In August 2013, Xbox challenged Ayzenberg to help energize Xbox's social channels, drive up levels of engagement in the brand before the launch of Xbox One. Specifically: Show Xbox’s passion for entertainment, igniting the community to discover and share theirs. The situation was simple. - Xbox had huge communities but low engagement. - Xbox had 100’s of products and activities being pushed out across multiple channels in a generic and standardized way - The tone of voice was marketing and sales heavy with little to no response to the community. - Internal perception of social was the opportunity “talk to" and not to “communicate with" - Engagement and positive sentiment was low Our Strategy focused on: - Reset expectations with all departments and partners about the role of social - Define process/standards and communication guidelines for content in all channels - Develop a personality that was fun, inviting, current, credible and lead with passion and not product - Create a sense of purpose for Xbox on social, as a whole and individually for each channel to allow us to add more value to the fans, the brand and the business. - Collaborate with internal brands and partners to create additional creative stories that are exclusive to the social channels - Set Xbox up for a successful launch of Xbox ONEWe started by retooling Xbox’s Facebook and Twitter personas, making the voice on those channels more personable, more open, and more engaging. We also focused on creating more original content—pieces that spoke to gaming culture and to gamers as individuals. We devised new and sometimes surprising ways to show our support of the gaming community. We expanded our reach to fans on Tumblr, Vine, and Instagram. And when people asked us about the Xbox One, we were direct and clear. And once again, the community began advocating in our favor. With the Xbox social channels primed and ready, we could finally turn our attention to the launch of Xbox One. The core of our launch was a dynamic, interactive web portal featuring a countdown clock, a constantly-updating social grid, and a stable of pre-written, shareable tweets. Xbox fans could tweet #XboxOne or #JumpAhead to see their words on the launch hub, and later, on an Xbox One billboard in New York's Times Square. On a more granular level, we developed launch programs specific to each of our three Xbox One launch titles: Dead Rising 3, Forza Motorsport 5, and Ryse: Son of Rome. The Xbox community was quick to respond, and timed interactions with brands like Oreo and YouTube exposed new communities to our launch message. We saw widespread adoption of our campaign hashtag: #JumpAhead. New creative on Facebook and Tumblr further spurred discussion around launch. Results By the time our launch concluded, we had driven over 3.9 billion social impressions and added 1.4 million fans, outperforming even our biggest competitor. All in all? A very successful Day One. The results were as follows… • 5.1M social engagements on Xbox’s channels from August – November • Facebook impressions increased 45% • The #jumpahead hashtag was recorded over 200k times • The congratulations Sony tweet received over 4.8 million views
www.xbox.com/launch www.facebook.com/xbox www.twitter.com/xbox www.youtube.com/xbox www.xbox.tumblr.com www.instagram.com/xbox
