March 4, 2012, Business: Emerging Technologies in Business / Social Media (BUS 450)

1. Adaptive Sliding: Community Building Report
Project Execution
Week 1 - March 4-10
As the semester began we established a relationship with the Leukemia and Lymphoma society of
Canada (LLS) as a teammate had a contact within the LLS’ Team in Training (TNT) department, a
group that focuses on supporting and training athletes for marathons. TNT was excited to have us
on board and admitted that social media was a foreign environment to them. We had several
meetings with administrators in order to understand the brand’s mandate, personality and goals for
their social media campaign. TNT welcomed our advice, however our campaign initiative reached a
crossroads early on. Because LLS is a large organization, their regulations did not allow for people
who were not employed by LLS to contribute to representing their brand. As a result of these
restrictions, our team’s role was reduced to one of consulting since we were not able to gain direct
access to their platforms. While our relationship with TNT was good, we decided to search for
another avenue that would provide more autonomy and control.
Our next campaign plan was to work with Canada’s official sliding organization called Bobsleigh
Canada Skeleton (BCS) as suggested by resident sliding athlete and teammate, Tink. Because she
was already working with the organization and had access to their social media platforms, we
decided to create a campaign for them with the goal of promoting sliding sports. A few short days
after we had gotten approval from the executives of BCS, we received news that they had
changed their minds, and did not feel that BCS was prepared to launch their social media
presence. However a BCS board member named Alan Morash suggested that we help him with
his personal campaign promoting sliding sports to disabled athletes. Therefore, a new direction
was found and Adaptive Sliding became our focus.
Adaptive Sliding Canada is a program that has been developing for the last three years. When it
was started it did not have a brand identity, web presence or strategy for reaching out to the
Adaptive Sports community. However, it seemed that what they lacked in business skills, they
gained in incredible people and athletes who live to defy all the odds with their disability, and a
community that supports them to achieve their dreams. For our campaign, we wanted to make
sure that we matched our tone to the mentality of our potential followers.
As mentioned in one of our initial team meetings, the goal for Adaptive Sliding would be about
“building excitement, hearing stories of disabled adrenaline junkies and connecting them with the
right resources to get involved”. In order to do that, we wanted to build an online community that
supported and engaged Canadian sliding athletes and para-athletes. We aimed to provide this
community with relevant news, information, and resources regarding adaptive sliding sports. We
brainstormed a list of words that we would keep in mind when building the atmosphere of the
initiative: “fearless, driven, motivated, committed (both physically and mentally), athletic,
passionate”. The word fearless resonated with our team and we knew instantly that that was the
tone we wanted to create. Drawing inspiration from popular and cause-driven campaigns like Fuck
Cancer and Movember, we created #GETFEARLESS - a photo sharing initiative that would
showcase sliding athletes and enthusiasts’ pride, excitement, and fearlessness. We planned to ask
athletes and community members to use our team-made #GETFEARLESS sign in adrenalinepacked photos, and share them on our Facebook and Twitter pages. This phrase would colour the
nature of our content for the entire campaign, ensuring that everything we posted was in line with
that fearless tone.

