Curing the Travelocity Roaming Gnome’s Cabin Fever

by stratton on January 15, 2010

roaminggnomeLike many of us, the Travelocity Roaming Gnome has a bad case of the post-holiday winter blues. Fortunately for him, we’ve partnered with Travelocity to bring their McKinney-developed “Cabin Fever” campaign to life on Facebook, allowing the little fellow’s fans to vote on where to send him next.

Fans not only get the satisfaction of helping Travelocity’s spokesgnome shake his seasonal surliness, they have a chance of curing their own cabin fever at the same time. Their vote allows them to enter a sweepstakes for a two-person Vail ski trip, including round-trip airfare, four nights’ accommodations and three-day lift tickets.

Since the promotion went live on Tuesday, over 10,500 votes have been cast in under 48 hours. Right now, Banff leads Whistler by an almost 2-to-1 margin, so the Roaming Gnome might be Calgary-bound. But with more than a month before the sweepstake’s February 18th deadline, there’s still plenty of time for fans to steer the little fella toward Canada’s west coast.

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StepChange Has Powered Up

by stratton on January 11, 2010

The word is out: StepChange has merged with three other social media firms to expand our capabilities. Powered, Inc. of Austin, TX has acquired StepChange, as well as NYC’s Drillteam and Crayon. This is an exciting opportunity for all of us, as well as all of our current and future clients.

We spent the last half of 2009 looking at lots of different ways to expand StepChange, anticipating that 2010 would be a very big year for Social Media Marketing. In Powered, Drillteam & Crayon, we found a set of like-minded companies with complementary social media marketing offerings. And with the gas that Austin Ventures is putting in our tank, we’ll be able to grow quickly and be early to market with a new type of “Social Agency” that offers unique services, scale and reach.

This shouldn’t affect our current partnerships or projects at all. StepChange—our name, our office, our team—will all stay the same. However, we’re looking forward to being able to broaden our offerings significantly this year, which will expand our ability to support clients and partners in their social marketing efforts.

And as we grow, we’ll be looking to add some social experience designers, developers and program managers to our team in Portland. If that’s you (or someone you know), drop us a line at info[at]stepchangegroup[dot]com.

To all of those who have partnered with us so far, thanks for helping us reach this important milestone. And if you’re just discovering StepChange now, we look forward to hearing from you and working with you.

Links

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StepChange 2009: Year In Review

by stratton on January 10, 2010

stepchangelogo2009 was StepChange’s biggest and busiest year yet, which explains why we’re only now getting around to writing our year-in-review post. Despite the rough economy, we were fortunate enough to be able to add staff and enjoy strong year-over-year growth in every quarter.

We started the year by moving into new offices in Portland’s Pearl District, and we ended it by being named one of 14 companies in the inaugural class of Facebook Preferred Developer Consultants. Here are some of the things that we accomplished in between:

Our Clients

We had the opportunity to work with some incredible brands this year—Nike, Clorox, Nestlé, Motorola, Bayer, Gold’s Gym, Huggies, T-Mobile, Southwest Airlines, Travelocity, ULTA, TrueValue and more—either directly or through our excellent agency partners, which included OMD, Ogilvy, Edelman, Motive, Mullen, Fathom Communications, Summit Projects, CMD Agency, Camelot Communications and WMI.

Here are just a few of the projects that we took on in 2009:

  • n180663790735_4862When Motorola launched their Rival and CLIQ phones, we supported them (in conjunction with Ogilvy) with custom Facebook tabs, interactive content and viral engagement applications. We also helped to drive over 38,000 new fans to Motorola’s Facebook Fan Page when it launched in July.
  • The Southwest Airlines “Fans Fly Free” Facebook promotion that we designed the app and custom tab for saw over 400,000 new Fans sign up on Southwest’s page within 10 days, driven by Facebook engagement ads and an excellent media plan from Camelot Comminications. Nearly half a million users entered the promotion for the chance to win one of 100 free round-trip tickets, and the “overnight success” nature of the promotion earned prominent coverage from Inside Facebook.
  • And one of the projects that we’re most proud of is our support for Clorox Clean-Up’s “Power a Bright Future” promotion. Through the Bright Future app that we developed for them, over 57,000 active monthly users nominated more than 4,000 non-profit kids programs for $10,000 grants. We also designed all of the custom tabs for the contest and currently maintain the Clorox Clean-Up Fan Page.

Press and Awards

insidefbStepChange and its work were also greeted with some very positive media coverage. The Survivor IQ widget that we developed to promote the launch of Ben Sherwood’s book, The Survivor’s Club, earned a mention in the New York Times. The Nestlé Crunch Challenge app that we developed for a December 2009 release was featured this week on The Today Show.

Inside Facebook, an invaluable resource for social media news, covered the Clorox Clean-Up Bright Future and Southwest Airlines Fans Fly Free promotions that we created apps for. TechCrunch featured the ampCloud semantic analysis widget that we developed for OpenAmplify, as well as the Facebook presence for SecondPorch that we worked on. SecondPorch was also profiled in Smart Money and FastCompany.

Our co-founder, Kevin Tate, was a featured speaker for the Portland Advertising Federation and also spoke at SEMpdx’s Social Media SixPack on the topic of strategies relating to Facebook, widgets and apps. And our own Michael “No Time For Love, Doctor” Jones authored a guest article (“10 Useful Tips for Ruby On Rails Developers”) with Greg Borenstein for Smashing Magazine and also spoke at the Innotech Oregon Event.

Finally, StepChange was honored with a pair of awards. We received the 2009 OMMA Award for Best Integrated Marketing Campaign for our work with Livescribe. We also received a hometown honor at the Portland Social Media Awards (SoMe) in the category of large-scale Social Marketing Campaign as a result of our work with Tostitos.

Thanks to all of the brands, agencies, partners and employees who made it all possible. 2009 was a great year, and 2010 promises to be even bigger and better. Stay tuned…

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