CHANNEL E

TitleCHANNEL E
BrandPANASONIC ASIA
Product / ServiceECO IDEAS
CategoryA02. Best Use of Social Media
EntrantACCOMPLICE Singapore, SINGAPORE
Entrant Company:ACCOMPLICE Singapore, SINGAPORE
PR/Advertising Agency:ACCOMPLICE Singapore, SINGAPORE

Credits

Name Company Position
Tobias Wilson Accomplice Managing Director
Francis Choo Accomplice Creative Director
Ed Choa Accomplice Digital Director
Kerrie Ho Accomplice Accounts Director
Catherine Cha Accomplice Digital Executive
Gavin Foo XPR Managing Partner
Andrew Loy XPR Senior Associate
Neal Moore Click2View Co-Founder & Director
Jackson Tan Go-React Accounts Director
Holly Grabarek MTV Asia VJ
Kossy Ng MTV Asia Senior Executive, Talent & Music Marketing

The Campaign

Panasonic Asia's 'Channel E' campaign was a unique solution to Panasonic's efforts to not only continue fan engagement and recruitment, but to spark action in the form of user-generated content around its CSR Eco Ideas philosophy. The KPI for Facebook fan growth given was 70,000. 'Channel E' leveraged YouTube - closely integrated with Facebook - as its primary campaign platform where users were encouraged to step-forward to be ambassadors of the environment, by either becoming an Eco-Ideas VJ ala MTV-style, or as an eco-photographer. The campaign saw thousands of submissions of fresh user-generated content by way of self-produced YouTube clips and photography work. Supporting social media outreach mechanisms such as Twitter, popular bloggers, community forums, and content-specific interstitials were employed to drive recruitment and participation - a consistent strategy centered around 'Community First'. All communication tactics had to be completely integrated, reaching all possible touch-points from an end-users' perspective, not an advertiser's perspective. The campaign saw growth from 30,000 fans to 111,500 fans within a 5 month campaign period with a total potential reach of 33.4 million Facebook users. The campaign also further saw the identification of Channel E ambassadors who were both well-spoken and YouTube-genic with massive online influence.

The Brief

Goals: • Become the global leading benchmark for Panasonic from Social Media perspective • Engage specific audiences who are interested in consumer technology and green initiatives Objectives: • Drive traffic and momentum to relevant portals (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and microsites) for engagement • Build a massive community while still communicating Panasonic’s key messages • KPI of 70,000 Facebook fans • Gain valuable feedback from audiences Target audience: Facebook suggests that there are “96,965,380” Facebook users across Asia. Given Panasonic Asia’s regional reach, Panasonic’s target audiences are consumers and would-be consumers interested in green initiatives, eco products, and consumer technology.

Results

The Channel E initiative gained 91,650 fans to a total of 111,150 fans since October 2010, exceeding the set KPI of 70,000 fans by 41,150 fans. Close to 500 new fans joined the page daily contributing to an average of 500 posts per day with each post garnering 17,000 impressions and reaching 33.4 million Facebook users in Asia, daily. In addition, 1020 users signed up for Channel E and in terms of user generated content, 690 beauty, beast photos and 52 videos were submitted. The Channel E campaign led to the fast fan growth of the Panasonic Asia Facebook page. Panasonic Asia is truly today's largest consumer tech Facebook page in Asia region.

Execution

The Channel-E campaign was launched on March 2011 and ended in July 2011 according to plan. Channel-e featured 3 submissions: 1) Beauty photos (Beautiful photos of the environment) 2) Beast photos (Photos of the threatened environment) 3) Environmental videos (30-second video about the fan’s environmental dedication) Popular bloggers were invited to attend Channel-e’s launch to drive initial traffic to the Facebook page. Content submission was made possible on Channel-e’s microsite (www. http://www.panasonic.asia/channele/). Fans were continually encouraged by MTV VJ Holly’s videos to participate in all three categories. The winner from each category gained the status of being Panasonic’s very own EJ (Environmental Journalist) or PJ (Photo Journalist) and was given the opportunity to post eco-content over 6 weeks on the Facebook page. This allowed other fans to gain a deeper insight into environmentalism through the eyes of another fan. This drove huge amounts of fans to the Facebook page.

The Situation

Panasonic Asia was looking into evolving fan engagement and recruitment into a richer series of user-generated content around its CSR Eco Ideas philosophy onto its existing social media channels. Apart from recruitment, Panasonic wanted to spark the community into a life of its own – self-generating content from the community and leveraging YouTube as a viral video platform. Panasonic’s Corporate Social Responsibility message – Eco Ideas – was harder to grasp, XPR and Accomplice created ‘Channel-e’, a unique solution that leveraged a whole spectrum of social media channels. The KPI given was 70,000 Facebook fans.

The Strategy

Unlike other run-of-the-mill social media campaigns, Channel E is an impeccable engagement campaign centered around getting consumers to generate content to educate other fans in their own way, from their own perspective. This meant blending above the line, event, PR and blogger relation tactics to directly touch consumers and fans on a conversational level, and more importantly, to get them involved in the campaign directly. It also meant that on a creative level, the overall look and feel of the entire program needed to be less main stream to really differentiate the social medium apart from the rest of Panasonic's marketing and communications.