2. Adaptive Sliding: Community Building Report
On March 4th, our new social media campaign officially took off after we created the Facebook
page and Twitter account, equipped with the custom logo designed by Tink. With Tink being the
most knowledgeable about adaptive sliding, we suggested that she could start building the initial
online community by following people on Twitter who would be interested in adaptive sliding
sports. The audience that was built were members of the National Bobsled, Luge, and Skeleton
team, sliding athletes, athletes from other sports, and adaptive sports organizations. We targeted
these people because we knew that they were users who were already involved in the sliding
community or would likely be interested in our message.
Originally our #GETFEARLESS photo initiative was a contest. We planned to give incentives such
as signed paraphernalia or free bobsleigh rides to the participants with the most creative photo
submissions. However, our sponsors fell through on the contest rewards so we had to change our
plan. We decided to continue with the photo submission initiative to get followers to interact within
our community, building upon the notion discussed previously in class, that participants often
contribute more without incentives, driven by intrinsic motivation.
The content and interactions for our first week were limited. Most fans/followers were friends,
family or class members. Therefore our first week was about establishing a brand identity and
communicating to our community what kind of content they could look to us for. A few initial
problems had arisen in the first week, one being that our team’s knowledge of adaptive sliding was
limited to Tink and Google. We received several posts from fans asking how they could get
involved or how to learn more about adaptive sliding, and sometimes the posts were directly
addressed to Tink. As a result the team could not effectively or efficiently give its followers the
information they wanted without relying on Tink. Because our schedule was set up so that each
team member was responsible for one or two days a week, posts addressed to a certain person
sometimes wouldn’t be viewed until the following week. This lack of organized communication
proved to be a consistent problem with our team.
Week 2 - March 11-17
Our second week online brought an onslaught of issues that stemmed from the obstacles we
experienced previously. Because of a misunderstanding of Twitter’s terms, a teammate added
1000+ tweeps on our Adaptive Sliding account on the night of March 8th. The intention was to
follow relevant people on the International Paralympic Committee, who would in turn follow
Adaptive Sliding back. However well-intentioned, this action was unplanned and not
communicated to the rest of the team, and caused our account to be suspended. We worked hard
to appeal the suspension, and quickly unfollowed all irrelevant tweeps until we were following a
manageable number, once we regained control a few days later. As a measure of good
communication and transparency, we made sure to mention on our Facebook page that we were
experiencing difficulties with Twitter, and that we would update the page once we were back on
track. We wanted to be clear with our community in case new followers looked for us on Twitter
but couldn’t find us, which would potentially lose us valuable interactions.
Although we were experiencing new difficulties in team management and execution, our
community was growing optimistically. On Twitter, we were continuing as planned to post relevant,
interesting, and supportive content to our followers, and were receiving many positive interactions.
We followed and interacted with relevant sports organizations, and gained around 40 new followers
in this period.

3. Adaptive Sliding: Community Building Report
On Facebook, we were learning a lot about what kind of content drew interest. Our daily posts of
articles, photos, and videos were not creating a lot of opportunity for interaction. As a result, the
views of certain posts were sometimes as low as 1. In order to counteract the low levels of
conversation, we pushed our #GETFEARLESS photo initiative into a higher gear. We created a sign
with our hashtag slogan, and made it available on Twitter and Facebook, explaining what followers
could do with it and encouraging them to get creative. That same day we posted our first example
submission of Tink holding the #getfearless sign while running on a Skeleton track. We wanted to
show our followers how they could support their community by getting fearless.
That photo spiked engagement with 84 unique views, 8 likes, and 2 comments. On the 16th we
had our first follower photo submissions by Francis Chiasson, who photoshopped our sign into two
photos and tagged Adaptive Sliding on Facebook. We were very excited about this, and shared
the photos on our own walls so that the page fans could see it and collect more ideas. In order to
keep this awesome conversation going, we thanked Francis, promoted him on Twitter with #FFs,
and tweeted with him frequently. Our first evangelist had emerged. Based on learnings in class, we
understood that tribe leaders such as Francis could spread your message and recruit other tribe
leaders. Therefore, we wanted to do everything possible to make him a big part of our community.
Week 3 - March 18-24
March 18 marked the mid-point in a decline in user engagement. Although each teammate was
posting relevant content on Facebook and engaging on Twitter, the liveliness and interaction
seemed to be steadily declining from the previous week’s record 79 views of a post on Facebook,
to a high of 5. However, the activity on Twitter during March 18-21 was booming. Our emerging
Twitter evangelists, Craig Drebit and Ken Childs, as well as new followers seemed engaged with
the content we were posting as they were responding to questions and retweeting links. Neither
Craig nor Ken knew Tink personally and found us through association with other organizations.
This was exciting, and we made sure to promote them as our Twitter community leaders.

