I’m also going to be diving back into Point Oh! a little more diligently in the coming months.  A hectic work and travel schedule has put the blog on the backburner for a while now but I’m hoping that will all change soon.

As always, I love to discuss new projects and opportunities so don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Some of the most elite athletes in the world, ranging from baseball players to golfers to cyclists to runners, use Nike Vision eyewear to help them reach the pinnacle of their sports.  After seeing frames on elite athletes like Alex Rodriquez and Paula Radcliffe, as you might imagine, many consumers want to know more about high performance eyewear and how it can help them.  The new Nike Vision Web site not only offers stakeholders an unprecedented amount of depth into the products but also makes selecting eyewear into a fun and informative process.  Features like the Lens Simulator also served to highlight some of unique benefits of Nike eyewear by showing the affects of different performance lenses in a variety of scenarios so you don’t have to guess at what a lens will actually do.  The result is a peerless Web site that has set a new standard for user experience in the athletic eyewear category.

Agency: Hill & Knowlton
Services: Digital and social media engagement strategy
Site: unitedagainstmalaria.org

What if a disease that kills more than one million people each year could be cured with a $10 mosquito net?  That was the very simple proposition that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and their partners made in the United Against Malaria campaign that launched in 2010 to leverage the excitement around the World Cup in South Africa.  However, gaining share of voice in an event like the World Cup can be extremely challenging without the right channel strategy.  In an effort to leverage social media and increase word-of-mouth on a global scale, we created a Facebook game where participants could pass the ball between each other in order to drive up donations from a host of sponsors.  The campaign resulted in thousands of mosquito nets being purchased for countries in need and an unprecedented amount of visibility for a campaign that had to compete against monumental media buys and sponsorships.

So there are some big changes on the horizon but a lot to look forward to.

When Pringles redesigned the container of their delicious crisps, they needed a new way to tell the world about their packaging innovation.  I led a team that integrated an interactive social media component into the campaign’s banner push that asked Pringles fans to utilize their preferred social networks to tell the world how they like to eat Pringles for a chance to win a trip to the Food Network Festival in New York.  An announcement that would normally fall under the radar became a popular topic of conversation across Facebook and Twitter and was sustained through the winner’s trip to the event in New York.

In the Spring of 2009, Yahoo! launched one of the largest brand campaigns of the year in the form of Ogilvy and Mather’s “You!”  An enormous brand launch generates an enormous amount of attention from the media so I helped Yahoo! build a digital press kit that would offer different tiers of access for the media and be updated dynamically with the coverage of the event.  The site had 18,000 visitors within the first hour of the announcement and proved to be a valuable resource in scaling to the demand of the media in the weeks following the announcement.

The title of my session last Tuesday was “Digital Tsunami: Breaking News at Breckneck Speeds” and you can find more information about it here if you want to attend (there’s even a Sched* for it).  You can even track the conversations happening online about it using#bneck on Twitter.

In a nutshell, the panel was about how the rise of social media and the increase in the overall speed of the newscycle affects brands, the media and us as a culture.  We discussed whether it was an opportunity or a liability for brands to communicate with their stakeholders in the face of a crisis.  We talked about its effect on traditional journalism.  We even assessed whether it was a genuine utility or if it only serve to drives us further apart from each other and the real meaning of the issues at hand.

As with all good panel discussions, there were multiple perspectives from all sides of the spectrum.  I was lucky enough to have members of my panel from GM to talk about the implications for a multi-billion dollar brand, NPR to discuss how the media is adapting and a professor from University of Miami to talk about some of the larger cultural and humanitarian issues at play.

All in all, it was a great way to conclude a great week at SXSW.  If you’re getting tired of hearing the same old echochamber stories and want to spend a week where you can really learn what is happening now in our space, I highly recommend budgeting some time and headed down to Austin.

An unfathomable amount of the world’s global travel is booked through Travelport technology and there is no other company in the world that their unique perspective on what makes the world travel.  The company had wanted to share their data for a long time but there was no media that was perfect for the level of detail that they wanted to go into so they created their own destination.  The Passport Blog became the preferred platform for the company’s executives to talk about the issues that are shaping the industry and showcase some of the most compelling proprietary data.  In addition to building out the platform, we also sat down with key execs, including the CEO, and did blog training as well as a detailed content strategy.