Mini-Blog Case Study: IBM, MS, LSI and SGI

Other Twitter Topics:      Twitter BackChannel for Presenters      Navigating the Approval Maze      Social Media: Not Just for Kids      Email The Scoopdog Team

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(Read time = ~2 minutes) This week, four big tech brands (IBM, Microsoft, LSI and Silicon Graphics) are experimenting w/a “mini-blog” while attending the Supercomputing Conference in Portland. Essentially, technology experts from each company agreed to blog “live” for four days only – a unique opportunity for the IT and data storage communities to join a dialogue w/business-critical technology providers.

The target audience was narrow, the High Performance Compute (Supercomputing) a subset of the IT and data storage, data center segment. Because of the tradeshow/conference, hashtags/keyword for Twitter were extensively used.

As fellow B2B marketers, Agency-types and otherwise Social Media communicators, would love  feedback – see the live blog and concept by going here. Please tweet, pass-along, blog about it, etc. Remember, only live from 11/16 – 11/20 noon PST. I’ll report on metrics and add further color in a future blog post here.  Great cooperation from all the companies/experts led to a successful launch.

The primary draw:  Big Tech Brands Blog Live for Four Days Only at www.ITdialogue.com

UPDATE: Day 1 traffic:  1000+ unique visitors;  Day 2 traffic: 2400+ unique visitors.

The runway to launch was ~6 weeks with most of the content load and functionality happening in the final 10 days. Nice custom admin screens support the site;  Google Analytics under it all.  Promotion happens at the venue from the various Partner booths as well as from Twitter accounts.  For various reasons, no promotion on the .com main company brand web sites, no PR on the advernture.  Facebook fan pages were considered but time limitations precluded using.

Mini-Blog Approach As An Answer to Start-Up Barriers

One barrier to blog participation is often the workload and commitment. By limiting participation, in this example, to four days only, the risk and pain was lowered with the result more willingness to participate. A multi-partner blog platform was developed using WordPress as a starting point, then customized.

Another barrier is can be Twitter copy approvals and therefore participation in real-time.  In this case, generic tweet samples were routed for review to gain pre-event blessings.  Click here for a more detailed look at the generic tweet concept.

Content, as always, was challenging but all the participating companies were able to re-purpose material otherwise available and public.  Bloggers were asked to contribute two posts per day (morning/afternoon) as well as respond to community questions.

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