Social Media Advertising & PR

Marketing, Social Media, Internet Marketing, Finance, Strategy

It was winter 2008.  Our client’s web property was experiencing explosive growth, already had nearly 100,000 registered users, and was finally ready to raise money.  But the credit crisis was in full swing, people feared the next great depression, and nobody was investing.  What to do?  Our client wanted to raise a protest – they wanted to parade down Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park daring venture capitalists to take a risk on them.

Crazy, yes.  A great publicity stunt, maybe.  But how to get their message noticed by the right people in the right way?  That was the problem our client brought to Summer Research.  Summer Research created a complete search engine optimization (SEO), social media, email marketing, and video public relations campaign.  We produced a series of short videos that our client could post on their website to build their founder’s persona as an innovative, quirky, and fun entrepreneur that people would want to watch and follow. 

We created a dialog between our client and their customers that previously didn’t exist.  Passionate customers called-in, told us how much they loved the service and how much they admired the founder. The result: traffic rocketed, his users responded with even more support, and some venture capitalists and angel investors gave him a call. 

During the project, people asked us "why pursue this when there's so much more to be done on the traditional marketing front" -- like surveying customers to understand what they liked about the site and what they didn't, building strategic relationships, and rewarding evangelists in our client’s community for spreading the word.  And the short answer is we went with the founder’s strengths -- and he just was not traditional.  That’s the difference in Summer Research – we find the way to make the pieces fit and we create opportunity where traditionalists saw none before.

Summer Research LLC is not registered as a broker or dealer with the SEC or NASD.  Summer Research LLC does not provide investment advice to our clients and you should consult investment, accounting, legal and other professional advisors prior to making any investment.