The Client
Fujitsu UK & Ireland is part of the global Fujitsu Group which offers ICT and micro electronics solutions and services across 70 countries. This business division offers IT services, systems and products from Data Centres and outsourced IT services, to strategic IT consulting.
Campaign Objectives
Fujitsu had a marked competitive advantage in the marketplace for enterprise class cloud computing services. This new technology was a major IT trend and was attracting lots of hype and media coverage. Fujitsu was the first provider in the UK to offer the service available for live business systems. In order to harness this first mover advantage a campaign was launched in November 2009, which consisted largely of direct comms to a target database. The most recent aspect of the campaign, is a more broad-reaching social media campaign.
The initial objectives were:
- To create a social community pool of 500 IT decision makers and Influencers who were actively engaging in conversations about enterprise cloud computing:
- And to subsequently, provide them with relevant content and Fujitsu materials on the subject.
- And to gather market intelligence in order to develop a more customer centric market proposition for the Fujitsu service.
Strategy
Market research revealed that our target audience in large numbers frequented the CIO UK website. In order to identify those individuals with a specific interest in cloud computing, a Fujitsu Cloud computing info zone was created within the CIO website. This zone was then publicised through co-branded web banners driving traffic directly to the zone. In addition, a polling unit was developed, asking contentious and thought provoking questions to visitors to the CIO home page, encouraging debate with peers on issues around cloud computing, and driving traffic to the partner zone. The findings and responses from the polling unit were used to refine the marketing proposition for future communications.
CIO Info Zone
The partnerzone acted as a content repository. Here Fujitsu white papers, blog content, educational literature and video insight content sat alongside third party content from the members of the IDG media network. This collaborative content publishing enabled Fujitsu to cut through the noise with added credibility. The broad range of content from various third party sources meant that this zone became a destination hub for information on the topic. All content was available without registration of providing personal contact details, so as individuals could experience the value of the content, without the compromise of ‘being sold to.’
Social Media
Integrating a twitter account (Cloud_Zone) into the zone allowed Fujitsu to encourage a community to establish itself, where peers could actively contribute to the content being discussed, and share their views and opinions. Fujitsu’s ownership of the account allowed for continual communication to take place with individuals who might otherwise have been fleeting visitors to the zone. Twitter was chosen so as to enable communication to take place in a media that the individuals were familiar and comfortable with.
A community manager was responsible for seeding content into conversations, responding to valuable tweets and retweeting content that was felt on revelance to the boroader community. The interactive poll units were used to create content and the results were regularly publicised to the growing community.
Once individuals engaged with the twitter feed, they could choose to “follow” Cloud_Zone, and from that point enter into two way dialogue, whereby they could respond directly to tweets, retweet relevant content to their followers, or contribute content of their own to Cloud_Zone. Twitter in this respect fosters the collaborative sharing of content, that helps heighten the profile of the twitter community, and hence attract new followers based on the relevancy and targeted nature of the content.
Reviewing followers’ biographies allowed us to identify contacts matching the Fujitsu target profile. These contacts were communicated with on a direct basis, offering a subscription to CIO magazine to help nurture the relationship with the programme and the Fujitsu brand.
Target Audience
The campaign target audience included “IT Decision Makers” which largely consist of individuals with job functions: CIO, CTO and IT Director. Also included in the target audience were influencers of these IT Decision Makers, including analysts, commentators and media editors / contributors.
Media / Channel Selection
The use of a digital channel enabled Fujitsu’s message to be exposed in an industry destination hub, with continually updated content. Fujitsu recognised that conversations were happening on the social web, and it was important for us to enable Fujitsu to engage in dialogue with their target audience in this medium.
Timescales
The activity commenced in November 2009 and is running currently.
Budgets
£65,000 for phase one until April 2010, to include editorial coverage, CIO Partnerzone and twitter account management.
Results / Return on Investment
- 2,474 responses to interactive poll questions
- 310 white paper downloads
- 447 video views
- 962 twitter followers
- 1,860 tweets on @cloud_zone
- 1,281 ReTweets of content by followers
- Ranking in the top 4.5 per cent of all twitter accounts (5.5 million)
Client testimonial
“We realised that our target audience was having conversations about this industry trend and wanted to get involved and be seen to be active the social media space. Doing so under the umbrella of the CIO brand gave us additional credibility. This campaign has more than convinced me of the value of social media in B2B marketing when used in the right context.”
James Collister, campaigns manager, Fujitsu UK & Ireland
