Sun Microsystems – which provides industrial strength hardware, software and services – wanted to cultivate its relationship with system administrators (sysadmins) that work for companies in a relationship with Sun.
Sysadmins keep the company networks, systems and PCs going, but they are notoriously difficult to communicate with. They also tend not to respond to corporate branded marketing, preferring to find out things for themselves. To the sysadmins, they are the real ‘heroes’, and everyone else (the users) just get in the way.
The campaign was designed to encourage sysadmins to interact with the website, encourage them to register as a ‘System hero’, upload a personal profile and start blogging on the site.
Hero bait
The website was kept simple to avoid looking like a marketing piece. With a rough-and-ready design, alongside chatty and irreverant language, the site (www.systemheroes.co.uk) deliberately does not follow Sun’s corporate guidelines. On the one hand there is factual material about Sun and its products as well as blogs from Sun experts; on the other there are cartoons, games, spoof ads and other light-hearted features.
There are five main pages:
- ‘Hero’ home: this enables visitors to head off wherever they want. It also features the headline news or article and the latest blogs
- ‘Hero’ central: where registered ‘heroes’ are listed, complete with profiles and pictures
- ‘Hero’ blogs: where blogs are posted on any subject
- ‘Hero’ plugs: where visitors can find the latest news from Sun
Caffeine crazy
The key was to keep content fresh. If users saw the same old material, they would stop returning. Traffic is steered to the site via simple, intriguing emails featuring a cartoon of ‘System hero’ – tall, thin, with a ponytail – and his short, bespectacled fried, Spod.
Emails were deliberately kept low-key and short. The first invited recipients to visit the site, but not to tell anyone else. The theme of secrecy gave the recipients the feeling of being part of something the users know nothing about.
The second email offered those registering as a ‘system hero’ the chance to win a free t-shirt that lights up when in a wi-fi area – an attractive geeky incentive to the target audience. As well as the website and emails, business cards were also produced for distribution at events.
The ‘Caffeine crazy’ game on the website was inspired by the frustrating demands made by users to sysadmins. It was promoted via a Google Gadget ad placed on sites including softpedia.com, linuxquestions.org and osdir.com. The ad contained a link to ‘Caffeine crazy’, a video showing a player getting frustrated, as well as a link to the site.
Result
The first email registered an open rate of 19 per cent with a click-through rate of 53.7 per cent; the second registered an open rate of 23.2 per cent with a click-through rate of 48.3 per cent. To date, 133 sysadmins have registered with the site and eight are now actively blogging.