An “extreme” social media strategy

What I find special about social media is that it’s a form of storytelling in the moment.  We can share our insight as something happens - whether it’s about a newsworthy event, a life milestone or a popular photo/video. And this is what, I believe, has contributed to the massive popularity of this online medium.

When putting together a social media content strategy for a company, the story’s theme often revolves around its products and/or services. What is so unique about working with our client Iridium – a global satellite communications company – is that their products can, at times, become part of the strategy. We get the opportunity to go beyond our terrestrial limits and plan a strategy for the people doing something extreme and adventurous.

The strategy is then framed by the tools we decide to use – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, etc – and we determine how to best tell the company’s story on these platforms in a way that’s appealing to their audience.

We recently worked with Iridium employee, Walt Everetts (Executive Director, Satellite Operations and SCS development), and his friend, Al Lepore, on how we could best tell their story of hiking Mount Everest – a lifelong goal for the two men. Iridium provided Walt & Al with an Iridium Extreme satellite phone for communications as they were out of terrestrial range.

We wanted these two men to be the primary drivers of this story for authenticity; therefore, we worked with Iridium to determine how we could tell this story on social media with only the phone. And here’s what we discovered:

• They could tweet from their Iridium Extreme via SMS
• They could create live podcasts during their trek

This framed our content strategy as we created a Twitter profile for Walt & Al to share their progress and an account on ipadio for followers to hear the excitement in their voices as they were living this dream.

To supplement these live updates from the mountain, Walt & Al sent us photos and videos from their training and during their expedition. To house all of these assets, we created a webpage on Iridium.com as their hub, so people could learn about Walt & Al and track their progress.

What could have been perceived as a challenge – telling a story on social media from a region without terrestrial coverage – became a strength for this campaign. The combination of an extreme expedition and Iridium technology allowed followers to stay up to date with Walt & Al as they shared their experience of reaching Everest Base Camp while in the moment.