4. Adaptive Sliding: Community Building Report
The activity on our platforms began to shoot upwards on the March 22 and continued to do so
until the end of the campaign. From March 22-24, more content was being posted each day, with
a high of 6 daily posts on March 22. This, in combination with the nature of the content, may have
contributed to a spike in engagement. The content, as opposed to the previous period included
articles and photos with known, named athletes and politicians. In the same period on Twitter, we
were taking advantage of all the conversations about this year’s London Olympics in order to
engage with like-minded tweeps. We made sure to monitor our feeds looking for athletes that were
tweeting about upcoming competitions or practices, and would reply to them with supportive
cheers. This would at least get an enthusiastic “thanks!” back to @AdaptiveSliding, and in most
cases those athletes would follow us back. This was a good and basic way to get our name out
into the Olympic and Paralympic communities.
Although the campaign seemed to be growing well, our team was still struggling to communicate
and coordinate schedules. On March 24, a doodle was sent out to finally and more formally
aggregate our team schedules to find multiple times for in-person and Skype meetings. This
proved to be a good way to organize our work and time because there were previously decided
times we could draw upon for meetings that would happen from then until the end of the term, as
opposed to communicating back and forth across multiple platforms each time we wanted to
meet.
Week 4 - March 25-31
Even though we were well into our project, our team still had trouble communicating with each
other and it was hard to find a time for a face-to-face meeting with everyone. Since an in-person
meeting seemed impossible to arrange, we agreed to meet via Skype on Sunday morning. During
this meeting, we confronted each other about our problems about the campaign and the ongoing
miscommunication between each other. We set clearer expectations and guidelines for one
another and most importantly, created a more narrow, clearer goal for our #GETFEARLESS
campaign. After realizing that time was running out, we sat down and started to brainstorm
different tactics to increase online community participation on Facebook and Twitter. With many
ideas being generated, we finally found consensus on a plan that incorporated an offline
component.

5. Adaptive Sliding: Community Building Report
We planned to print out the #GETFEARLESS sign on a large banner and find local athletes to pose
with the sign. We would then post the pictures on our social media platforms to stir excitement
about #GETFEARLESS and continue to encourage our users to submit photos as well. Instead of
finding athletes who were already involved with adaptive sliding, we decided to broaden our
audience and reach out to students who were unaware about the topic. We did this because we
did not want to limit our community. Instead of focusing solely on adaptive sliding athletes, we
broadened our content to include all sports, therefore expanding awareness about Adaptive
Sliding.
The first item in our action plan was to find local athletes and potential supporters for our
campaign. Fortunately, a teammate had a friend who played on a recreational hockey league and
even had a game scheduled on the following Monday. We agreed to meet at the Richmond
Olympic Oval on Monday at 8:00pm to gain support from the mighty Ice Wolves.
Throughout the week, our vision for our campaign began to form much clearly. We walked around
the SFU Burnaby campus to find people who we thought would be interested in our organization
and were able to reach out to many types of people. These included recreational staff members,
intramural sport players, and radio station hosts. All of them were more than willing to hold the sign
and be apart of the #GETFEARLESS campaign. It was fun spreading awareness about adaptive
sliding because it’s a topic that is not regularly discussed. We told them that we would be
uploading the picture on Facebook and Twitter, so if they wanted to see their famous face online,
they could just check out our platforms. We had a lot of queries about the campaign from new
faces, and were able to then explain and promote our cause.
Project Success
Week 1
After targeting key community members we were able to build a Facebook following of about 42
fans and a Twitter following of about 65 fans, bringing us almost halfway to our total campaign goal
within our first week, of 100 Facebook fans and 100 Twitter followers by March 31. Admittedly the
majority of our following at this time were people that each of us had contacted personally.
Because Tink is a member of the sliding community, her personal connections accounted for a
large majority of our following. Posting relevant and interesting content yielded some slow, but
positive results. The two weeks that followed generated a steady progression of growth. An
average of 2.5 users liked the Adaptive Sliding Canada page.
All of our initial goals were met, as our group was strict to adhere to our deadlines. However, our
plan to start the photo submission initiative (formerly named a contest) was very late. We asked

