What’s it like to get zapped in space? Are Smartphones orbiting the earth? What is a Robonaut and how firm is it's handshake? Engineers are curious and they thrive on forward thinking 'out of this world' science and technology. In 2013, Littelfuse Speed2Design partnered with NASA (Technology Transfer Program) and gave engineers -and social media followers- the opportunity to go behind the scenes at NASA to see firsthand the innovative technologies that NASA is developing. Centered on two events hosted at NASA Ames Research Center and NASA Johnson Space Center, Speed2Design provided this once in a lifetime experience to those who dream of space and the advanced unknown of future technologies. Via a variety of social media channels, including Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, Vine, Blogs, LinkedIn and Engineering Exchange (a social media site for engineers), Speed2Design posted photos, videos, NASA facts, questions, contests, blogs, and news articles to engage audiences, create dialogue, and share the excitement of space exploration. Through Speed2Design’s social media, we were able to interact with contest winners, media partners, and end users in multiple ways. We engaged audiences by sharing our experiences on the NASA site visits, as well as promoting our media partners’ and winners’ experiences through social media. We were not only able to expand our followings across multiple channels throughout the campaign (most notably, our Twitter follower numbers rose from 1,000 to 11,000 and Pinterest follower numbers grew from 100 to 3,000), but social media channels accounted for 20% of our total www.Speed2Design.com website traffic over the course of the campaign. Although we were extremely satisfied with the rapid growth in new followers and traffic, our proudest accomplishment is the quality of followers we gained. As a B2B company, it is vitally important to have followers that reflect our marketing demographics. We are an electronic component company specializing in circuit protection devices that engineers to use in circuit board designs and we have a distinct target audience: electronic design engineers or soon-to-be electronic design engineers (i.e., engineering students). An analysis of our Twitter followers at the end of the campaign revealed the top keywords from our followers’ profiles were “engineering," “engineers," “design," and “aerospace." This is a key metric that shows not only did we build a large audience; it was exactly the audience we were targeting. We also were able to see the leads gathered (approximately 35% of the 4,000 visitors from social media channels entered the Speed2Design contest) were not only from industry end customers, but also social media was the source of our greatest number of student engineer leads – a key goal of our campaign.
http://www.speed2design.com/ https://twitter.com/speed2design http://www.pinterest.com/speed2design/ https://www.facebook.com/Speed2Design http://vimeo.com/speed2design http://www.youtube.com/speed2design
