Social channels (a.k.a. social media) have seemingly boundless benefits for companies. We get a lot of clients and prospects at March that ask if this is an appropriate communications channel for them. Some yes, some no … but just a channel for spreading corporate Kool Aid? Not so!
NASA reveled on Tuesday it needs millions of new employees to sift through Mars photos taken since the 1960’s. Now that’s a big headache for HR! To spare the wrangling with the U.S. Congress over funding for all this man-power, NASA built their new citizen-science website in order to crowdsource the needed labor.
How are they recruiting? They combined a traditional media campaign – press release, BBC + other articles – with a social channel campaign. NASA communications went after targeted forum participants through Urban75, Wirefresh, CheifDelphi and many other social channels.
The result? It appears so much traffic has been driven to the site that it has crashed! Or perhaps they have technical issues which are causing the down site, although my money’s on too much traffic. After all, if you can find water on the Moon, you can handle throwing together a website.
Great example of power, reach and effect of a well run program. Wonder what a well thought through social channel program can do for you …
