The challenge

A product marketing team at a large semiconductor company wanted to use social media to drive key messages and highlight the company’s activities at industry tradeshows and events. In addition, they wanted to establish and promote a member of their team as a thought leader and industry influencer in the big data analytics space. However, the marketing team lacked the time, focus and expertise to develop social media programs on their own. Though these marketers had made forays into the Twitter-sphere and a few team members contributed blogs to community sites, their collective social media efforts lacked consistency, a coherent message and an overarching strategy.

What we did

Publitek built a social media persona for one of the team members, leveraging his growing role as a thought leader and industry influencer to drive audience engagement with relevant content. To achieve this, we crafted a social media program to amplify the company’s key messages to target audiences – IT decision makers and enterprise-level CIOs. We devised a comprehensive hub-and-spoke content strategy by blogging and tweeting on our client’s behalf, promoting events and keynote sessions, and using his position as a thought leader to address industry trends. We identified key industry influencers for him to engage with, which laid the groundwork for the client to partner with top-tier partners, such as Oracle, IBM and Microsoft, to amplify key messages. As our client’s responsibility’s evolved—and as the industry changed – Publitek transitioned his key focus areas to include new topics, such as IoT, artificial intelligence, the cloud and machine learning. We also provided ongoing training on best practices for discovering relevant rapid-growth communities and to achieve high levels of targeted message amplification.

Results

Through engagement with our social media programs, our client’s Twitter base grew from 60 to over 13,000 followers by the end of Q1 2017, and garnered over 40 million Twitter impressions in 2016 alone. This exposure solidly established him as a key influencer on Twitter across a range of technologies, boosting his influencer score on Klout to a high of 60 points.