Company: 97th Floor, Lehi, UT
Company Description: 97th Floor is an award winning digital marketing agency that offers content ideation, creation and promotion. We elevate brands we believe in. We focus our campaigns around results not a content quota. We work with companies like ESPN, Dell, Discover Card, X-Games and Time Warner Cable. Located in Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, we have around 40 employees.
Nomination Category: Marketing Campaign Categories - Specialty
Nomination Sub Category: Brand Experience of the Year - Consumer

Nomination Title: Blendtec's 2014 Google+ Brand Experience Campaign

Tell the story of this nominated brand experience program for the judges (up to 650 words). Describe the genesis, planning, execution, and results to date of your campaign.

Blendtec came to us wanting to brand themselves on Google+ as an authority in the fitness and healthy food niche, and use Google+ to increase traffic to their site. Our strategy was to create a Google+ community, branded under Blendtec’s name, where users could come and find healthy recipes, fitness tips and other health related posts. Blendtec would be the authority on health and fitness, without giving fitness advice. We also wanted to create a Google+ brand advocate user who would invite and communicate with other users. This person would share all of Blendtec’s updates and also become an authority in the food niche.

To begin, we did extensive keyword research to figure out the best possible community name. Knowing Google+ does not implement semantic search, we knew the community name needed specific keywords. “Food” and “Fitness” had over a million searches every month, much higher than the terms “Fit”, “Recipe” or “Cooking”, and also had high engagement. From this research, we decided the community name would simply be “Food + Fitness”. We then created the user Jennifer Livingston and built up her profile as a brand advocate.

Once the community went live in August, we used Blendtec’s Google+ page to invite their existing followers to join the community. Jennifer Livingston then reached out to over 2,000 of the top contributors on Google+ and asked them to join and contribute. We then started posting the content we had been creating for Blendtec’s website on the community page. We chose posts with high visual aspects and posts that featured ways you could create healthy food with a Blendtec blender. The Google+ community “Food + Fitness” is now a thriving community where users can find the information they need to eat healthy from not only Blendtec, but also the top health food contributors on Google+.

After being live for a few months, the community has 4,779 followers and high engagement on posts. Jennifer Livingston has over 1,000 followers and is also considered an authority in the food niche. She also gets high engagement on Blendtec’s content that she reshares. For the previous five months before we started working on Blendtec’s Google+ page, they had 114 visits from Google+ to their site. After creating this community and this brand advocate, we increased traffic from Google+ to Blendtec’s site by 538%. Through our efforts with Blendtec’s “Food + Fitness” Google+ community, this campaign has been named a Finalist in the 2015 PR News’ Social Media Icon Awards for “Google+: Best Communications”.

In bullet-list form, briefly summarize up to ten (10) of the chief features and results of the nominated campaign (up to 150 words).

- Created a Google+ community
- Created a brand advocate
- Reached out to over 2,000 of the top contributors on Google+ and asked them to join and contribute
- Posted relevant and helpful content to the community
- The community has 4,779 members and high engagement from those members
- Our brand advocate is considered an authority in the space and has over 1,000 followers
- We increased traffic from Google+ to Blendtec’s site by 538%
- Named a Finalist in the 2015 PR News’s Social Media Icon Awards