Title: Global online marketing-social media manager

Company: Hitachi Data Systems

Years in current job: 2

In the past 18 months, Sharon Crost has led three integrated social media campaigns for Hitachi Data Systems, each time learning something new that led to further improvements.

“All three campaigns have been extremely successful in terms of transitioning to more digital, more social and more online,” said Crost, global online marketing-social media manager at Hitachi.

The first social media campaign Crost led, “Quiz,” kicked off in October 2010. It was a lead-gen effort that guided users along a virtual treasure hunt, complete with online videos, a game and prizes.

“We learned so much about digital and how a b2b organization can get a lot of engagement with customers,” Crost said.

“Be a Star,” the second campaign she oversaw, was also a lead-gen effort. It featured customer case studies on a virtual globe hosted on a campaign microsite. Users could tweet about the stories, and Hitachi displayed the tweets as stars on a map in real time. The campaign was promoted on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

“With 'Be a Star,' we learned that Facebook ads worked well for us, and we never thought they would be effective for a company like [Hitachi Data Systems],” Crost said.

The effort resulted in more than 9,000 social media engagements (against an initial goal of 200) and 359 leads (against a goal of 300).

“Quest for Scalability,” The third campaign, launched in April and is designed to raise awareness of HDS Unified Storage, a new line of unified storage products.

“We took the adventure to the ice shelf. Administrators couldn't cool computers adequately in their large data centers, so they learned how cooling could be scaled without going to extremes,” Crost said.

“With the newest campaign, we learned that when you have something that people are engaging with and really like, there is an opportunity to reuse and recycle the campaign,” she said, noting that the campaign has been picked up in the Asia-Pacific region and adapted for different countries.

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