Andy Pawlowski, Global Digital Lead – Nike Basketball
Twitter @pawlow34 

Campus Roar

Involver collaborated with sports innovator Nike to pioneer a groundbreaking campaign integrating web services with Facebook to enable college sports fans to share content via web site, Facebook and their own campus fan pages.

To increase engagement and visibility, Nike Basketball was looking to create an ongoing campaign to amplify fan interaction on Facebook, build brand affiliation, and provide new avenues for supporters to celebrate and share big game excitement.

Involver worked with Nike Basketball to create a custom user-generated contest app that enables fans of 150 college teams to submit the words to a “campus roar” on Facebook, Nike.com, or one of 12 selected school brand pages (e.g. University of Washington Facebook page).

As speed of engagement is a crucial factor in getting users to take actions, Involver added a number of features, including type-ahead functionality, to make it easier for users to affiliate with participating Nike-sponsored schools.

The most successful social marketing campaigns focus on driving content into the stream, where the largest numbers of interactions take place. By enabling supporters to customize their Facebook profile picture with their team colors, Nike created a trigger for news feed content, as updates are automatically shared with users’ communities.

Finally, one of the biggest challenges facing brands is how to take advantage of the viral capabilities of social media while still maintaining unity across multiple platforms. Involver teamed up with Nike to create a system to fluidly link content from three different portals into a seamless user-experience.
 

Campaign Performance

Campus Roar had the fastest Facebook interaction of any campaign on NikeBasketball.com. Across the 4-month campaign, Nike Basketball also achieved a 24% social participation rate; meaning 24% of consumers who came to Campus Roar liked, shared, or commented on the content. The Nike Basketball Facebook page has grown to over 2.5 million fans.

“Involver helped us build a campaign to foster a high level of interaction in the place college basketball fans go to share their passion online, which is Facebook. They offered a huge amount of experience with the constant changes on Facebook and enabled us to implement a system to allow fans to support their schools through Nike.”
- Andy Pawlowski, Global Digital Basketball Lead, Nike

“By building it socially inside of Facebook, we ended up driving 50% more traffic to NikeBasketball.com than through campaigns built previously on the dot-com site.”
- Matt Brenner, North America Digital Basketball Lead, Nike