BlogWorks: For the good of the project

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January 25, 2007

For the good of the project

By Melanie Seasons

Last summer, Charlie and I worked on a campaign for The Canary Project, an artistic endeavor by Susannah Saylor and Edward Morris that attempts to document global warming through photography. To date it is one of the most successful projects we’ve ever had. We even won a “Wommie,” WOMMA’s award for “amazing word of mouth campaigns and the fabulous people who create them.”

In the first week of our outreach efforts, traffic at canary-project.org went from around 20 unique visitors a day to 5,000 — an increase of 24,900 percent.

The day-to-day work was pretty much identical from the other projects we’ve worked on.
We used the same methods of researching, pitching and monitoring. The big difference, however, was our fee, which was, nothing. We did the work completely pro bono.

The Canary Project campaign shows that online outreach is not just about dollar signs, it’s about future investments.

Our work not only promoted The Canary Project in the blogosphere, it got our name out there as well — and in a very positive light. Many of the blog posts specifically mentioned Hass MS&L doing the work pro bono; that resonates well with bloggers. We were not seen as the PR stooges that so many bloggers are skeptical of.

It was, and continues to be, an amazing learning experience for us. The more an agency can be positively associated with word-of-mouth marketing, the more potential there is for future business.

Posted by staff at January 25, 2007 04:34 PM