If the keystone of the American Dream is owning a home, losing that home is the American Nightmare. 

Whether they’re prey to storms, earthquakes, or the collapse of financial markets, such losses are devastating—not simply to those directly affected, but to those in adjacent towns and neighborhoods, or even right next door.

Then there are those who are without a home because of personal setbacks. Their needs are no less valid nor less pressing. 

Rebuilding is restorative on many levels. Enter CBRE, winner in the exceedingly strong Best Corporate-Community Partnership category of PR Daily’s 2012 Corporate Social Responsibility Awards. 

The CBRE Shelter Program works in conjunction with two primary nonprofit organizations, Rebuilding Together and HomeAid, as described in one of CBRE’s internal memos: 

“Rebuilding Together is the nation’s largest nonprofit working to preserve affordable homeownership and revitalize neighborhoods by providing home repair and renovation services, free of charge, to those in need. HomeAid is a leading national nonprofit provider of housing for the homeless, whose mission is to build and maintain dignified housing where homeless families and individuals can rebuild their lives.”

The campaign won not only for the extraordinary benefits it provided to individuals, families, and communities nationwide, but for its efforts to engage staffers and outside volunteers alike in constructing and renovating homeless shelters, transitional housing, and private residences.

To promote its Build Month and Build Day initiatives, the real estate giant targeted memos to specific locales, as well as offering a toolkit on the company intranet. Photos of volunteers in various locations recognized their altruism while cultivating camaraderie across the teams’ ZIP codes and time zones.

The benefits of giving and accomplishment no doubt matched those of the finished projects that helped so many. 

When community outreach transcends beneficiaries and benefactors alike, you’ve got a sure winner. So, hats off to the CBRE team, from carpenters to communicators, and painters to partners.

Want to get recognized for your hard work? Find out about Ragan and PR Daily’s award programs here: http://www.prdaily.com/Main/RaganAwardsPrograms.aspx

The No. 1 killer of children throughout the world is unintentional injury, claiming more than 830,000 lives each year. 

Underwriters Laboratories (UL) president and CEO Keith Williams wants to change that. 

What’s his goal? It’s for every child, everywhere in the world to be safety smart, reducing those tragic numbers. 

The good news is that, thanks to its employees and volunteers, teachers, and organizations worldwide, UL’s Safety Smart® program has reached more than 117 million children and adults. 

This mission and reach earned UL, a global, not-for-profit, independent safety science company founded in 1894, top honors in the Best Community Affairs category of PR Daily’s 2012 Corporate Social Responsibility Awards. 

In this category, we asked entrants, “How did your corporate efforts contribute to causes in your home community, the nation, or worldwide?”

UL told us. “For employees at UL, ‘Working for a Safer World’ is more than a company motto—it’s a way of life. Employees at UL do more than work for a company with a public safety mission. They live the mission.”

The World Health Organization characterizes the unintentional injuries claiming so many lives each year—traffic-related crashes, drowning, burns, falls, and more—as predictable and preventable, UL says. 

UL believes “standards, certifications, and regulations alone are not sufficient in addressing all aspects of injury prevention.” That’s why it developed Safety Smart®, “a program allowing employees to improve a child’s awareness and understanding of safety, health, and well-being, thereby helping children to manage themselves and their surroundings by conscious action, not chance.”

Around the world, the organization’s employees volunteer as Safety Smart Ambassadors. They bring the Safety Smart® program to classrooms, camps, youth groups, daycare centers, scout meetings, and community fairs. The program’s educational materials include animations, flash cards, activities, and more in 20 languages. Employees choose not only their language of choice but the safety topic to present based on their own interest, experience, and comfort level. 

Safety Smart® includes programs on topics such as home, water, fire, and online safety. It has programs about going green and being healthy and fit, and plans to introduce additional programs this year. 

As UL expanded its Safety Smart Ambassador program to include non-UL employees, it established partnerships with the International Association of Electrical Inspectors, more than 600 fire departments in the U.S., the U.S. Embassy, Disney, and organizations in Europe, Africa, and in nations such as China, India, Singapore, Korea, and Taiwan. UL provides the training, educational materials, and know-how for partners to bring the Safety Smart® program to children in their own communities. 

What does UL want to see through its efforts? It wants to make children around the globe safety smart—to help them “[build] a consciousness and a knowledge which they draw upon in making better life-sustaining choices helping all children to ‘die of old age.’”

We think 22 countries and 117.6 million people reached is a pretty good start. 

Learn about Safety Smart® here. 

Want to get recognized for your hard work? Find out about Ragan and PR Daily’s award programs here: http://www.prdaily.com/Main/RaganAwardsPrograms.aspx

Insurance is designed to give people a sense of safety and security. Esurance, an Allstate company that provides auto coverage to consumers across the country, takes that one step further with its support of The Trevor Project, a suicide prevention lifeline for young people in the LGBTQ (Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender/Questioning) community. 

Esurance’s online campaigns in support of The Trevor Project have resulted in a $100,000 contribution to the nonprofit group—and also won the company first place in the Best Cause Branding category of PR Daily’s 2012 Corporate Social Responsibility Awards.

