FG SQUARED Integrates Social Media into Brand Awareness Campaign for UFCU

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This campaign is a great example of how the different marketing disciplines can be integrated

Austin, Texas (Vocus) November 14, 2009

Austin-based FG SQUARED, a full-service, interactive agency with a fifteen year history of delivering bottom-line results for Fortune 500 clients, recently developed and executed a brand awareness campaign for their client University Federal Credit Union that integrated the primary elements of social media and public relations to maximize exposure.

From August – September 2009, UFCU awarded students who opened a checking account at their credit union with a $20.09 initial deposit into their account. Alongside that promotion, the public was encouraged to submit videos on the unique ways in which they could spend that $20.09 – whether to pay for a date or for the paint to redecorate a room, etc. David Lee, an FG SQUARED employee and part-time college student, volunteered to demonstrate the value of $20.09 by living off of that amount of money for twenty days and to blog about his experience.

“This campaign is a great example of how the different marketing disciplines can be integrated,” explains Jason Fellman, Co-Founder of FG SQUARED. “Blending social media (blogging, video, Twitter, etc.) with more traditional public relations activities (media outreach, press releases) gave us reach and exposure than could not have been achieved with any single approach”

FG SQUARED has implemented interactive and social media projects for corporations like Royal Dutch Shell, Motorola, Premiere Global Services and American Campus Communities. Although UFCU had already been using social media to engage with customers online, this brand awareness campaign was the University Federal Credit Union’s first truly integrated communications strategy to include social media. As such, they were expecting to gradually build a community of UFCU fans interested in their online activities. FG SQUARED teamed up with strategic partner, Accolades Public Relations, in order to maximize social media and media coverage results.

“We saw a healthy uptake in Web traffic and gained valuable media coverage due to the interest in the social media campaign,” states Sheila Wojcik, Vice President of Membership at UFCU. “The team accomplished goals that we did not even have on our list of priorities for this initial campaign. The $20.09 promotion has become a model of how to effectively handle integrated communications campaigns within the financial sector. We have other credit unions and trade associations asking us how to do create one like it.”

FG SQUARED and Accolades PR have advice for other financial organizations wanting to create similar campaigns for their unique purposes. The principles below will help to create positive results.

•     Do include the human element and creativity that will engage the interests of bloggers and influencers. A major part of the web traffic (82%) was derived from bloggers who were interested in following David Lee’s daily challenges and commented on his experiment of living for twenty days on $20.09.
•     Do integrate traditional public relations into your campaign to make more people aware of the social media campaign. If a blog is interesting to readers online, it will likely be interesting to the media. David Lee’s experiment gained media coverage in multiple publications including a front-page story in a key newspaper read by UFCU’s major target audience.
•     Don’t be afraid of controversy – just be open, honest and transparent in your responses. At one point in the process, readers were skeptical of David’s intensions and suggested he was making light of poverty situations. David’s open responses and the support of other readers quickly averted any negativity. Remember a crowd of followers generally accepts controversy since it allows people to express different opinions, and the same group will typically support you if your motives are honest.
•     Do integrate PR 2.0 activities into your plan. You can easily gain interest from members of social networks like Facebook and Twitter to support your goals. Optimized press releases appearing in Google search results will also drive more traffic to blogs and a client Web site.
•     Do incentivize your social media campaigns in an appropriate manner. UFCU requested videos on how to creatively spend $20.09. Even though the participation in this part of the campaign was modest, the top three winners received $500. $250 and $100 as promised. In addition, an unexpected $20.09 was also awarded to every video participant. The legitimacy and timely follow through on the awards will likely solicit an even larger number of participants for the next promotion.

Those interested in gaining case studies from FG SQUARED http://www.fg2.com and Accolades PR http://www.accoladespr.com are welcome to visit their respective Web sites and to reach out to the media contact for more information.

$20.09 Blog Mentions & Social Media Sites:
twitter.com/fgsquared
flickr.com/fgsquared
facebook.com/fgsquared
http://www.youtube.com/user/FG2Squared
http://blogs.babble.com/strollerderby/2009/08/28/kid-survives-for-20-days-with-20-could-you-do-it/
http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/food/user-post-20-09-for-20-days-challenge-a-lesson-in-food-life-507929/

About FG SQUARED
Founded in Austin in 1994, FG SQUARED is a full-service interactive marketing firm merging experience, insight and agility to deliver powerful campaigns, tools and results. Focused on strategies that enable clients to strengthen customer relationships, increase revenue, and reduce costs, FG SQUARED’s clients include Advanced Micro Devices, American Campus Communities, Hitachi, Shell Oil Co., Motorola, Premiere Global Services, and Callaway Golf. To learn more about how FG SQUARED creates compelling brand experiences through strategic consulting, web and interactive, design and production, and social media solutions, log on to http://www.fg2.com

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