We created a compelling online debate to help BT engage more than 1,100 senior IT professionals and chief information officers (CIOs) during this year’s Gartner symposium in Cannes.
The challenge
Global CIOs are a small, fragmented and difficult to reach group. We needed to reach them with a splash online to sit alongside BTGS’ major presence at the event itself. We were contending with a crowded digital environment vying for limited attention both among delegates and IT professionals not at the event.
Our response
We captured attention by promoting an online debate around the contentious question: “has the recession killed the innovative CIO?”. The issue related broadly to the symposium themes, and was not cut and dried.
We created a live blog to generate genuinely new and insightful content.
We engaged independent experts (ranging from IT analysts through to computer science researchers and economics professors) to write controversial opinion pieces. They went head to head with BT’s experts.
We published live updates from the event and we promoted everything we did through the right social media channels.
The lively debate played out over 29 thought-provoking written and video posts which each tied neatly into BTGS’s priority product and service areas.
Results
We were aiming at a micro-audience interested in a niche subject. We got more than 1,100 of them to follow our debate, visiting 2,000-plus pages.
They were engaged. Each visit lasted more than four minutes on average, a long visit to a web site. Participants downloaded more than 750 individual BTGS materials. The content we created was re-Tweeted or replied to more than 230 times.
Gartner’s own analysis of the twitter chatter suggested that our theme, ‘innovation’, became one of the top five online discussion topics.
All of this helped BTGS start new conversations with new prospects.
