Social Media … Done Right

Image credit: Flickr user raphaelle_ridarch

Team ELISE spent five days last week in San Francisco for the NCIIA’s annual March Madness for the Mind showcase of student invention. As always, the event was a roaring success, and we met some really engaged collegiate entrepreneurs who we’re sure you’ll be hearing more from in the future.

But this year’s event still managed to be unique in many ways: it was the first time that March Madness for the Mind was held in San Francisco; the first year that an actual head-to-head element was added to the programming, in the form of an all-team video competition; and the first year that the NCIIA collaborated with Inventors Digest magazine to promote the event. In many ways, this looked like your standard media partnership: Inventors Digest featured NCIIA-supported inventors and NCIIA staffers in its pages (including a gorgeous cover story), and the NCIIA in turn made sure that Inventors Digest’s logo appeared on the March Madness for the Mind Web site and throughout the annual conference and at the public event. But the partnership took a turn into the experimental, incorporating an ambitious social media campaign surrounding the video competition.

At first, the social media integration was simple: NCIIA and Inventors Digest announced the partnership on their respective Web sites, then repeated the announcement, briefly, to their Facebook fans and Twitter followers. This enabled both organizations not only to get the word out about the video competition, but also to strengthen their connection through the use of hypertext—which is to say that every time Inventors Digest was mentioned on the NCIIA’s site, if even in passing, NCIIA provided a link back to Inventors Digest, and vice-versa. And a few weeks later, when Inventors Digest announced its own competition, to launch officially the day of March Madness for the Mind, the relationship between the two organizations was further solidified as it became the NCIIA’s turn to post about Inventors Digest’s activities.

Once the details of the partnership were solidified, ELISE created a social media release via PitchEngine that allowed us to streamline the process when we were actually doing the pitching: we could send a link to the release instead of needing to copy-paste or send an attachment; low-res photos were downloadable directly from the release’s slide show and high-res photos were linked at the bottom of the page; and compelling video could be viewed and linked to without any need to leave PitchEngine and visit YouTube. The release received several hundred views within the first days of being posted and began getting traction on its own: when doing our final round of short-lead pitching, we found that some bloggers had found the release on their own and were familiar with March Madness for the Mind before they heard from us. And at least one story about March Madness for the Mind appeared when an intrepid blogger stumbled across the release without receiving a pitch from our office at all.

The social media release was also dynamic, allowing for even the tiniest updates as they happened. So when the NCIIA/Inventors Digest video competition finally went live on the Inventors Digest Web site, we were able to seamlessly integrate the updated information into the release’s links section. We’d like to think that updating this link had at least a little something to do with the 109% Web traffic increase that Inventors Digest experienced during the run of the competition—but we’re well aware that, in reality, this highly successful component of the March Madness for the Mind social media campaign was only partly because of our stellar social media release.

Mostly, it was because the video competition went viral—and that’s the true mark of a successful social media campaign, because, as Peter Shankman will tell you, “viral” isn’t something you can force. If you have good content, internet users the whole world over will want to share it. You still need your communications team to help create this content and get it posted, but it’s up to the rest of the world to decide if it’s worth sharing.

And when they do? That’s how you know you ran your campaign right.

ELISE Heads to San Francisco for NCIIA’s March Madness for the Mind

Starting tomorrow, Team ELISE will be in San Francisco for the NCIIA’s annual March Madness for Mind, a showcase of collegiate invention and innovation held this year at the Exploratorium. During the event, Excellence and Entrepreneurship Teams (E-Teams)—collaborating groups of college students, faculty members and industry mentors who have received NCIIA grants—from all over the country will unveil their inventions to the public, many for the first time. This year, sixteen E-Teams from Brown (see above) to Stanford and all points in between will display their state-of-the-art medical, agricultural and environmental innovations during the exhibit.

The NCIIA has partnered with Inventors Digest, the nation’s longest running publication for the inventing culture, to host a video competition for participating E-Teams. Public voting ended last week, but the videos are still available on the Inventors Digest Web site. The winners of the competition will be announced at the event on Saturday March 27 after the top three videos are screened.

We’re excited to see which teams received the most votes and to get an up-close look at the work these dedicated and creative students and their professors have put in over the past year. More on our trip when we’re all back east!

Where in the World is … ELISE communications?

Happy New Year! We hope all of you are as excited for 2010 as we are here at ELISE. This is proving to be a fantastic year, chock-full of many new events and experiences. Over the next few months ELISE will be on the go, East Coast to West Coast and everywhere in between.

Here is just a sampling of some of our exciting work to come:

February 11-13, 2010: Tech4Society, an Ashoka-Lemelson celebration, will be held in Hyderabad, India. Tech4Society is a three-day conference that is expected to draw over 250 social entrepreneurs, innovators, business leaders and movers and shakers who will explore how technology can drive social change.

March 5, 2010: Opening of the Marvels and Ciphers exhibit at the museum at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Old City, Philadelphia. The world premiere exhibition examines the dichotomy that exists between scientist and citizen: the first group trying to understand the universe, and the second trying to understand the scientist.

March 8, 2010: Richard Holmes will be hosting a lecture and reading at CHF. Holmes is a biographer, whose latest book, The Age of Wonder (2008), was recently named the best nonfiction book of 2009 by TIME.  The Age of Wonder focuses on the life and work of the Romantic-age scientists who laid the foundation for modern science.

March 25-27, 2010: NCIIA’s annual March Madness for the Mind 2010 will be held at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, California. The event showcases the nation’s top “E-Teams”—collaborating groups of college students, faculty and industry mentors who have received NCIIA grants—unveiling their inventions to the public, many for the first time.

Week of April 12, 2010: Launch of Kirk Boyd’s book, 2048: Humanity’s Agreement to Live Together, in San Francisco, California. The University of California, Berkeley Law Professor’s book focuses on an enforceable international agreement that will create a social order based upon human rights.

We are looking forward to all that 2010 has to offer.  Let us know if we will see you at any of these events and be sure to visit us on this blog and our Facebook and Twitter pages for updates.