Case Study: Conflict of Pinterest campaign by Caliber
Content Marketing

Case Study: Conflict of Pinterest campaign by Caliber

25th September 2013

Conflict of Pinterest was a creative content marketing solution which won the Innovation Award at the UK Searchawards 2012. In this case study Caliber Interactive explain what they did with the campaign “Conflict of Pinterest”.

Conflict of Pinterest was a creative content marketing solution that delivered First Choice hundreds of links, thousands of social mentions and an increase in search engine rankings. It did this by combining HTML5, crowd sourcing and game theory to attract influencers to talk about the First Choice brand and help extend their reach into the online travel community which was already talking with their consumer base.

Let’s break it down; 

The Brief

Develop a content marketing solution that would bring together influencers in the travel market to assist with outreach into the online community and drive social shares, independently earned links (preferably on high profile publications) and contribute to increases in search engine rankings.

A winning strategy

For any content marketing project to be a success it is important to ensure that it is:

  1. Engages appropriate audience(s)
  2. Delivers benefit to the users who contribute
  3. Promotes sharing

Factoring in these key points our campaign strategy revolved around addressing a universal issue in a newsworthy fashion, while stirring up debate which would turn users into sharers. We focused on Pinterest to capitalise on its newsworthiness. The subject matter is globally appealing and given the interest around Pinterest we knew that outlets such as Mashable would be interested in covering a campaign that used it in a new and engaging manner.

conflict-pinterest-ipad-2

Engaging Audiences

Engaging an audience always has three core strands of work:

1. Who are the audience?

a. Who do we want to share it
b. How do they share it

2. What would they find engaging?

a. Patterns of sharing for our audiences
i.     What they share shows us what has the highest chance of success

3. How do they consume information?

a. Online/multi-device etc.
b. Who are they listening to : traditional adoption growth curve

Growing value for users

Value has many facets. Often online being “cool” is seen as delivering value; the problem with being “cool” is that it evaporates as quickly as it was developed. To deliver value there has to be an outcome which is beneficial for the user. And the more perceived value there is the more that users will become contributors – and contributors engage with a brand far more deeply.

Promoting sharing

Social media continues to grow more quickly than in any other part of the Internet and the joins between people and online content grows massively fast as a result. The goal is to enhance the joins between the First Choice website and as many other sites as possible required that social shares and links had to be the core KPI.

We decided to use two social networks – Twitter and Pinterest with user generated content parsed into country-specific feeds on the infographic itself. The former was a practical method of engaging a large audience, while the latter was a way to make the project ground-breaking as it used Pinterest in an entirely new way.

This conversational element was crucial to the infographic’s success, as it allowed participants to qualify their votes and express their love for particular countries. Voters through both social networks were also entered into competitions for exciting prizes that were appealing to our target audience.

Concept to launch

We produced a simple, yet appealing visual design on a newsworthy subject that would encourage major media outlets to pick it up. This allowed us to captivate audiences without a major spend.

Votes were updated in real time to an interactive heat-map and users could explore by clicking on a specific country where they would see a thread of votes and pin-boards which had been submitted in support of that nation’s bid to be the world’s most beautiful country. These threads drew in readers from all over the globe and sparked good-natured debates pitting the Swiss Alps against the Rockies, and Latvian lakes against Scottish lochs.

conflict-pinterest-ipad-2-2

Launch and success

The campaign launched with an exclusive feature on Mashable, one of the world’s leading social media outlets. We pitched the infographic to Mashable as we knew that infographics featured on the site have a tendency to perform well socially.

The infographic immediately accumulated thousands of tweets, hundreds of Facebook likes and shares through other social networks. Over that weekend it was Mashable’s most shared item, and it currently stands as the 35th most shared piece of 2012.

To complement this initial social boost we used paid social media campaigns on Twitter, StumbleUpon and Facebook to drive interactions – these proved to be an excellent investment as sponsored interactions led to organic shares. The material resonated with viewers and the momentum built to a viral stage.

Organic social media outreach played a major role, and we contacted tourist boards and key influencers, encouraging them to galvanise their followers into voting for a given country. This saw the infographic go viral in online communities in Latvia, Mexico and Turkey as people voted patriotically in large numbers.

The return on investment for our client surpassed their expectations as the infographic was published on over 300 websites. Media coverage was achieved in five major outlets: The Travel Trade Gazette (online and in print), Mashable, The Daily Mail, The Huffington Post and Gadling.

Additional results:

  • Over 72,109 social interactions (7 x KPI)
  • 16,680 likes and shares on Facebook
  • 11,439 tweets of the infographic
  • 3541,497 interactions via StumbleUpon
  • 831 pins on Pinterest
  • 654 shares on LinkedIn
  • 311 shares on Google+
  • 114,002 unique page views

Outreach and viral spread generated 300+ links and 5 keywords jumped to the front page of Google’s results as a direct result of the campaign. During the month of April, traffic to First Choice’s blog jumped 500%. 

About Caliber

Caliber is an SEO, Social and content marketing agency with offices in Edinburgh, London, Manchester and shortly Dubai – we use SEO, Social and content marketing to connect you with the people who matter.

We believe that forming long-standing relationships with our clients is the true measure of success, and we are proud to have some of the world’s most successful companies on our client list. Integrating with client-side teams is crucial in this respect, and we ensure that everything we do is aligned with your best interests.

This article is written by Paul O’Connor, Business Development Manager, Caliber

References / Links

Conflict of Pinterest: How First Choice used content and social sharing to increase blog traffic by 500 per cent
Conflict of Pinterest: The Most Beautiful Country in the World

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(Original version of this case study was published in January 2013)

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