision, Brian Solis, award-winning author and principal analyst at Altimeter Group, released his new e-book, “What If PR Stood for People and Relationships?,” illustrated by world-renowned cartoonist Hugh MacLeod of Gapingvoid.
Event
To help promote the e-book, we hosted an exclusive What’s The Future of PR half-day conference for industry thought leaders at Google’s headquarters. Brian served as the keynote and offered insights from his book to over 100 attendees. In addition to Solis, Google Analytics Advocate Adam Singer and a panel with Airbnb, Orange and Cisco representatives served as speakers.
#FutureofPR Social Media Contest
Other innovative components of this campaign included a #FutureofPR contest, sponsored by graphic design tool Canva and its digital evangelist Guy Kawasaki, on Twitter and Instagram. For one week, we received over 60 entries, illustrating their thoughts about the future of PR, inspired by Solis’ book. The winner was hand selected by Cision CEO Peter Granat.
Influencer Relations
To expand the campaign’s reach, we leveraged our relationships with our influencers, giving them early access to the e-book and asking them to share on social and via their blogs. During the run of this campaign, we got 11 influencers with a combined following of 2 million to share the e-book and contest with their followers.
What If PR Stood for People and Relationships by @vocus #futureofpr http://t.co/sBBChff97G via @BrianSolis Humanization.
— Scott Monty (@ScottMonty) October 2, 2014
What if PR stood for People & Relationships @briansolis @gapingvoid @Vocus http://t.co/Z200RU3oKz #FutureofPR. http://t.co/wqxZxcGDmQ — Kami Huyse (@kamichat) October 2, 2014
“A manifesto for building relationships in the digital era” – Rocking the world again w/@gapingvoid via @vocus http://t.co/Yq3h5OKdqS
— Brian Solis (@briansolis) October 2, 2014
‘What If PR Stood for People and Relationships By Brian Solis’ by @vocus is the SlideShare of the day. http://t.co/c9OagoWjuk
— SlideShare Today (@SlideShareToday) October 6, 2014
Check out this manifesto from Vocus, @Cision (client) & @BrianSolis: What If PR Stood for People and Relationships? http://t.co/6VeW0XV9OL
— Heather Whaling (@prtini) October 2, 2014
Tell Us the #FutureofPR to Win an iPad Air http://t.co/GvIJQV3jA3 pic.twitter.com/cDb08HDZCg
— Guy Kawasaki (@GuyKawasaki) October 3, 2014
Final Results
Our e-book to date has received over 290,123 views, (72,404% more than our average). Though leads were not a direct goal of the campaign, as awareness and thought leadership were our focus, we secured over 600 new prospects (100% higher than our average, gated content piece).
Increase in traffic due to e-book
Over 53% of those views are from people sharing the e-book through by embedding it on blogs, social media and news sites. By leveraging our relationships, we had 11 of our industry’s top influencers, who have a combined following of over 2 million followers, promote the e-book online. We also generated online conversation, with the #FutureofPR hashtag being used over 1,000 times (900% higher than average).
