Bite works with HP to drive awareness around the company’s “Changing the Energy Equation” campaign – a thought leadership platform that raises awareness around HP’s efforts to create more sustainable ecosystems for businesses and communities. A proof point to the sustainable IT research driven through HP Labs, the company’s central research arm, HP presented a new research paper at the ASME International Conference on Energy Sustainability in May 2010, showing how the manure output of cows and the heat output of data centers can be combined to create an economically and environmentally sustainable operation.
Leveraging the HP Labs research paper, Bite created a multi-faceted international communications strategy to position HP as a thought leader and innovator in sustainable IT, translating the highly technical research into concepts that every-day consumers could relate to – cow farms and computers. Bite worked with HP researchers to develop a concise storyline explaining the human interest element behind the research, and then conducted select advance interviews with high level mainstream and technology publications in the U.S., EMEA and APJ regions, including BBC News, CNET, Newsweek, New York Times, The Economist, and The Sunday Times.
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To supplement these meetings, Bite’s design team created a set of creative images to visually depict the symbiotic relationship between dairy farms and the IT ecosystem. Bite then worked with HP to create a social media release incorporating links to these images, a video interview of the Labs Director, an HP.com story, and the full research paper, to tell the story in a visual and content-rich manner.
A broader media push followed the release, generating more than 135 articles worldwide including a feature story on the front page of the New York Times Business Day section that included our graphic. Coverage spanned major news, technology and blog outlets, many of which republished HP’s images and video content. Following our promotion on the HP Labs Twitter handle, the story received more than 1000 Tweets and 1,600 YouTube views.
Coverage was overwhelmingly positive, highlighting HP’s forward-thinking approach to creating more sustainable data centers. The PR push also resulted in business development inquiries from large investment firms and other companies interested in partnering with HP on implementing the research concept into real-world systems.