The year 2011 ended as the most violent year in the history of Puerto Rico, registering 1,136 murders at a rate of 30.5 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, the highest on the island since 1940. Despite any efforts the government had taken, Puerto Rico’s young adults were drawn to the violence and unfazed by authority.

The Puerto Rico government would have to try a more personal and relevant approach to get through to the youth they were losing. We suggested that if the voices of reason weren’t getting through, perhaps the voices of experience would. Our idea was one that had never been done before, anywhere: enable a real-time dialogue between convicted criminals and free citizens.

We created the first-ever Twitter-lead campaign as a crime deterrent: FOLLOW2UNFOLLOW.

We convinced the Puerto Rican authorities to give Internet access to three inmates so they could set up Twitter accounts and share how miserable prison really is with everyday people on the outside.

We launched the campaign with a press conference, and within just a few days, 'FOLLOW2UNFOLLOW' was the main topic of conversation in the news, in tweets and on blogs—in Puerto Rico, and across the world.

A target-relevant multimedia campaign filled out the delivery of the FOLLOW2UNFOLLOW message across paid, owned and earned platforms.

We leveraged our relationship with top media vendors, and they agreed to donate their advertising inventory and space for the project. With a traditional media investment of $0, we got over $1.1m in earned media, with an unprecedented reach of over 90% and 44% awareness.

Our inmates’ Twitter accounts got thousands of followers on the week after the launch, and in only two months they attracted 23% of Puerto Rico’s Twitter population. Ultimately, 54% of Puerto Rico’s young adults said they would reconsider their actions to avoid a life of crime.

Despite numerous advertising campaigns attempting to discourage criminal behaviour, nothing had worked. Dead in the centre of this domestic warfare were Puerto Rico’s young adults who, like young adults everywhere, were resistant to the voices of authority. The Puerto Rico government would have to try a more personal and relevant approach to get through to the youth they were losing. We turned to social media, which, like social media everywhere, is the leading communication channel among young adults. But we couldn’t simply interject more government warnings into this arena, which would be equally dismissed; we had to find a way to influence our target on their own terms. Because the advantage of social media is one-on-one connection.