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Social Media Campaign Success – Olympic Bloggers

At this year’s Olympic Games in Beijing we saw world records shattered including Michael Phelps amazing eight gold medals won beating Carl Lewis and Mark Spitz for the most won in one Olympic games. Michael Phelps is from my hometown of Baltimore so I am very proud.

Another person who is very proud is Rohit Bhargava, Senior VP, Digital Strategy and Marketing at Ogilvy PR and author of the popular book, Personality Not Included. Earlier this year, Ogilvy was engaged by Lenovo to create a social media campaign that would maximize the benefit of their sponsorship. He wrote this original summary of the project in his blog:

The Problem: Media coverage of the Olympics has become about melodrama that is broadcasted as “real” stories. But those producers only choose the athletes who have overcome quadruple knee surgery and the lack of a college degree to become a world champion … in other words, the extreme stories.

The Insight: What about the real athletes who spend every day training and working hard just to get to the Olympics whether they have a shot of winning or not? Their voices could be the most powerful and this Olympics more than any other promises to offer the chance for them to do that.

The Project: We are seeking 100 potential Olympic athletes from around the world to all start and maintain a blog all about their experience leading up to and during the Games. In return, Lenovo is offering all participants the chance to use a new IdeaPad laptop for their blogging and help from our team to set up and maintain their blogs.

Well, they found the bloggers they needed, supplied them with laptops and social media training to get them up to speed fast. Each launched their respective blogs using Blogger (Google was a Worldwide Olympic Partner like Lenovo) and Lenovo launched Voices of the Olympic Games.

Metrics that blew away everybody’s expectations

Rohit has a follow up post captured some really cool metrics:

Though the numbers are still coming in, the short story is that we recruiting 100 bloggers from 25 countries and 27 sports. They created more than 1500 blog posts, generated over 8000 comments over the course of a single month and were mentioned on hundreds of blogs and social media sites. The social media impressions alone are estimated at over 10 million and we drove more than 1.6 million unique visitors to the site over the course of the Games. In every case, these metrics went far beyond the KPIs we had set for ourselves at the beginning of the campaign.

That is truly amazing. If you want to check out more, visit the site or watch a video produced by Lenovo promoting the event. It goes to show that that with the right campaign that properly leverages social media tools you can see direct results that include brand recognition and awareness.

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