Power Shift Facebook Campaign

For Power Shift Canada ’09 I helped out on the Communications Team, headed up by Sofia Fortin. She was great, especially since she was very supportive of team members taking their own initiatives.

Leading up to the conference, one of our hightest priorities was ensuring that we reached our goal of registering 1000 participants. To this end, I decided to focus on our Facebook fan page. We already had a website, but the fan page was being used simply to get news out about the conference. It seems to me that this isn’t where the strength of the platform lies, though.

Over the past year, I’ve discovered that you can post news articles or website previews to my Wall. It’s actually really fun! When I read a great article, I want to share it with friends. With the functionality, I can show my friends what I’m reading, and they can start a discussion below the post.

I figured that’s the sort of thing we want to be doing with PSC’s fan page. We want to post content that fans will then want to post to their own Wall. Or even to their friends’ Walls.

So I first designed a print-ad style badge promoting PSC’s Via Rail discount. I figured that people excited about getting to Ottawa for Power Shift would be interested in posting this badge to their own and their friends’ Walls, to get word out about the affordability of travel to PSC.

Unfortunately, we can’t track how many people share something off of your own Wall. But the promo got a postive response from participants I met. Anyway, in the final ten days before Power Shift, I designed a series of new badges promoting a different aspect of the Conference—from keynote speakers, to workshops, to events, to priniples. I had hoped to build a level of buzz across hundreds of Walls, potentially reaching thousands of people.