Creating A Relevant Challenge is a Sure Fire Way To Create Engagement
A few months ago we worked with AMD, to celebrate the launch of its latest product. We held a special live overclocking event, called AMD BlackOps, where seven teams from around the world set out to find out how fast they could push AMD’s new Phenom II X6 chip. The teams, identified through AMD’s ongoing involvement and engagement with hardware enthusiast communities, featured overclocking enthusiasts from US, Poland, Russia, Canada, Finland, Austria and Italy.
After identifying the teams, AMD sent each of them everything they needed to stream their record attempt live in HD video. The package they were sent included an HD webcam, instructions on how to set up their live streaming and the brand new Phenom ii X6 chip. All of the HD video was then streamed through a BlackOps microsite which we created to support the event so that enthusiasts from around the world could watch multiple live HD streams from the different teams. This microsite became the center of the conversation around AMD’s latest processor.
To further increase the traffic to the event, AMD featured the event heavily in its gaming community on www.amd.com and also syndicated the content through other social channels including its Facebook page at www.facebook.com/amd. It is worth noting that Twitter was not used as a channel to reach the enthusiast community because they don’t use Twitter, however Twitter was used to broadcast the event to the influencer community.
The event attracted over 45,000 unique views and 11,588 hours of video streams which is the equivalent of 483 days of streamed video. Interestingly, the highest viewing figures were from Russia followed by the US with enthusiasts as far afield as Australia viewing the event.
The lessons learned: know what your audience gets excited about, understand where they live, involve them in the launch and the engagement will speak for itself.
*This work was produced by Type3 Limited, now part of Beyond.