The Canary Project leverages bloggers
The Canary Project is an effort by photographer Susannah Sayler and her team of researchers, writers and designers to gather images that evidence the ravaging effects of global warming in ways that bring them to the attention of the widest audience possible. Of course, part of reaching the widest audience possible is getting your website on the radars of folks who would be interested. When the Canary Project decided it needed to make a concerted effort to drive consumers to its site, it enlisted the natural chatter-talents of a targeted group of bloggers.
The first step was to gather a number of images, which were assembled and hosted on a compact, easily accessible online gallery. The website URL, press kit and mission statement were sent to 54 targeted blogs-- primarily blogs that dealt with news, the environment and art / photography.
Seven influential blogs, including Boing Boing, picked up the Canary Project's story -- which resulted in more than 1.5 million impressions. The news rapidly spread to 60 other blogs, which is part of the wonderful magic of WOM.
The Canary Project site
The 67 bloggers talking did the trick: traffic to the canary-project.org site increased 24,900 percent during the first week of outreach.
By putting the materials into the hands of the right bloggers -- ones that had been (ahem ... key concept ahead...) read and vetted in advance of sending the materials -- the project was able to generate a blogosphereic grapevine, spreading its message along and ultimately meeting its objective.
Credit Information
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Client: Ed Morris / The Canary Project
Agency: Hass MS&L
Budget: Pro-bono
Date of campaign: July 2006
Case Study URL: http://www.canary-project.org
Excerpted from WOMMA's Case Studies Library.
