I work for a publicly traded, B2B IT Networking Solutions company. That sentence has a few words that aren’t usually associated with “fun.”
A few weeks ago, our EVP of WW Sales, Services, and Channels, Bob Gault, was notified that he would once again be a participant in CRN’s Channel Madness. As you can guess by the title, it’s a March Madness-type popularity contest. An email went out to a few of us saying we should vote for Bob.
I’ve worked with Bob on a few projects in the past, so I thought he might like to go a little outside of our normal promotional efforts. Our creative team was drowning in work that week, but I decided to take a few minutes and create something that might get people fired up for the competition.
Believe it or not, that’s not actually Bob. I just Photoshopped his head on there (crazy, I know). It was so ridiculous that I had to do it. And I purposely threw the proportions off to add even more humor to the image. I added some Extreme purple and we were good to go.
When I sent the image around for approval, it was met with a huge response, so we started promoting it on social media and across the company.
Bob went on to win the first round of voting.
But now there was pressure. People were expecting another funny image. So another was created.
And he won again.
And again! Now these images were becoming an incentive. People within the company were voting just because we were having a lot of fun with it.
My personal goal was to get more and more ridiculous as the contest went along.
and another from that round …
(the Extreme tattoo was Tabi Jones’ idea)
Though Bob didn’t win it all, everyone got a kick out of the campaign.
After he was robbed … I mean after he lost … this image was sent out to internal employees.
This whole campaign was a good example of using humor to have some fun. It’s a silly popularity contest, but it enabled the company to rally around one of our own. And it helped create some buzz within the industry.
After the first round wrap-up, CRN actually attributed Bob’s success to “a creative social media campaign.” Our CEO gave me a shout-out in an all-hands meeting to thank me for working on these and getting people engaged.
Finally, I want to thank Bob. How many top salespeople in our industry would be willing to poke a little fun at themselves? I’m glad I get to work with people who have a good sense of humor and allowed us to have a little fun in an industry that isn’t well known for humor.
