Lessons learned from the Big Blue Test campaign

Afew weeks ago, Manny Hernandez of Diabetes Hands Foundation launched his Big Blue Test campaign.

The goal was simple: If the video gets 100,000 views, Roche will donate $75,000.

The goal was attained and lessons were learned. Here’s what Manny shared with me:

The power of captions

We were approached by a Brazilian group that also does diabetes advocacy offering to translate the video to Portuguese. As a result, more than 5% of the views came from Brazil and nearly 2% came from Portugal. A German diabetes advocacy group offered to do the same in German: we received 2% of the total views from Germany.

The power of partners

Partners within the diabetes space. Those listed on the BigBlueTest.org site, including the International Diabetes Federation and Insulin For Life, all helped promote the campaign.

Partnerships outside of diabetes: Ultimately, friends who have supported our work in the past, who write about social media and health, social media and pharma and social media in general also played an important role in helping us reach the goal.

Riva Greenberg, one of the people in the Big Blue Test team, got visibility on the Huffington Post. This story alone was liked more than 300 times and retweeted more than 100 times.

The cause marketing partnership

Rob Muller (Social Media Consultant at Roche) and Todd Siesky (PR Manager at Roche) supported the project from the beginning and helped not only make it possible financially by moving whatever had to be moved internally to make it happen, but also followed through with things like:

• Having the press release we created in connection with the project published through thousands of media outlets.

• Including the video as part of a takeover box that appeared on the home page of their affiliate sites in the days leading up to World Diabetes Day.

Know what referral sources work

We were surprised at where our traffic came from. Notice that Facebook came before YouTube and Twitter was way less than expected.

• Facebook: nearly 20% of the views.
• YouTube itself: 10% of the views (they were kind enough to feature the video on the nonprofit channel most of the time, between Nov. 1 and Nov. 14)
• Fark.com: nearly 7% of the views.
• Mobile devices: nearly 6% of the views.
• TuDiabetes and EsTuDiabetes: almost 5% of the views.
• Fail Whale? In spite of the efforts to push the #bigbluetest hashtag, only 3,000 views came from Twitter itself.

Understanding these sources will help us assign resources for future campaigns.

Questions for Manny? Comment below!

Manny Hernandez is a social entrepreneur, community strategist, president of the diabetes hands foundation, founder of tudiabetes and estudiabetes, author of ning for dummies. Cross-posted from JohnHaydon.com.John Haydon delivers social web strategy solutions for “the quick, the smart, and the slightly manic.” Curious? Then visit the John Haydon blog, follow him on Twitter or leave a comment.