The primary objective of Lab Madness was to engage the Juniper Network social media community through a competition that thoroughly involves prolonged active participation. More than just liking social media posts, or re-Tweeting, we wanted the community to create, share, and give feedback on their own content. Secondly, we also wanted the topics conversations and creative content to revolve around the theme of networking technology. Thirdly, we wanted the engagement, fun, and competition to be associated with Juniper Networks throughout. All the participants are Juniper Networks customers, and are passionate about the technology, and the brand. They take any opportunity to be advocates for the brand.
The strategy was to engage the community with a subject matter that they were passionate about, and to take advantage of the concept and popularity of the NCAA college basketball tournament (March Madness). We then used the concept to engage our social media community in a fun way. We morphed the concept into a technology themed competition that required participants to create and submit their own content (photographs of their labs, and data centers).
How It Worked
The Lab Madness participants were required to submit a photo of their data centers, showing off their organizational style, cabling, neatness, and creative photographic skills. Each competitor's photo was paired up with another competitor in two sided bracketing system, much like a typical sports tournament. The community was asked to vote for their favorite entry per bracket. In the end, there was one last competitive pair remaining for the final. The final winner was awarded with the notoriety of a being the 2015 Lab Madness winner. Their winning photo was reshared with the community as the grand winner.
# of submissions: 27
# of participants: 16
# of engagements: 7,859
# blog views: 8,204
#labmadness mentions: 341
