In my last blog post, I revealed one of my favourite social media case studies – The Fiskateers! And how I loved the way they created a ‘passion’ group not around their product (scissors) but around a ‘passion’ that a large majority of the customers shared – crafting!
Now I am going to show how I, myself, have helped create a community using very similar ideas and tactics.

The Birth of a Voice

The client was a gap year company, specialising in gap year programs in South Africa.  Gap years themselves are not a passion, and trying to create a community around this product would have seemed far too ‘salesy’ and would surely have flopped.

So, donning our virtual lab coats, we conducted some extensive research looking into why people were interested in gap years.  We started by looking at which key phrases were generating the right traffic to our client’s site and which of those phrases actually generated good conversions.

The following phrases came up trumps:

conservation, animal rehabilitation, vet training, how to be a game ranger
We loved these results because each of them revealed a definite passion!

Calling All Animal Lovers…

So we decided to help these young people realise their dream and indulge in their passions by creating the Voice of Conservation and allowing them to ‘talk for the animals’!

Our idea was to create a community around a role that would be held by different young people for a period of 3 months at a time.  The idea was that each of the ‘Voice’s would enlarge the community using their own social networks and also by engaging new communities they joined and made friends with during their term as ‘The Voice of Conservation’

The Voice would have a job which would be twofold:

1: To Speak for the Animals

2: To promote the Voice of Conservation (and therefore the projects and gap years available by the company) using the online world of communities, blogs, forums, Twitter and Facebook etc.

If animal conservation was their passion and social media their skill, then we wanted to hear from them.

What were we offering?

Up to three months FREE getting down and dirty in the different conservation projects the company was involved with in South Africa. They were given flights, bed and board, internet access, a camera, access to all the staff (vets, game rangers) for interviews and use of a jeep to get them around the reserves.

Note: The cost to our client was really tiny.  They already had beds and food for the volunteers on site, so all they had to pay for was the cost of a flight!

Their job was to foster a community and then sustain and enlarge it by using great content from the front line!  Videos, blog posts, interviews, photos and anything else they could think off.

First Time Around

This was the first attempt and we had around 20 entries from which we chose Karra

Look at how excited she was!.  That that is the type of passion that you simply cannot buy!

She went on to produce video content and start our burgeoning conservation community.

Second Time Around

The second time around we had about 120 entries (this time including entries from the US, Canada, Australia and Africa!) and as you can see, not only had the competition got greater, but the quality of entry had increased and it become a lot more competitive

The winner was an American, Katherine Alex, who wasted no time creating a community and content.  Unlike the first winner who only stayed in Shamwari, Katherine Alex moved around between conservation projects and got a much broader view of what types of exciting conservation projects are out there such as the ORCA foundation and Kariega.

http://www.facebook.com/voiceofconservation?sk=wall

She managed to widen the scope of the communities that knew about The Voice of Conservation, and placed blog posts on many difference conservation and wildlife blogs as a guest blogger, thus making their readership aware of the Voice of Conservation and aware of the amazing gap programs on offer.

The Result

This social media campaign shows the signs of being a brilliant example of building a passion group – and I would like to focus on the word ‘building’.  This is not an overnight solution, it is a long term solution and, as you can see from one competition to the next, it started to slowly grow and grow.  If the competition were to run again, we anticipate around 500 entries, all clamouring to be the new Voice of Conservation.

So I urge you to re-evaluate your social media campaigns – choose a passion and then run with it!!!


Other Blog Posts in this social media case studies series:
Fiskateering: A Passion for Scissors
Social Media Case Studies: How to Make Scissors Sexy