6. Adaptive Sliding: Community Building Report
Tink to get her sliding athlete friends to kickstart the #GETFEARLESS photos by March 6th. This
did not happen, due to a lack of communication and quite simply forgetting.
Week 2
This period’s goals were mainly content based. We had originally planned to designate Mondays,
Tuesdays, and Thursdays as #megamonday, #trainingtuesday, and #innovativethursday as themed
content days on Twitter and Facebook. Our group decided that this would be confusing in
conjunction with our overarching #GETFEARLESS tag, and decided to drop the themed plan in
order to focus on our main theme of fearlessness. Although we did not plan for a certain number of
#GETFEARLESS photo submissions, we received two from Francis Chiasson, a sliding enthusiast
at Whistler Bobsled and a personal connection of Tinks.
We surpassed our midway goals of 50 Twitter fans and 50 Facebook fans by March 16th. Attaining
our Facebook fan goal was mostly attributed to personal connections, but a few fans stemmed
purely from their own interest. After our Twitter suspension incident, we had added so many people
that at least 1/10 followed us back, resulting in our hitting the 100 followers very quickly. Although
an unplanned way to hit our mark, we were able to take advantage of this mishap to genuinely
engage with those followers to further grow our community.
Week 3
From March 18-21, posts on the Facebook page were minimal and did not coincide with our goal
of at least 3 daily posts. Although each team member was responsible for a designated day, we
did not establish a review system to ensure that that person was managing the platforms, which
contributed to a lack of posts and the ensuing decline in engagement. However, more content was
being posted after the 22nd, which helped the Facebook engagement to grow steadily. According
to Facebook insights, we had reached 510 people by March 24. Our goals surrounding the
#GETFEARLESS photo campaign were extremely vague, which resulted in a very loosely planned
initiative. There was hardly any action on this part of the campaign during the week, except for
some continued engagement with the previous week’s photo submissions by Francis Chiasson.
Week 4
Week 4 was the final week of the #getfearless campaign and was a week that had the most
improvement and growth. Communication between the internal team significantly improved as the
main method of communication was changed from using Facebook to having Skype meetings and
phone conversations. The inconsistencies of replies were reduced and a more open discussion
was created. Changing the original method of communication helped the team become successful
as each member now saw a much more clearer picture of individual responsibilities and
expectations, as well as, clearer guidelines for the campaign.
The goal of the campaign was also modified to push online interaction. Instead of focusing on
specific types of athletes that were involved with adaptive sports already, the audience was
broadened and allowed more people to support the campaign. By expanding the target audience,
it allowed the creation of a more realistic, measurable, and achievable goal. In the end, the support
from people who were not originally involved with adaptive sports was overwhelming. The
campaign became more defined and achieved measurable, tangible results. In the end, we
received an amazing 43 likes on Facebook within that one week.
Currently, we have a total of 118 Facebook likes and 169 followers on Twitter. This is definitely a
great accomplishment for our team. Without Tink’s connections and a supportive follower base,

7. Adaptive Sliding: Community Building Report
the online community would not have been as strong and interactive. Our evangelists and tribe
leaders are the ones who motivated us to keep going because their passion for the organization
definitely showed through their interactions on the different social media platforms.
Project Evaluation & Analytics
Week 1
Adaptive Sliding reached a substantial following within its first week. Our success with Facebook
Twitter can largely be attributed to Tink’s knowledge of the sliding community and her ability to
seek out users who would be most likely to care about Adaptive Slidings message. Also, Twitters
open network allowed for a much easier build in following as many users would simply ‘follow
back’ once we had connected with them. For, metrics we agreed to rely on Facebook insights and
Hootsuite analytics to quantitatively analyze our success. Our initial jump in viewership can be more
attributed to the team's proficiency with telling friends and family than anything else.
Week 2
This week we discovered a few trends in content. Empowering our users by giving them a tool in
which they could label and post their own photos with the #getfearless tag made our users
proactive. 13 engagements later, we decided it had been a smart move. We also noticed that the
number of views increased when we posted official Paralympic or race result news. This news was
highly read but not commented on. Perhaps this is due to cultural habits of reading non-interactive
news sources like newspapers. For example a posting regarding the Canadian National
Championships was read by 57 people but only commented on by 1 person. Regarding familiarity,
when posts involved familiar faces, for example the photo of Tink posing with her medal, the result
generated more comments than views, perhaps because users felt a more powerful connection to
the content.

