1. Dallas Convention & Visitor’s Bureau

2.  Goal: Get people talking about Super Bowl in Dallas.  The idea: Send a “Mystery Man” to cities sending NFL teams to the Super Bowl. The first person in each city to tell the mystery man the secret phrase wins tickets to the game, travel, accommodations, and other goodies.

3.  Integrated Elements: Pitched idea to “exclusive travel bloggers” in each city to share clues about the location of the mystery man.  Selected five bloggers in Green Bay  Selected four bloggers in Pittsburgh  Chose ONLY bloggers with strong social media presence and engaged readership.

4.  Smart Elements: Clues provided by bloggers tied to tourism in Dallas.  Printed clues on photos that were easy to share via Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and the exclusive blogs.  Secret password revealed by liking the Visit Dallas Facebook page.  Created #hashtags to facilitate (and monitor) conversations about the contest.

5.  Smart Planning, Immediate Action: Prepared for four cities, implemented plan as soon as the last playoff game concluded. By noon Monday, the bloggers announced the contest.  Measureable Aspects: When the contest tab was activated on the Facebook, their page had 600 fans. Within four days, that number swelled to 3,000+. By Friday, the topic was trending on Twitter in both Pittsburgh and Green Bay.

7.  Tradition Media Chimed In: Within a week, traditional outlets were talking about the campaign on air.

8.  People Talked: People were talking about the campaign to one another in person, too!

9.  Coverage of Winners: In both cities, winners were invited to be guests on news and radio shows. Bloggers, websites, and others were talking about the contest and its winners.  The Green Bay winners lived in a homeless shelter. CNN picked up their story and eventually outlets from as far away as Australia aired the story.

10. From the agency’s website:  We definitely succeeded in getting people talking about Dallas. We proved that when you run a social media campaign within passionate communities, you don’t need a big media budget.  We grew the Visit Dallas fan page by10,000 fans in three days. The fan page received 100,000 page views and generated 500,000 feed impressions.  We’re most proud of the incredible positive reaction from the people in Green Bay and Pittsburgh. We received many messages from individuals telling Dallas how much they enjoyed the weekend.

11.  Was the goal of the campaign simply to increase “likes,” or the number of friends? So what? How to qualify friends?  So people were talking. So what? How does this equate to increase visitors?  After the contest, then what? How to keep these new friends and followers engaged?