The Trevor Project 

The Trevor Project was founded in 1998 by three filmmakers: James Lecesne, Peggy Rajski, and Randy Stone, the creators of the short film “Trevor” (winner of the 1994 Academy Award® for Best Live Action Short Film, and numerous other awards). 

Its services include Trevor Life, a 24-hour suicide prevention and crisis intervention hotline for LGBTQ youth; Ask Trevor, a confidential Q&A site for youths with questions; Trevor Chat, an online messaging service that provides live help from trained volunteers; and more.

With over 600 active volunteers and 200+ counselors, the organization’s vision looks to “A future where the possibilities, opportunities and dreams are the same for all youth, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.” Since its inception, the lifeline has fielded over 200,000 calls from youths around the nation.

The 2011 campaign

A sponsor of gay pride events across the country since the early 2000s, Esurance wanted its outreach to go beyond booths and banners, checks and corporate logos. It selected The Trevor Project because of its reputation as a leader and innovator in suicide prevention for youth. 

In the summer of 2011, Esurance pledged to give The Trevor Project $10 for every “like” Esurance received on its Facebook page. The insurance company created a “Like Gate” on Facebook—a page that Facebook users must “like” before they can see further. A meter on the page counted how close the campaign was to its $50,000 goal. 

As an added incentive, visitors to Esurance’s Facebook page could enter a sweepstakes for a weekend in Hollywood, with a chance to win $2,000 in cash along with two tickets to Trevor Live in Los Angeles, an evening of comedy and music that helps raise money and awareness for The Trevor Project. 

The online campaign was promoted with news releases, shared efforts on Facebook and Twitter, and online and print advertising in LGBTQ outlets like Instinct Magazine. During National LGBT Pride Month, Esurance also had a presence at several Pride events across the country including San Francisco Pride, Seattle Pride, Los Angeles Pride, Philadelphia Pride, and GayDays Orlando. 

The 2011 campaign reached its $50,000 goal in two weeks. A record-breaking number of 3,459 new friends joined Esurance’s Facebook page only three days after launch. By the end of the campaign, the company had gained over 6,500 new fans.

The second campaign

The success of that campaign inspired Esurance to support a new project in 2012: the Need to Talk Live campaign. When someone is having a rough day and needs real-time support from a friend, he or she can message “NTL,” and the friend will know to call or make a face-to-face visit right away.

For this campaign, Esurance created a Facebook application that allowed users to easily upload their profile photos into an online mosaic to show their support of The Trevor Project. Again, the company offered to donate $10 for each uploaded photo.

The 2012 effort reached its target of raising $50,000 in eight weeks, with supporters uploading nearly 6,000 photos to the mosaic. In addition, more than 27,000 visitors have viewed the mosaic and read the messages of support that Esurance invited participants to leave for those feeling alone or ostracized.

The two campaigns represent a total of $100,000 donated to a lifesaving cause: helping youth victimized by bias.

The Trevor Project website: www.thetrevorproject.org

Want to get recognized for your hard work? Find out about Ragan and PR Daily’s award programs here: http://www.prdaily.com/Main/RaganAwardsPrograms.aspx

Videographer Jamie Pent’s first day on the job at Charity: Water was beyond eventful.

She spent the day on a plane to Ethiopia, reading about a girl named Rachel Beckwith, who had asked for $300 in donations to her Charity: Water page for her ninth birthday. She got $220. Just a month after her birthday, Rachel tragically was killed in a car crash. The story of Rachel’s birthday wish went out all over the world, and people donated more than $1.2 million to the cause of clean drinking water.

Pent was on her way to meet with Samantha Beckwith, Rachel’s mom, and her grandparents, as they met with some of the people Rachel had helped. While there, Pent would create a powerful video that more than 500,000 people have seen since it was posted in July.

Charity: Water could have told the story in a blog post, a slideshow, or a Facebook update. But Pent says video forges stronger connections.

“People are inspired by other people,” she says. “When you realize that somebody else is like you, that’s huge.”

Whirlwind production

Charity: Water founder Scott Harrison had a distinct vision going into the video’s production, Pent says. He already had a song in mind for the video, and he insisted that it had to be shot, edited, and posted on the anniversary of Rachel’s death.

Pent did some shooting the day before, but the bulk of the work happened in one day as she scrambled to get the video posted within the eight-hour time difference between Ethiopia and New York.

“We got up at 5 in the morning and we got ready to go to all the different villages that Rachel had built,” Pent says. “We shot until about 1 p.m. [and] drove four hours to our next hotel.”

A mix-up at that hotel led to Pent converting video in the hotel lobby and editing in the car as the team headed to a different hotel.

“I literally ended up editing all the way through the night,” she says. “I don’t know what time it was, I think it was 1 in the morning, I just prayed, I said, ‘God, just let me sleep one hour. Let one hour be enough.'”

It was. At about 5 a.m., the video was finished. Harrison and other bosses requested some minor changes and, once they were made, the video went live.

Explosive response

The video racked up thousands of views on the first day and many of its 500,000-plus views in the first month or so, Pent says.

“We didn’t do any huge push,” she says. “It happened kind of naturally. I hope that happens more often.”

