As the construction market is slowing down globally, KONE has increasingly shifted their focus from new equipment business towards services. Digitalization is changing elevator and escalator maintenance and many of KONE’s competitors has launched new services within this area of business. KONE wanted to launch their IoT-service in a way that clearly stands out and create a competitive edge.

The new 24/7 Connected Services combines KONE equipment with IBM’s Watson-platform, which analyses escalator activity in real-time, every second of every day. Continuous monitoring helps KONE make timely service and maintenance procedures, which prevents unnecessary breakage.

In 2017 KONE launched their connected services for elevators, under the title Machine Conversations, to great success. In 2018 it was time for escalators to become connected.

How do you market something that is innovative, but essentially boring? Our solution was to bring something fresh, captivating and news worthy to the method of storytelling itself.

Escalators are boring by design, even to the target groups. They only get noticed if they break down. This means that we make them even more uneventful by monitoring them in order to keep them running without interruption.

How do you market something that is innovative, but essentially boring? Our solution was to bring something fresh, captivating and news worthy to the method of storytelling itself.

The use of Twitter as a platform for our communicational concept allowed us to interact with our audience in a completely new way. To simplify a fairly technical service and make it easily approachable and engaging, we used the framework and limitations of Twitter to our advantage and created a campaign revealing the thoughts of an escalator.

As we have access to the inner thoughts of a London escalator, why not translate them into human tweets and share them with the world?

Reaching the right target media would be crucial, so we targeted the world’s leading outlets in the financial, technology and industry specific sectors.

The PR plan was optimized to help the story spread organically, including seeding to carefully selected news outlets, discussion boards, blogs and social media.

As hundreds of millions of random thoughts are tweeted every day, we wanted to answer the question: What would an escalator say to the world, if it had 140 characters to express itself?

We translated 3572 data signals into engaging content and let the world follow the inner thoughts of an unnamed London escalator.

The public campaign elements were supported with a Press Kit including a press release, making of-video and still images which could all be downloaded from the campaign site.

We wanted to make the complicated AI and IoT-based service concrete and understandable to the wider audience. By interpreting the data provided to the cloud by the escalator, and translating it into readable messages, we created the world’s first tweeting escalator.

Through real-time, automated tweets, we gave people a rare glimpse into the daily activities, condition, performance and surroundings of an unnamed London escalator.

As data is the driving force behind the product itself, we also made data the core of our concept.

Aside from Twitter, the escalator could also be followed on the campaign site: machineconversations.kone.com/escalators.

We also expanded the story through a demonstrative product video.

The public campaign elements were supported with a Press Kit including a press release, making of-video and still images which could all be downloaded from the campaign site.

The campaign on Twitter ran from February 28th, 2018 to March 20th, 2018.

With the campaign, our goal was to a) raise awareness around KONE’s Connected Services globally, b) communicate that escalators are now included in the service offering, and c) strengthen KONE’s position as an innovation leader.

Results:

? 1345 followers on Twitter

? 620,828 Twitter impressions

? 42.8M potential audience reach

? 3.6M Social Media contacts

? 19,884 website visits (exceeded the set goal levels, low: 6000, average: 12.500, high: 17.200)

? Active dialog between CEO’s on Twitter between Henrik Ehrnrooth (KONE) and Marc Benihoff (Salesforce).