Objectives

United Technologies (UTC) has strong roots within the history of aviation, and each year we capitalize on National Aviation Day on August 19^th to highlight our contributions to the field. Within our company portfolio, Pratt & Whitney manufactures aircraft engines and Collins Aerospace (formerly UTC Aerospace Systems) is one of the world's largest suppliers of aerospace products. Approximately every second, an aircraft takes off with our equipment on it. To celebrate National Aviation Day this year, the UTC social media team invited our aviation enthusiast colleagues to share their personal stories, photos, and videos as pilots and designed a custom, employee driven campaign. The goal was to authentically portray UTC employees and their passion for flight.

The campaign also sought to:

• Showcase the people who power our aviation and innovation
• Increase UTC's employee engagement on social media and seize real 'moments'
• Strategically grow UTC's Instagram community through number of followers, comments, and engagements
• Leverage a modest paid, targeted campaign via Instagram and Facebook for cross-platform synergies to expand our reach

Strategy and Execution

By partnering with UTC's Business Units and issuing a call for pilots to share their stories via our UTC Now intranet and all employee Yammer channel, we received over 85 submissions within one week. The positive response and richness of content led the team to adjust the campaign from one day to a week-long aviation series. Leveraging a shoe-string budget of $2,000 for social media promotions, we selected our most dynamic content and created a targeted audience of aviation enthusiasts. This integrated approach focused on:

• Content first. Reviewing and prioritization of employee participants with a focus on selecting the most compelling photos, videos and stories;
• Unified, compelling narrative. A week-long narrative was crafted, with each day dedicated to a specific theme to best showcase diversity among divisions and participants (i.e. – women pilots, veteran pilots and even dog co-pilots!)
• Collaboration with our social colleagues at our business units: Pratt & Whitney, Collins Aerospace, Otis and Carrier to align on strategy;
• Ongoing communication with campaign participants, including tagging of their personal channels with permission;
• Quick, timely engagement including executive participation with our Chief Technology Officer Paul Eremenko, who saw the campaign on Twitter and reached out to participate. Paul provided pilot pics for inclusion in the series.

Results

All the content featured in the Aviation Week series was branded with #UTCAirplaneMode, a hashtag first introduced in July during the Farnborough Airshow. We posted five-times as much as content as usual, with nearly 100 posts and an aggressive cadence of Instagram stories (nearly 40) which resulted in 17k paid engagements (likes, comments and shares) and 3k organic engagements, reaching a total of 2M people. The Aviation Week series is our most viewed Instagram Story campaign ever and the second most engaging campaign of all time following the Farnborough Air Show.

During the campaign, UTC gained nearly 800 new followers to Instagram, Facebook and Twitter; an increase over our usual growth by 62%. While our target platform of Instagram gained 100% new followers and a 343% spike in engagements over the previous period.

Key wins include:

• LinkedIn promo teaser which drove 850+ click-throughs to our Instagram page and 283 engagements;
• Organic Instagram stories were viewed nearly 20k times;
• Facebook posts received over 2k engagements, including many from employee participants, with colleagues commenting and/or tagging one another;
• And on Twitter, the CTO Paul Eremenko feature helped drive 650+ engagements.

Media