It helped that quite a few news organizations which had reported on Rachel’s wish were already eager to see the video, but Pent says tons of other people—members of the Beckwiths’ church, fans of the charity, and total strangers—helped spread the video online with blog posts, tweets, and Facebook updates.

Surprisingly, the video has gotten nearly 10 times more views on Vimeo than on YouTube. Pent says that’s because she and other Charity: Water employees pushed the Vimeo version out. The organization’s creative director prefers Vimeo, Pent says, because it’s more aesthetically pleasing and because organizations get more control over what things look like.

It’s a mini-battle within Charity: Water, Pent says, because their online manager says YouTube videos are more shareable.

Lessons learned

Video is going to continue to be a huge part of what Charity: Water does, Pent says.

“People’s attention spans are extremely short, and they’re getting shorter,” she says. “People are constantly watching videos, either on little breaks or when they first get to work in the morning. It’s more likely someone’s going to sit through a three-minute video than it is that they’ll sit down and read a couple pages about our experience in another country.”

The funding for the charity’s videos doesn’t come from public donations—100 percent of those funds go out into the field—so the organization has a separate group of fundraisers who gather up money for operations, Pent says.

The immediacy of video remains important to Harrison, she says. For instance, in the organization’s Live from Rwanda video in September, he wanted the phrase, “It’s our birthday” to really be authentic. He’s saying it on Charity: Water’s birthday, and the video is posted that day, too.

Pent says she wants to do more videos like the Rachel video in the coming year. The big lesson she learned, she says, is that you have to be open to what people are saying. Don’t just fill out a checklist of things to cram into a video.

“You can draw out some things you weren’t thinking about,” Pent says. “Everyone has a story. Every single person has a different perspective.”

Matt Wilson is a staff writer for Ragan.com.

Want to get recognized for your hard work? Find out about Ragan and PR Daily’s award programs here: http://www.prdaily.com/Main/RaganAwardsPrograms.aspx

Baseball is the quintessential American pastime. Major League Baseball knows this, but in March of 2011 the famed organization decided to launch a project that would reach younger fans, increase the profiles of baseball’s star players, and position baseball in the center of pop culture. 

To do this, MLB harnessed the power of social media and rallied around what CNBC’s Darren Rovell called “perhaps the craziest, most ambitious, yet perfect idea a sports league has ever come up with”: the MLB Fan Cave.

The MLB Fan Cave 

MLB created the MLB Fan Cave in the old Tower Record Building on 4th Street and Broadway in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. The Cave is actually a storefront with floor-to-ceiling windows, allowing fans and curious onlookers to take in the sights of the Cave’s goings-on. The organization hired two fans dedicated to watching all MLB regular season and postseason games (read: super fans) on a giant wall of 15 TV screens. The Fan Cave is a daily digital content factory—the fans charged with watching the games blog and interact with fans via social media continually. 

Additionally, the MLB Fan Cave shares videos on social media of famous visiting players and celebrities, including David Ortiz, Justin Verlander, Chase Utley, Matt Kemp, Jesse Eisenberg, Lisa Kudrow, and Kate Upton. To further emphasize its connection to pop culture, the MLB Fan Cave also created a concert series hosting free concerts featuring popular acts like Far East Movement, Ziggy Marley, and more. 

Getting social 

Video

As you can imagine, after the initial launch of the Fan Cave in 2011, MLB fans were beyond eager to walk in the shoes of the two fans who had been hired to launch the project. MLB drew upon this enthusiasm and created a social campaign to crowdsource the next two lucky fans. After receiving more than 22,000 applications, MLB narrowed the pool down to a group of 50 by allowing fans to vote for their favorites based on the finalists’ video submissions to MLBFanCave.com. Thirty lucky fans—who actively campaigned via social and traditional media—were flown to Arizona for a two-day Spring Training “bootcamp” and were narrowed down to a final nine fans, or “Cave Dwellers.”

Facebook

The MLB Fan Cave uses Facebook to target a younger demographic, elevate the status of baseball’s star players, and position itself as relevant to pop culture. To do this, Cave Dwellers share Q&A’s with players, post fill-in-the-blank questions to engage fans, create catchy memes using MLB stills, and share exclusive content with Facebook fans. The Cave Dwellers also focus on cross-promoting, as they did when they announced the Instagram profile on its Facebook page, using Timeline features to highlight important and pertinent posts and using Facebook events to keep fans up to date on MLB Fan Cave celebrity guests and happenings.  
 
Twitter

@MLBFanCave is a vibrant Twitter account that provides a social space for the Fan Cave to share news and interact with Twitter followers. The account is updated often with images from games, shout-outs to players, competitions, promoted posts, and more. 
  
The content

The MLB Fan Cave takes a step beyond simply sharing celebrity interviews via social. The creative team crafts stories about the players to further engage its audience. David Ortiz turned his visit into a search for hugs from Yankees fans on the streets of New York, while Miguel Cabrera became “Miggy Poco,” star of his own telenovela. 

Such stories allow players to show a side of themselves that fans wouldn’t otherwise see. The MLB Fan Cave keeps such narratives going on social media to reinforce pop culture relevance and provide a way for fans to connect more with players.
 
