In the world of business technology there are three types of decision makers: people that love you, people that use your products but don’t love you, and people that prefer other products over yours. Our task? Engage the fence-sitters, and increase advocacy using more direct, targeted and one-on-one dialogue, from the inside. The challenge was getting inside. Why? IT decision makers don’t take their cues from advertising – they’re tuned in to bigger conversations, coming from real voices they respect. IT professionals want to hear from the people actually making, buying, and using technology. They inhabit an exclusive ecosystem of peer-to-peer conversations. We had to join their conversations and contribute to them. We had to augment them in real time.

In just 7 months we've become a valued resource for news and information in the tight-knit IT community, with our top bloggers averaging over 19,000 page views per post. With more than 300 blog posts published so far, we've become one of the most popular Microsoft blogs with over 1.4 million total page views, an unprecedented level of sustained audience growth in the publishing world. The IT audience is also interacting with our Microsoft experts through live chats, roundtable discussions, white papers and audiocasts, generating 8.8 million user engagements so far.

We call it Brand Journalism. Each day, our dedicated agency “news team” monitors everything being said about Microsoft Enterprise Software on the Internet. We then identify which conversations we’d like to be a part of and activate bloggers from within our ecosystem of 40+ contributors—product developers, analysts, and other enthusiasts—to speak on Microsoft’s behalf. In addition to joining conversations, we also host them—having conducted 60+ audio interviews to date, live chats on publisher sites, Twitter feeds like ExecTweets IT, and roundtable discussions with industry analysts…the list goes on. Instead of trying to get people to come to us, we have gone about publishing in places where crucial decision-making conversations happen, in real time. And instead of using our media buys for advertising, we’re using them to distribute content targeted at fence-sitters across the web.