Opinion
Assertions
12/8/08: While we are extremely pleased
Johan Jervoe, the architect of
McDonald’s rules-breaking and wildly successful online activation around its TOP worldwide Olympic sponsorship, will be a
keynoter at IEG’s Singularity conference, we also want to acknowledge the
other Beijing Games marketer that won gold in the
digital marketing space:
Lenovo.
Through its
Voices of the Summer Olympics campaign, the computer giant supplied
100 athlete bloggers from 25 countries and 27 sports with laptops and digital video cameras and asked them to share their Games experience with the world.
In the end, the athletes accounted for
1,500 postings and
800 Flickr photos, generating
1.6 million unique visitors to Lenovo’s Web pages. A
quarter of a million people downloaded the Voices’ campaign’s
Facebook application and
1.5 million invitations to visit Lenovo.com were sent via the app.
Sixty thousand downloaded Voices’
mobile phone application. The program received more than
200 mentions on other blogs and social media sites, giving Lenovo
10.4 million social media impressions.
Such a high level of response, which reportedly exceeded the company’s expectations–
does not happen automatically. The key to Lenovo’s
success lies in some of the key
strategic decisions the company made in planning and conducting the campaign.
First, there was an integrated
online ad buy, the Facebook tie-in, the mobile app, a connection to Lenovo’s existing
iGoogle portal and a
paid search marketing program that all combined to drive people to the site. During the Games, the company syndicated the bloggers’ newest posts into the ad units and Facebook pages, thus keeping its message
fresh and compelling.
Second, Lenovo
put connecting athletes and fans first, ahead of its need to sell more computers. The athletes were under
no obligation to the company and their posts were not subject to review. Lenovo aggregated all the blogs on a single page and allowed visitors to select athletes by country, sport or language. The page noted the bloggers were using IdeaPads and ThinkPads, but there were
no ads or calls to action. The online ads for the program also did not include any sales messaging.
Third, when the blogosphere
criticized some elements of the program, Lenovo saw it as an
opportunity, not a
threat, and responded
quickly and
smartly. For example, when a post took the program to task for not incorporating search engine optimization as well as it could have, the second commenter was Lenovo’s tech lead for the project. He shared Lenovo’s perspective on the issue and actually
made some adjustments to the site, taking advantage of user reaction to
improve the experience for both sponsor and audience.
The bottom line: The campaign worked because it
recognized what was important to its target. During those three weeks in August, just about everybody cared about the Olympics. But instead of taking the
old and tired route of talking about how Lenovo put thousands of pieces of equipment into all the Olympic venues and helped to run the Games, the Voices program was more
relevant to PC-buying consumers. We watch the Olympics for the athletes, not the business stories.
Jim Andrews