The results

The MLB Fan Cave boasts 1,007,844 Facebook fans and 199,235 Twitter followers. The audience is younger (30 vs. 45) than the average MLB fan and more engaged with the content—33 percent of Facebook followers either liked or shared content, which is up to six times the typical level for sports pages. 

The MLB Fan Cave has generated more than 2.2 billion earned media impressions—approximately 1.5 billion via earned media and more than 750 million via social media. The Fan Cave has garnered attention from The Wall Street Journal, TIME Magazine, CNN, and Sports Illustrated, and has received praise from online outlets like Mashable’s Todd Wasserman and ESPN.com social media columnist Maria Burns Ortiz.

Want to get recognized for your hard work? Find out about Ragan and PR Daily’s award programs here: http://www.prdaily.com/Main/RaganAwardsPrograms.aspx

If you’re trying to launch a viral campaign, it helps to have a 25-year head start.

Repeat after me: “Bueller… Bueller… Bueller…?”

Early in 2012, American Honda tapped in to the established buzz about the 25th anniversary of the iconic movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” to promote its CR-V model to young drivers. Who better, after all, to convey a sense of freedom and fun than Mr. Do Everything in One Fantastic Day, Ferris Bueller himself—or, more accurately, his portrayer, Matthew Broderick. 

The concept and its multilayered execution earned American Honda and RPA top honors in the Best Viral Campaign category in PR Daily’s Digital PR & Social Media Awards. 

The “Matthew’s Day Off” promotion turned back the proverbial odometer and had Broderick cruising in the newly redesigned CR-V, replete with music from and other homages to the original movie.

The campaign included a Super Bowl commercial, which was heralded by a YouTube teaser with a twist: The 10-second spot was unbranded. It generated a torrent of speculation that Honda was behind it. 

And Honda stayed mum. 

If less is more, then nothing was everything. 

Then, the Monday before the Super Bowl, when its 60-second ad would air, Honda posted extended versions of the commercial on Honda sites and on YouTube. 

Honda wasn’t done, though. It hid in the extended version what company officials described as “Easter eggs”—little prizes for “Bueller” aficionados to hunt for. There were references to the original movie, and devotees were encouraged—and many needed little, if any, prompting—to identify them. Many were obvious, but some were as subtle as the appearance of Ferris’s vest in a store window. 

Honda’s submission offers these results:

“Honda website traffic tripled during the Super Bowl activity. Honda was the most-viewed Super Bowl video online, the No. 1 trending video on YouTube, and the No. 1 shared commercial on Facebook and Twitter, and overall gained more than 2.5 billion PR impressions.”

The campaign, clearly, took on a life of its own—the essence of a viral campaign.

Kudos to the creative teams at American Honda and RPA for developing a campaign that was “so choice.”

If you’d like to watch the extended video—and hunt for the “Easter eggs”—click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhkDdayA4iA 

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The cost of a Super Bowl commercial in 2012 came to $3.5 million per 30-second spot. According to 24/7 Wall St., those rates have since jumped to a nearly $4 million price tag for 2013 with 95 percent of the available time slots sold out as of November.

But is the return on investment worth the hefty cost?

For game day regulars like Coca-Cola, Volkswagen, Budweiser, and Doritos, the rate might merely prove fractional when compared to their respective marketing budgets, but for others, it could be too rich for a brand’s blood.

Brands such as Network Solutions.

However, that didn’t deter the online domain provider from taking an interesting approach to throwing itself into the Super Bowl XLV name game of advertisers.

As the Pittsburgh Steelers prepared for battle against ensuing MVP Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers, a different war was brewing on social media between the Herndon, Va.–based company and industry rival Go Daddy.

This clash was the crafty result of CRT/tanaka and its digital savvy. The public relations and marketing firm strategized with Network Solutions to increase its .CO domain sales by way of a counter-campaign.

To do this, the agency played off of Go Daddy’s notoriously provocative Super Bowl spots featuring auto racer and reprising spokeswoman Danica Patrick. However, looking to parody the work of Go Daddy, CRT/tanaka decided on a YouTube-hosted “mockumentary” series developed around its sassy “original domain girl,” Go Granny.

Enlisting the help of eccentrically witty Academy Award winner Cloris Leachman to play the role, as well as the aid of acclaimed BlogHer co-founder Lisa Stone, both of the featured women provided the campaign a valuable contrast between comedy and business that easily engaged the campaign’s targeted demographic of female small business owners.

Promoted on its website, Facebook page, YouTube channel, blog properties, Twitter streams, and an online banner ad, the campaign was further heightened by three one-hour Tweetcapades the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of Super Bowl weekend. 

Under the handle @Go_Granny, the campaign brought its cheeky antics to the Twitterverse while cunningly exploiting the game’s popular hashtag #brandbowl.

These tactical efforts were more than entertaining. The video itself resulted in more than 60,000 views over the big weekend, while its Twitter strategies inspired more than 3,500 tweets. Furthermore, public online sentiment of the Go Granny video campaign also raked in a 97.5 percent positive response.

