LinkedIn Work Snapshot: Itanium Solutions Alliance
March 8th, 2010 by Jeff H.McBru’s James McIntyre, Brandon Wick and I were recently interviewed by Marketingprofs.com about our agency’s work using social media on behalf of business-to-business technology clients. As a result, some of the LinkedIn aspects of McBru’s social media projects for the Itanium Solutions Alliance are featured in Marketingprofs’s new report on Linkedin. If you’re not a “pro member” of the marketing industry site, you’ll need to purchase the LinkedIn report to learn everything, but here’s an excerpt to whet your appetite.
Centralized micro-targeting on a global scale makes it easier to locate well-qualified people.
Company/Marketer: Based in Portland, Ore., McClenahan Bruer Communications (McBru) provides integrated advertising and public relations
services for B2B technology companies.
Among other clients, McBru represents the Itanium Solutions Alliance, a global community of hardware, operating system, and application vendors dedicated to accelerating the adoption and ongoing development of solutions based on Intel’s Itanium microprocessors.
Challenge: Every year, the Itanium Solutions Alliance holds its Innovation Awards Celebration, an event in which ground-breaking work and humanitarian achievements developed using Itanium-based solutions are recognized.
For the Alliance’s third awards event, which was in September 2009, McBru was charged with cultivating the best submissions and attendance it could find. One might think contestants would quickly line up for a chance to receive industry acclaim and international publicity, but as McBru found, these people can be difficult to pin down. In addition to being based all around the globe, they tend to be extremely busy and dedicated to their work.
“Although winners and finalists receive attractive prizes, it’s always a challenge to get busy IT professionals to take the time required to develop a serious and detailed submission,” says James McIntyre, McBru’s senior communications counsel. “What’s more, to manifest the gala event we were planning, 200 attendees were required.”
Back in 2008, the company had tried targeting a purchased list of IT executive contacts and had some success in attracting applicants and attendees. On the day of the event, however, it became clear that the market reached was not of the caliber expected.
McBru needed to find an alternate means to engage high-performing IT executives for the 2009 event.
Solution: In March 2009, Brandon Wick, communications counsel at McBru and the team member who handles social media activities for the Alliance account, began a discussion in the OpenVMS group on Linkedin. The post read:
“Anyone using OpenVMS on Itanium? If so, we’d like to hear about it. There are many ways to get publicity for your work, including blogs, newsletters, and an Innovation Awards program.”
The firm wondered whether this group would accept and openly communicate with someone not from their circles, especially because Wick’s title and information were clearly visible next to the post. But the company was pleased to find that the answer was yes. The LinkedIn post generated 19 comments, led to five substantial conversations about Itanium usage, and paved the way to agency relationships with three OpenVMS group members.
“We saw positive results right off the bat,” says Wick. He further used the exercise to gain a better understanding of group interactions and member interests. He then used that insight to launch into one-on-one conversations with respondents and answer their questions.
To build on the success of this approach, Wick used a keyword search to identify 25 groups relevant to Itanium where he could replicate this effort.
As the awards date neared, the McBru team shifted their efforts to audience acquisition to assure a “critical mass” of qualified people at the event. They read up on group member profiles and reached out to those matching the core demographic. The team also searched through members’ contacts for other interesting parties and opened the invitation to industry executives located in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the event would take place. Invitations were presented via one-to-one messaging, rather than a mass blast, so that they were more personal and authentic.
Results: The Alliance received 35% more submissions for 2009 than it did in 2008. It also received more submissions from around the world than it had in previous years, thanks to LinkedIn.
The McBru team agreed that, particularly relative to the investment of time and resources, LinkedIn delivered “outsized results.” Plus, 17.4% of all submissions received could be tracked back to these efforts, making LinkedIn the second most productive source for the year. Three of the 2009 Award finalists came through LinkedIn.
“It enabled us to field a critical mass of qualified submissions in each of the four Awards categories,” says Wick, noting exceptional success with the
“Humanitarian” category, which is traditionally the most challenging to fill.
In addition, McBru was able to attract higher-quality attendees to the event through LinkedIn at a much lower cost than it had incurred using purchased lists. Moreover, many connections that the team made during this campaign have evolved into mutual ongoing relationships, with several contacts contributing to whitepaper development and other initiatives.
Business Lessons Learned
• Use LinkedIn groups to reach a centralized network of internationally
based contacts.
• Identify groups based on your specific goals, and don’t simply assume
the largest groups are best. McBru says some of its best responses
came from smaller targeted groups and that often the members of
those groups were more willing to help out.
• Take the time to listen to what’s happening within the group
Take the time to listen to what’s happening within the group and
figure out what they deem relevant before you begin posting.
• Use personal one-to-one communications for extending invitations
that are credible and apt to be received well.
That got me to thinking: with the rapid pace in technology markets, how many of us are too busy just doing to enjoy the luxury of thinking?


If you’re working with social media, you’re probably on Twitter, which means you’ve been hearing a lot about Lists.
Where was social media marketing when virtual events really needed it?
What came first the shortened URL or the tweet? That is a question I ask myself. Was there a need for a URL shortener before we had character limitations? I don’t know the answer, but I do know that there are many services that have popped up to meet this shortening demand. From