AMD: Contesting to Drive Awareness, Advocacy, and Revenue — Live from BlogWell

Coverage of this session by Chesapeake Energy’s Sean Scogin. Say hello and connect with him on Twitter at @seanscogin.

4:30 — SocialMedia.org’s Kurt Vanderah introduces AMD‘s Mobile & Social Media Strategy, Online Marketing, Jon Peters.

4:31 — Jon: Over cyber Monday, we ran a Twitter contest for a week. Since we weren’t able to measure engagement, we did a campaign on Facebook.

4:32 — Jon: We currently have a massive amount of gamers and enthusiasts. Our social presence is 500K: 90% gamers/enthusiasts.

5 business goals:

• Drive brand awareness to “technology oriented females and mainstream consumers”
• Grow mainstream consumer fan base
• Increase advocate base and increase purchase intent through contests
• Identify enthusiasts and gaming advocates for revenue in 2012
• Increase enthusiasts and gaming fan engagement with brand

Targets:

• 96K tab viewers
• 6K new fans
• 6K potential advocates
• 24K shares
• 36K submissions

4:34 — Jon: Our creative theme: softer, more consumer-focused toward technology oriented female. Battlefield 3′s creative targeted gaming enthusiasts. We used Facebook gated pages (two pages on the screen, one for each of the audiences targeted). One side offered female oriented products, and the other side was focused on  gamers/enthusiasts.

4:36 — Jon: The structure of the sequence of steps similarly, only changed the language. We made it simple to enter, with only 4 steps to submission.

After hitting submit, we encouraged people to share on their Newsfeed, used the language we provided for sharing.

When a post is submitted on Facebook, only 5% of the audience actually sees it (though 17% was a number recently quoted – AMD on the low side)

We made sure to include the theme: Share, share, share! – looking for virality.

4:37 — Jon: AMD set the default to the public for the best chances.

4:38 — Jon: The contest ran starting November 21, for six weeks. We reiterated the links to the contests by using short links to both tabs (depending upon audience). In the end, audience rules – contests go through legal department.

4:39 — Jon: The contest was specific to North America. We created two blogs, one for our gaming audience and one for our consumers (15K views, 166 shares).

We also had an additional event created for the female bloggers that work on AMD’s behalf — unpaid, incentivized (35K reached, 22 comments, 6 shares). The event was  a tweet up and happy hour, “Population Proliferation,” on November 22.

4:40 — Jon: We update our Facebook status to continually target the Newsfeed – target the 5% that actually see it. Updates include: Calling out prizes, using short links, and every Friday we gave out a popular prize.

We posted the pictures of prizes, and interesting comments came through that showed engagement. For example, one humorous comment: “Is it wrong to be turned on by this?”

We also included imagery for our mainstream audience to make sure it wasn’t just focused on gaming.

4:41 — Jon: Some additional status updates included people expressing that they want. One best practice we learned can be overlooked: By simply @tagging Dr. Dre’s Facebook page, we accessed a new audience.

4:42 — Jon: We started tweeting just to have other mechanisms to get the message out to our fans. We started our Twitter account with 1 – 3 tweets per day, and posted through January 3^rd. We realized we needed to have a lot of tweets and content to create any type of scale.

4:43 — Jon: We gave daily prizes away for six weeks. In the first week, all winners were female, so we knew our goal was hit.

4:44 — Jon: We announced winners every 7 – 10 days, and were able to grab positive sentiments by our followers by improving the quality of the prizes.

4:45 — Jon: The winners engaged and helped drive the messaging throughout, and it went viral.

4:46 — Jon: Our targets:

• 96K tab views
• 6K new fans
• 6K advocates

Results on the consumer side:

• 97K tab views
• 45K submissions
• 35K shares
• People were sharing the items that they won

Results on the gamer side:

• 110K tab views
• 53K
• 51K shares

Overall great results from 41,000 users in North America

4:47 — Jon: We weren’t able to do this alone: socialmedia180.com and shortstack.com helped.

Q&A

Q: Did interactions drop after the contest; how many migrated to become ambassadors?

A: Jon: Twitter makes it easy for spam. Peaks and valleys are updates — we started the contest the week before to not fight that

Q: Started on Facebook, then went to Twitter and blogging – Did you track conversion rates?

A: Jon: We looked at it holistically, not concerned with clicks from other places. Additional outreach to major publications to drive traffic – getting eyeballs and people on the tab. Basically we were just worried about the end results.

Q: Was the Twitter channel created for the audience?

A: Jon: No, we had too many Twitter handles already, so we tried to find the best handle, and used better channels to retweet.

Q: Were people mad about the influx of posts?

A: Jon: There was a passionate, enthusiastic crowd that was a bit angry, but we knew they were going to see that. We redirected to the gamer/enthusiast page (Battlefield 3).

Q: How were the objectives set to be stretched enough and reasonable enough? (Encourage to move far enough, but not impossible)

A: Jon: We knew our audience, because we looked at engagement in the past. Our goals needed to be realistic to show the management team that there was a value. We used initial numerical reference of likes and retweets.