Fishburn Hedges

22.11.2010

Oh, Cannes…home of the film festival, stunning ocean views, fine dining and opulent hotels. And the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2010.

In the second week of November, the great and the good of the IT industry – namely CIOs and other senior IT leaders – descended on the glamorous south east coast of France for the biggest event on the industry’s calendar. BT Global Services (BTGS) was no exception, taking its place among the 4,500-odd delegates via stands, coffee shops and expert presentations. This year, the symposium focused an optimistic set of CIOs on the theme of handling change.

This, of course, was an event in which delegate chatter took place almost as vociferously online as it did in the halls, workshop suites and cocktail bars at the exhibition centre. The #gartnersym hashtag took a hammering on twitter.

The challenge for 2010 was to create a splash online to complement BTGS’ significant presence at the event itself. In comparison with the previous year (where BTGS’ live reporting from the symposium had gone down a storm), there was a much more crowded digital space to contend with, namely because other vendors - and Gartner themselves - were set up to be far more proactive online. This year, BT needed to do something different to genuinely add to and inspire the delegate chatter: to literally stand out from the IT crowd.

Our strategy focused on creating an online debate to generate genuinely new and insightful content related to, but distinguishable from, the symposium themes. To spur the debate, we engaged an expert panel (ranging from IT analysts through to computer science researchers and economics professors) to produce controversial opinion pieces to be published and promoted on a debate blog and promoted through social media channels.

Our expert panel went head to head with experts from BT to debate whether ‘innovation had killed the innovative CIO’. By the time the symposium’s exhibition floor was empty, a lively debate had played out over 29 thought-provoking written and video posts which each tied neatly into BTGS’s priority product and service areas.

Promotional activity on twitter drove over 800 visitors to make in excess of 1,400 page views in the week of the event alone, shattering all targets - and we’re still counting. Most significantly, the depth of content has led to the average visitor spending more than four minutes absorbing the debate and BTGS presentations and materials being downloaded 129 times.

Testament to the power of social media, our use of twitter helped BTGS strike-up new conversations with prospects, and debate content was ‘retweeted’ over 80 times by senior IT professionals attending the symposium. And that content certainly stood out: as the event closed, Gartner’s own analysis of the twitter chatter around it suggested that ‘innovation’ had become one of the top five online discussion topics. Mission accomplished.

Posted by Russell Saunders