8. Adaptive Sliding: Community Building Report
Top content: Week 2
9 likes, 2 comments | Reach: 61 | Engaged
users: 79 | Talking about this: 8 | Virality: 13.11%
When we posted content that mentioned Tink,
we would notice an increase of online interaction.
This was the case because a majority of our
Facebook fans are Tink’s connections. If a
familiar face is mentioned in the post, there a
higher chance for the person who is reading the
post to “Like” it and/or comment on the post.
Week 3
The Facebook content during this period
included photos, links, and a video. Drawing from
the previous week, an observation that can be
made regarding the nature of the content is that
user engagement was low when content wasn’t
personalized or related to a known athlete. While
our team may have thought that this was
interesting and relevant information, it didn’t
provide a lot of opportunity for discussion with
our community.
On Twitter, an interesting observation is that the same lego bobsleigh photo that was posted on
Facebook without much engagement, gained 7 clicks and 2 retweets on twitter. From this, we
could perhaps draw the conclusion that unpersonalized content is better received on Twitter, as the
format explicitly allows a very open sharing network and a less user-tailored approach to social
media. This format allowed for our two Twitter evangelists, Craig Debit and Ken Childs, to support
us without having any personal connections to our team. Both are supporters of sliding sports, and
emerged on Twitter to retweet and mention us almost everyday. Our best explanation for this is
simply their enthusiastic and supportive nature. Our content was always upbeat and we were
responsive to every single comment we received. We asked them what kind of updates they would
like to see more of, and followed accordingly to their responses in order to keep them engaged.

9. Adaptive Sliding: Community Building Report
Week 4
Top content: Week 4
9 participants| Reach: 191 | Engaged users:
14 | Talking about this: 10 | Virality: 5.24%
By introducing an interactive activity on
Facebook, our virality increased (5.24%) and
we were able to reach 191 users. We had a
total of 9 participants in this poll because
having a poll is a low-risk activity and very
easy to use. Also, by asking an engaging,
interesting, and opinionated question, we
were able to reach out to those who
supported their favourite sports.
On March 30, three pictures were uploaded: snowboarders on Seymour mountain, floor hockey
players at the SFU Burnaby gym and SFU recreation staff members at the SFU Burnaby campus.
The new Facebook fans included people who were in the pictures as well as their friends who
supported them. Also on March 30, the cover photo on the Facebook page was changed. The
photo was changed from a Skeleton athlete sliding down a racetrack to a more abstract picture of
an upside athlete. By changing the cover photo to a more general picture, more people could
relate to it and feel a part of the online community. Instead of displaying a photo of one particular
sport (i.e. Skeleton), posting a picture of a person who is ready for an adventure was more
captivating.
On March 31, another picture (the CJSF radio stations hosts) was added to the Facebook wall and
there was an additional 22 new likes. The growing amount of Facebook likes was astonishing and
provided motivation for the team to continue finding more people to hold the banner and be a part
of the campaign. The rapid growth did not end there as 9 new likes arrived on April 1. In just this
week, a total of 43 likes were acquired where most of the likes came from people who were either
in the uploaded pictures or friends and supporters of the faces in the photos.
Conclusions
The key points we want to emphasize, now at the end of our campaign, are as follows: 1) Defining
the scope of your activities and further defining weekly so as to keep a constantly focused
campaign, 2) Tailor your content to your community needs as much as possible, 3) Use analytics
early on to track progress, and modify strategy according to rising and falling levels of engagement,
4) Good communication is everything! Choose the modes of communication that best work for the
team and stick to them. Communicate often and efficiently. Our entire team learned so much
during this campaign. From the inner workings of team management to social media etiquette 101,
we were able to understand the power that social media holds in business.