And the media’s response was even better.

Go Granny was not only picked up for coverage by the likes of Business Insider, Advertising Age, PRWeb, PRWeek, the Los Angeles Times, and New York magazine, but was also named to Mashable’s 2011 “7 Twitter Marketing Campaigns to Learn From.” 

From an ever-important business standpoint, the campaign helped increase .CO domain sales by more than 500 percent during Super Bowl weekend.

Whereas sales numbers such as those might appear victory enough for any business, we’re proud to chalk down another tally in the winner’s column for CRT/tanaka and its Go Granny campaign. Congratulations on being named the winner of the Best Video category in PR Daily’s Digital PR & Social Media Awards.

Want to get recognized for your hard work? Find out about Ragan and PR Daily’s award programs here: http://www.prdaily.com/Main/RaganAwardsPrograms.aspx

What’s customer service all about if it’s not about listening to customers, hearing their needs, and responding? Wouldn’t it be nice as a customer to get that kind of service 24 hours a day, seven days a week, no matter where you are, even in the middle of an airport? 

It’s this kind of customer service that earned Delta Airlines top honors in the Best Use of Twitter category in PR Daily’s Digital PR & Social Media Awards.

As the airline developed its social media strategy, it wanted to use the venue to provide “a real value—customer support.”

@DeltaAssist was the first airline program in the U.S. to use Twitter for customer support. When it started, four community managers provided support Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. EST, helping customers who sought answers to questions about things like flight status or gate numbers. 

As team members listened to customers, they realized they could help customers even more by using the social media platform to solve problems. 

The expanded team includes 12 empowered reservations agents serving customers 24/7, using a triage system to respond to tweets. They can do anything a call center employee can do, except book a new ticket. To add a personal touch, employees sign their tweets with their initial, and their first names are listed on the airline’s Twitter profile. 

The @DeltaAssist team also noticed customers used Twitter for complaints about airport facilities or service. In response, the airline developed its “Twitter Watch” program, working with station managers and airport personnel to deal with real-time customer experience issues. 

The airline added a Spanish-language line, @DeltaAssist_ES, as a pilot program in September 2011.

What are the program’s payoffs? 

Check out these 2011 statistics:

• 158,000 mentions on Twitter
• 115,000 outbound tweets and direct messages
• 28,000 additional customers, even with travelers following and unfollowing based on travel plans

 Customer service is really all about the customer, though, so how is @DeltaAssist doing creating brand evangelists?

If these tweets and this video are any indication, the Twitter strategy is working out just fine: 

Thanks to the social media team @Delta (DeltaAssist!) for renewing my faith in customer service!

@DeltaAssist one of the best customer service experience ever #delta @Delta

Want to get recognized for your hard work? Find out about Ragan and PR Daily’s award programs here: http://www.prdaily.com/Main/RaganAwardsPrograms.aspx

What’s customer service all about if it’s not about listening to customers, hearing their needs, and responding? Wouldn’t it be nice as a customer to get that kind of service 24 hours a day, seven days a week, no matter where you are, even in the middle of an airport? 

It’s this kind of customer service that earned Delta Airlines top honors in the Best Use of Twitter category in PR Daily’s Digital PR & Social Media Awards.

As the airline developed its social media strategy, it wanted to use the venue to provide “a real value—customer support.”

@DeltaAssist was the first airline program in the U.S. to use Twitter for customer support. When it started, four community managers provided support Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. EST, helping customers who sought answers to questions about things like flight status or gate numbers. 

As team members listened to customers, they realized they could help customers even more by using the social media platform to solve problems. 

The expanded team includes 12 empowered reservations agents serving customers 24/7, using a triage system to respond to tweets. They can do anything a call center employee can do, except book a new ticket. To add a personal touch, employees sign their tweets with their initial, and their first names are listed on the airline’s Twitter profile. 

The @DeltaAssist team also noticed customers used Twitter for complaints about airport facilities or service. In response, the airline developed its “Twitter Watch” program, working with station managers and airport personnel to deal with real-time customer experience issues. 

The airline added a Spanish-language line, @DeltaAssist_ES, as a pilot program in September 2011.

What are the program’s payoffs? 

Check out these 2011 statistics:

• 158,000 mentions on Twitter
• 115,000 outbound tweets and direct messages
• 28,000 additional customers, even with travelers following and unfollowing based on travel plans

 Customer service is really all about the customer, though, so how is @DeltaAssist doing creating brand evangelists?

If these tweets and this video are any indication, the Twitter strategy is working out just fine: 

Thanks to the social media team @Delta (DeltaAssist!) for renewing my faith in customer service!

@DeltaAssist one of the best customer service experience ever #delta @Delta

Want to get recognized for your hard work? Find out about Ragan and PR Daily’s award programs here: http://www.prdaily.com/Main/RaganAwardsPrograms.aspx

Most of the world’s maple syrup comes from Canada, about 80 percent of it, in fact. Which made it all the more curious that online searches for syrup almost never pointed people who were looking for some pancake topping or waffle sauce to the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers.

The organization had a great website, but not too many people were actually getting to see it. Public relations and marketing firm CRT/tanaka analyzed the site and found that the content simply wasn’t optimized to draw in people searching via Google and other search engines.

