Blue Helm

Activate the masses through social media

It’s been a busy few months for us here at Blue Helm. We’ve worked with some exciting new clients –from leading financial advisors at Northwestern Mutual to community education experts at Utah Valley University to the ambitious health food company, SunDrenchers. By far the group we’ve collaborated with the most over the past several months, however, are the folks over at America’s Freedom Festival at Provo, who work tirelessly to organize and promote year-round patriotic celebrations throughout the state of Utah.

The Freedom Festival sponsors one the nation’s largest (if not the largest) Independence Day extravaganza every year called the Stadium of Fire, located in LaVell Edwards Stadium on the campus of BYU. Last year they invited the Jonas Brothers, SHeDAISY and Glenn Beck to perform. And the year before that was Miley Cyrus and Blue Man Group. Big stars like that, in addition to thousands of other dancers, singers, volunteer performers and a trillion pounds of fireworks, make this quite a show. Needless to say, this is no humdrum July 4th celebration, and the Freedom Festival needed a social media campaign to match this colossal patriotic performance.

We strategized here at Blue Helm for a while and decided that the Freedom Festival needed an online campaign that not only energized its thousands of fans, but activated them. How could we use the Freedom Festival’s existing social media platforms to galvanize its fan base into doing something, thus enhancing the admiration, loyalty and passion they have for the organization? What could we do to attract other members of the community to its cause? How could be grow its social media fan base, all the while galvanizing and motivating its existing fans into taking positive action?

To make a long story short, we organized Vote the Voice—a three-part campaign that invited people to vote for a future Stadium of Fire performer. You can read more about the campaign (and the viral stir it caused) here. We promoted the campaign extensively, utilizing Facebook, Twitter and the local media. But the response to Vote the Voice was more than we could have ever anticipated. Over 75,000 votes were cast, some from as far away as New Zealand, Saudi Arabia and the Philippines. Blogs and news sites from across the United States picked up on the story, and we were overwhelmed with thousands of comments, links and wall posts on the Freedom Festival’s social networks. Even now that the campaign has officially ended, fans continue to send us votes and comments saying who they want to see perform this summer.

Moral of the story: Choose a social media campaign that mobilizes your fans and prompts them to do something. The Freedom Festival’s fans are now expert lobbyists, motivating (sometimes begging) other fans to vote for their pick. And it turned out to be a PR coup for the Freedom Festival as well.

Activate your Facebook, Twitter and blog fans. Posting random updates that don’t ask your fans to do anything will result in a lower level of fan participation, thus undermining the point of using social media.