Exactly one year ago today, Nuance, the company behind the T9 mobile phone dictionary, encouraged the Swedish public to suggest which words the next generation of dictionary should contain. Bite in Sweden was behind the concept and the implementation of an intensive two-week campaign that made use of both social media and traditional PR. Instead of talking to end customers, we chose to engage directly with end users in an online dialogue. The goal was to give the product brand a more positive image, to point out that the dictionary is updated continually and to collect popular words for the coming version. An interactive dialogue conducted directly with end users was initiated via different social media platforms. Through a social media widget and a campaign blog (www.t9bloggen.se) users were given the opportunity to send in their own suggestions for words and influence the next generation of the T9 dictionary. A final list was then produced from the most usable words received throughout the campaign.
T9 widget
Through an intensive two-week campaign, Nuance made an impact that by far surpassed expectations; the campaign took place a year ago 4 December 2008 and resulted in approximately 38,000 votes, 700 proposed words for the dictionary and about 70 mainstream articles including 4 national TV and radio slots. More than 45 Swedish bloggers talked about the T9 campaign and we were able to calculate, via our monitoring tool, that about 85 % of international online discussions about T9 in December 2008 took place in Sweden. Both the initiative with its voting process and the winning words were featured in blogs, various forums on the internet, and in traditional media at national and local levels. All these factors contributed to making T9 a positive and widespread topic of conversation. And the PR industry also nominated it as one of the year’s best B2B campaigns, with the entry ending up in recent Spinn Awards along with three other competitors in the same category.
Even though our entry did not win the gold medal, we are proud of our achievement as one of the top PR campaigns of the year and see it as proof that Bite’s skills in social media and traditional PR here in Stockholm are very strong . Crucially though, we must also give Nuance major kudos for agreeing to run such an innovative and bold campaign as the T9 dictionary campaign. We’re already brainstorming like mad to think of ways in which we can surpass our previous efforts with a new and even more successful campaign. We’ll be sure to let you know how we get on!
T9 banner
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