The agency took two months to resolve that problem, and in doing so earned PR Daily’s PR & Social Media Award for Best Use of SEO.

CRT/tanaka opted to go beyond general terms such as “maple syrup.” Other companies had already invested too much in winning the top results on those search terms. Instead, the agency targeted specific terms it identified as having a high search volume and low competition. Those included “maple recipes Canada,” “maple syrup nutrition,” and “pure Canadian maple syrup.”

Not only did that help put the Federation near the top of the results for certain searches, it also helped get its message out that syrup is a healthy alternative to sugar and is great for cooking.

Over the course of two months in early 2011, the agency completely overhauled the site, from the content to navigation to social sharing. Page titles, headlines, and page descriptions all changed, and the site was relaunched on March 1, 2011.

The results were explosive. Visits increased by a factor of nearly four, page views increased 514 percent, and visits from Google searches were nearly six times as high as the year prior. Plus, the Federation now sits atop the Google search results for 50 search terms.

Want to get recognized for your hard work? Find out about Ragan and PR Daily’s award programs here: http://www.prdaily.com/Main/RaganAwardsPrograms.aspx

For most people who are on Pinterest, their boards are filled with aspirations—activities they’d like to do, recipes they’d like to make, places they’d like to visit.

What would you do if someone told you they would pay for you to do anything from one of your Pinterest boards? Chances are you’d be pretty excited. 

Honda made such a proposal to five influential pinners for its Pintermission campaign, which earned the carmaker first place in the Best Use of Pinterest category in PR Daily’s Digital PR & Social Media Awards. The campaign successfully announced Honda’s presence on Pinterest in a way that went beyond simply pinning.

The campaign

The goal of the Pintermission campaign was to establish Honda’s new CR-V in a unique way that promoted the vehicle’s “get out and live life” personality. Marketing the vehicle on Pinterest was a natural choice, as target customers for the CR-V are young people on the edge of adulthood’s big milestones—marriage, children, etc.—and young people plan those milestones on Pinterest.

Honda reached out to five influential pinners—chosen by the number of followers they had—and challenged them to a #Pintermission: a 24-hour break from Pinterest to bring something from their boards to life. To help the pinners complete their chosen activities, Honda gave them $500 apiece.

After choosing the pinners, Honda uploaded personalized posters to individual boards within its profile. Honda made the pinners collaborators on their individual boards so they could upload their photos once their Pintermission was complete. Additionally, Honda asked the pinners to create their own Pintermission boards and make Honda a collaborator. This gave Honda exposure to many more followers than it could have had on its own. 

To further promote the campaign on Pinterest, Honda created promotional posters that mimicked many of the motivational posters that are popular on the site.

The results

More than 4.6 million people were exposed to the #Pintermission boards, which produced more than 5,000 repins and almost 2,000 likes. Additionally, more than 16 million media impressions were garnered from the campaign. 

But the buzz didn’t remain exclusively on Pinterest. The #Pintermission hashtag popped up on Twitter with hundreds of tweets linking to Honda’s Pinterest profile or Pintermission press coverage. Many people even asked Honda for a Pintermission of their own.

Want to get recognized for your hard work? Find out about Ragan and PR Daily’s award programs here: http://www.prdaily.com/Main/RaganAwardsPrograms.aspx

Most people can name at least one book from childhood that they loved—a book that made them laugh, think, or imagine a world different from their own.

What if you had the chance to talk to the author behind your favorite childhood book?

For fans of its Facebook pages, Scholastic Inc. offers such an opportunity. 

To better engage with the 3 million readers, parents, educators, librarians, etc. who comprise its fan base, Scholastic invites authors and experts to host live chats or takeovers on one of its 27 Facebook pages. For this unique and interactive approach, these chats and takeovers earned Scholastic a first-place win in the Best Use of Facebook category in PR Daily’s Digital PR & Social Media Awards.

Scholastic began experimenting with live chats and takeovers as a way to not only engage fans and connect them with authors and experts, but to establish itself as a credible source of information for parents and educators.

R.L. Stine takes over Scholastic’s Facebook page

R.L. Stine, the author behind the “Goosebumps” books, launched Scholastic’s social media takeover series. To get fans in the Halloween spirit, Stine “took over” Scholastic’s main Facebook page on Oct. 28, 2011, for two hours. Scholastic’s social media team stepped aside to allow Stine to post jokes, photos, and fun memories with fans, and answer fan questions as they came in. 

It was easy for fans to interact with Stine; all they had to do was log in to Facebook as they normally would, go to the Scholastic page, and post their questions directly to the page. To let fans know the event was coming up, Scholastic promoted it via both traditional channels and social media.

After Stine’s successful takeover, Scholastic scheduled live chats with Judy Blume, author of “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” and Dr. Harvey Karp, pediatrician and author of “The Happiest Toddler on the Block.” 

How it works

Prior to each chat and takeover, Scholastic preps authors on what to expect from the community and social media platforms. Scholastic encourages authors to use their own voices, which means it must choose authors whose voices reflect that of Scholastic. 

