August 26, 2013 by Paolo Cortez

Case Study: Content is King but Timing is Everything

On August 15, 2012, we conducted a content marketing campaign for CBS News using a video clip that dated back to 2005. Even though the video we promoted was seven years old, our effort produced great visibility on a number of social sites and the content ultimately went viral across the web.

The campaign reached the number one spot in Reddit’s Today I Learned section and later reached the front page of Reddit as a whole. With more than 1.4k upvotes, it was one of the most popular pages on the web for that day, according to Alexa.com.

Campaign Goal

On Aug. 14, 2012, Stan Lee conducted an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit: The main goal of our campaign was to promote archived content that would take advantage of Stan Lee’s AMA. The timing was impeccable. So, we found the perfect subreddit for archived content: r/todayilearned.

Approach Used

After finding the ideal content for our campaign, we discussed which social sites would allow for the best engagement, along with what kind of approach we should take as far as the title, description and categories chosen for the campaign.

We concentrated on Reddit because of the timing. It immediately started picking up traction. http://reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/y9eok/til_that_stan_lee_who_worked_for_marvel_as_a/

Social Communities and Platforms Engaged