Crowdsourcing the Brand – A Case Study

The case of the Fleet Feet Sports Chicago Cheer team #RunChi (formerly #FFCheer) shows how to employ user-generated content and the social reach of your fans to create a movement and drive traffic to a website.

Objective:

Fleet Feet Sports Chicago were looking to give runners a supportive environment, a place to applaud their accomplishments, support each other and encourage others to embrace running.

Strategy:

We chose to invite runners of all ages and training levels to contribute to a blog that would highlight the daily successes, struggles, wins and tips they learned while running.

Execution:

Six bloggers were selected and given an area of focus each, from product coverage to races and events, and the Fleet Feet Cheer blog [ffcheer.posterous.com] was launched. One person was selected to coordinate the blogging schedule.

Within a few weeks the blogging schedule was booked for months to come. Within a month of blogging the site had attracted 6,000 unique visitors and has grown to over 15,000 in the 4 months since. Long conversations ensued, certain popular posts attracting 20 to 30 comments. Shortly the original group was expanded into a club team with 25 contributing members.

The top 7 lessons learned:

1. There’s indeed power in numbers: Having multiple bloggers each with their independent social networks meant the blog posts were being shared on multiple networks and thus gained momentum very fast.
2. Be genuine: Real people, writing about real challenges is very appealing.
3. Be organized: Taking an organized approach to scheduling posts held everyone accountable to meeting their blogging deadlines and thus the blog didn’t fizzle out as time passed.
4. Be supportive but don’t try to control the content: Fleet Feet did not control the blog which allowed the bloggers to keep it original and real. The bloggers posted and published exactly what they wanted to post with no reviews or approvals needed from Fleet Feet.
5. Give trust and you will be rewarded: Many have asked us if we weren’t worried about the bloggers hijacking the blog. The answer is no. We did discuss and prepare a back-up plan but we knew that trust is essential to building a community. So we gave trust and education. The bloggers received social media training at the beginning and weekly tips emails for the first month. Even when they published something controversial it resulted into more discussion and more traffic. 90 posts later and the blog is still “worry-free.”
6. Understanding the audience is key: We coached the bloggers to be sensitive to beginner runners and be welcoming of all, whether they run slow or fast, or never ran. Some of the feedback we received was that the blog made running accessible to amateur runners, unlike some of the large publications that seemed to tailor to performance athletes.
7. Substance wins over form: Although the blog was set up on the simplest platform, Posterous, the simplicity of it kept the focus on the content.

Refining the plan:
Just like with any marketing campaign, some things didn’t work as we expected. For example, the originally selected hashtag, #ffcheer, did not resonate with our audience. Although the hashtag had a reach of over 1.5 million people on Twitter (based on estimated impressions) within 3 months it became obvious that it was not clear to our audience what the hashtag meant. The Cheer team made a decision to change the hashtag to #runchi which caught on instantly. As a result we saw a spike in traffic to the website immediately after the launch of the new hashtag.

The lesson learned here is that you should never be afraid to make changes when something doesn’t work. In fact, successful marketing requires that we are data-brave, that we test, learn and continuously evolve our strategies and tactics. It also requires that we listen to those involved. The Fleet Feet team were wise to turn to their ambassadors and hand them the decision for a new hashtag.

I wish I could tell you more about what we’re working on next, but you’ll just have to stay tuned and see for yourselves.