During all of the chats and takeovers, the Scholastic profile picture changes to one of the featured author or expert to ensure fans can quickly and easily identify with whom they will engage. Scholastic starts each chat with a welcome message, an announcement of the day’s featured guest and the topic to be discussed, and an invitation to submit questions and comments. The author or expert then gives his or her own welcome message and kicks off the discussion. Due to the interactive nature of social media, the authors primarily let the fans lead the talks.

The results

During his two-hour takeover, Stine posted 21 updates that attracted 513 comments, thousands of likes, and 41 shares. Blume posted 57 times during her chat, and answered dozens of fan questions. Karp’s chat garnered 92 comments and reached more than 14,000 people. All the events increased likes to Scholastic’s Facebook pages.

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When you think of McDonald’s, do you associate it with “nutrition”?

Probably not.

The fast food chain is trying to change that perception through the McDonald’s Nutrition Network, a program designed to highlight its commitment to nutrition. To help spread the word and change the minds of consumers, it turned to influential bloggers, a dietician and social media.

That effort won McDonald’s the nod for Best Use of Digital or Social Media for Media Relations in PR Daily’s Digital PR & Social Media Awards.

PR Daily’s 2012 Digital PR and Social Media Awards were presented by Synaptic Digital. Learn more about Synaptic Digital here (pdf).

To localize the message, MWW and the McDonald’s New York Tri-State Owners/Operators Association created The McDonald’s New York Metro Nutrition Network (MNN).

The “MNN” was created to award local organizations with seed money to fund projects or programs that promote nutrition and responsible eating choices to the communities they serve, says Alissa Blate, MWW executive vice president, Consumer Lifestyle Marketing.

Developing a healthy strategy

First, a third-party, high-profile dietician was selected to tell the brand’s story. This campaign also relied on local “mommy bloggers” to share the McDonald’s story. McDonald’s knows parents are concerned with providing affordable, healthy meals to their children.  

MWW also reached out to thousands of local organizations to raise awareness for this program and encouraged them to apply for funding. These organizations were pleased that McDonald’s was getting involved in the conversation, Blate says.

Next, local “Meetups” were held throughout the area. The registered dietitian, Tanya Zuckerbrot, spoke to attendees, answered questions, and provided wholesale menu items for people to sample.

“Lastly, content for consumers was created by the program’s registered dietitian, including prebuilt meal bundles and nutrition tips, which were available on the program website,” Blate says. “This content was supported with ongoing messaging on McDonald’s local Twitter and Facebook handles as well as seeded to prominent, influential bloggers.”

How to change the conversation

MWW invited key bloggers to attend the network’s launch event, featuring a Q&A with Zuckerbrot. Then, after the launch event, there were more “Meetups,” live-tweeted by McDonald’s.

“Bloggers never before had the opportunity to talk to McDonald’s about nutrition,” Blate says. “When they learned about the better for you options available at McDonald’s restaurants their perceptions changed. The experiential component – taking them offline versus just communicating with them online – made a difference in their views of the brand.

“Tanya helped dispel myths around McDonald’s food, created custom menu choices for each meal of the day, and armed parents with the information that they need to responsibly integrate McDonald’s into their hectic daily schedules,” she says.

In addition, the MWW public affairs team met with local officials in the community to raise awareness of the program and encourage their constituents to apply for the grants.  They applauded McDonald’s for supporting nutritional education in the local community by donating seed funding to local nonprofits.

“This effort had an enormous effect in increasing the number of organizations applying for the grants, as well as opening a line of dialogue between the McDonald’s owners and operators in their constituency,” Blate says.

Did it work?

MWW secured close to 100 media hits, including Newsday, NJ.com, and posts from more than 20 influential bloggers in the local NY Metro market.

McDonald’s exceeded its goal in applications for the grant awards by nearly 500 percent and every segment of the New York Tri-State area was represented showing that the efforts in this program reached the entire region and wasn’t limited to just the big cities.

Success was also measured on social media channels. Before the launch, MWW benchmarked the volume, tone, and common themes around discussions on McDonald’s and nutrition throughout the region. Then, it compared the numbers to post-launch.

Blate says the results were “perception-changing” with nearly “a 2,300 percent increase in social media impressions around McDonald’s and nutrition with 99 percent of them considered ‘favorable.’”

“Additionally, many local bloggers who had previously written negative posts around McDonald’s and its nutritional benefit have begun to praise the brand for its commitment to bringing responsible eating to the forefront,” Blate says.

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It’s not easy to build a robust social media program from nearly nothing.

That’s what faced Josh Landsberg when he joined KB Home in January 2011. The homebuilding company had a 4-year-old YouTube account with outdated content and minimal video views, and an inactive Facebook account. 

Rather than jump in right away, his team studied other homebuilders to see what opportunities they could find. Landsberg also included other department executives to provide input and be part of the social media rollout. 

That approach won KB Home top honors in the Best Social Media Team category in PR Daily’s Digital PR & Social Media Awards.

The homebuilding company now has active corporate Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and YouTube pages. 

