When we talk about a concept for strategic engagement our focus is on the entire overarching conceptual framework for the social media campaign. This framework helps us understand why we are doing this and to what ends, and it helps us see the potentials of engaging with others strategically in order to identify those connections with whom we might have mutual business interests.

In other words, strategic engagement means intentionally looking for conversations with people (both B2B and B2C) that will add value to your business and create a return on your investment – and it means identifying the best tools to start those conversations.

Our concept for strategic engagement was two-fold:
- Make the content easily accessible to the highest number of relevant people
- Use partners to reach the highest number of relevant people

Make the Content Easily Accessible
Before we produced the content we needed to define how people would access it. With our small budget and desire for wide exposure, social media was chosen as our channel.  Avid social media users ourselves, we knew that targeting the message would be worth the while. And we believed that aiming for quality over quantity would yield the best results and facilitate a feeling of discovery that so appeals to adventure travelers.

We decided to produce a dedicated microsite for the Rough.Real.Remote. journey where the vidoes and blog posts would be posted, but we did not anticipate that people would initially view the content on the website. Rather, we correctly assumed that people would discover the content through social media, and we would place it in front of those people who we thought would be most interested in it. They would visit the microsite when they were searching for more information.

Certainly, you can’t control social channels once your content is released, but you can control how and when it gets put out there, and that makes all the difference.

Our goal was to have people discover our videos over social media and then turn to the website for more information. We knew that if a person was interested in Greenland, once they viewed one video they would either find the previous episodes or tune in the following week for the next in the series.

After we had determined the shortest path to the content, we engaged our partners.  We had two sets of “partners” – our project partners Air Greenland and Visit Greenland and our ambassadors/influencers.

Project Partners
Our key partners shared our goals and were willing to work with us, and our combined voices took the message further. For example, Air Greenland, has left a link to the final episode, Settlement Songs, on their homepage since the end of the campaign, and as a result of the airline’s reach across the globe people from 70 different countries have clicked onto the landing page for that film.

Our partners also traced the Rough. Real. Remote. journey through their respective Facebook and Twitter feeds. Although the posts on each channel were not identical, they followed the same ideas and themes as outlined in the overarching content plan that we will describe in our next post [in-blog- link].

Therefore, we staggered them over the course of the day (GTE posted first for early morning in Europe, we posted for early morning in Greenland and Air Greenland posted for early morning in North America), and this timezone sensitive scheduling allowed us to reach broader audiences and remain active and engaged with users at different times of the day.

Ambassadors/ Influencers
Secondly, we identified ambassadors and influencers (we will post on this tactic in detail later on) who would be interested in our content.  These ambassadors and influencers were individuals as well as companies who we thought would gain social capital by spreading our message – they were either enthusiasts or supporters of Greenland, or they were innovative, early adopters in the adventure industry.

Bringing it All Together
Along with our partners, we made our content easily accessible to people and companies who were interested in our product. This broad orchestration of engagement helped us target people who considered our content valuable to them, because it was in line with their interests.  These people were more likely to explore our content and therefore help us reach our key goal of raising awareness of the region and inspiring people to one day visit Greenland.

As such the concept of strategic engagement was a matter of using a combination of our brand values and social media goals to set up a plan of action based on our interest in finding and engaging with oncoming traffic that we knew would turn up and show an interest in Greenland once we set in motion down the road we had planned for ourselves.