Its strategy behind all those accounts is to be responsive, timely, and engaging. That has reaped big payoffs, including landing on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” 

Its quick response strategy on Facebook even paid off in the form of a home sale in San Antonio, when someone inquired about floor plans available at a particular community and ultimately ended up purchasing a new KB home.

Facebook first

In surveying its competitors, it appeared that no one else was really engaging on Facebook in a meaningful way. KB Home was determined to be different.

But company executives had major concerns about negative postings and how messaging would be regulated to ensure it complied with restrictions inherent to KB Home being a publicly traded company.

Landsberg worked with numerous KB Home corporate teams, including human resources, legal, IT, and customer relations. All of these groups had to provide input and be a part of the rollout in order to ensure KB Home’s social media launch went smoothly. 

Landsberg brought Ali Kendall onto his team to assist. Working closely with corporate customer relations, the two developed a strategy on how to best respond to Facebook posts. 

Its winning strategy: Quickly move issues related to customer service off social media and into the more traditional customer service channels of email and phone. 

Proof in the pudding

KB Home’s Facebook page went live in mid-April 2011. In its first year on Facebook, the team experimented with a variety of tactics: posting outside links, promoting KB Home events, and sharing photos and videos. 

They also developed two national Facebook promotions: the “EPG Share and Win” contest, and “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” Home Giveaway “Vote and Win” contest. Facebook likes grew 30 percent during the DeGeneres show giveaway.

The response to the “EPG Share and Win” promotion was so great that KB Home CEO Jeff Mezger mentioned it on an earnings conference call. An analyst later responded, “Wow, that’s the first time a builder has talked about Facebook on an investor call.”

Following the successful launch of the corporate Facebook page, Landsberg’s team trained division employees to develop and manage local Facebook pages. Those divisional teams can better promote local events and new communities to a targeted audience. 

The same response tactics developed for Facebook are used on its Twitter account, which became active in April 2011. Twitter is used as a way to monitor hot topics and potential issues that involve KB Home. 

Additionally, its YouTube account was updated, with new content featuring Martha Stewart, as well as KB Home’s involvement on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” being promoted via all of KB Home’s social networks.

Our congratulations go to Landsberg’s team.

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The winner in the Best Social Media News Release category in PR Daily’s Digital PR & Social Media Awards stole cuckoo-like into the nest of its bigger competitor to lay a social media egg that hatched and began yelling for attention in a voice that reached around the world.

AMD amazed industry reporters, bloggers, analysts, and experts with the audacity, speed, and timing of its social media assault on Intel’s Developer Forum trade show on Sept. 13, 2011:

• Two weeks before the IDF show, AMD flew top industry press reps out to Austin, Texas, to show them the speed of its new FX processor. It didn’t tell the industry press that AMD was chasing a Guinness world record in CPU speed. (This “record” had been informally recognized up to that time.)
• The day before the IDF, AMD rented a floor of the St. Regis Hotel across the street from the trade show as a staging area and briefing room for 100 reporters.
• The plan was “bold, yet simple”: a press and social media takeover, timed to the second, of Intel’s trade show. AMD would “seize the narrative” of the IDF, use the IDF’s own “conversation stream” to direct attention to AMD’s FX processor, and persuade IDF’s live audiences that the “over-clocking prowess” of the FX processor mattered more to them than anything at the IDF event.
• AMD timed its social media fireworks to start the moment Intel’s CEO stepped up to the IDF podium to give his keynote address.
• AMD’s opening move was a press release announcing the Guinness world record its processor had set. AMD let tech reporters tell the story for a bit, and waited for the alerts to filter through to the journalists’ social media followers. Then AMD’s pre-assembled, pre-briefed army of tweeters, each of whom had 10,000 followers or more, began tweeting the news of the world-record-setting AMD processor.
• AMD asked its tweeters to use the hashtag #IDF that Intel had set up for its event, so that AMD’s big news would show up in real time on the hundreds of Twitter screens Intel had placed throughout the IDF convention halls—while Intel’s CEO gave his keynote. Of course, the AMD tweets also popped up on Intel’s corporate website.
• AMD wrote attention-grabbing posts on its Facebook page to get engagement from AMD’s fan base, posted a much-talked-about viral video on YouTube (it got more than 850,000 views), and induced Guinness to present AMD with the world record certificate at a rooftop ceremony overlooking the Moscone Center, where the IDF show was taking place.

The results:

• In AMD’s words, a “massive digital onslaught” ensued: 26 million social media impressions, more than 81 million media impressions, and a Fox News interview on the third day of the IDF that showed footage of the Austin “world record” attempt.
• AMD earned enthusiastic admiration from industry press and mainstream media: TIME Magazine called its campaign “daring,” Forbes labeled it “dramatic,” while PC Magazine wrote “astounding.” 
• AMD even won grudging recognition from industry experts who thought the Guinness idea too much like a stunt: Industry analyst Rob Enderle admitted, “If you’d called me last week and told me what you were planning for IDF, how you would dominate IDF and social media with an over-clocking story, I’d have told you it couldn’t be done.”

AMD’s intrepidity and imagination, its cheekiness bordering on impudence, and its clever, massive social media campaign to support its social media news release, made it an easy winner in this category.

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