US Army: Faces of Strength and Year of the NCO
The US Army contracted a virtual team of experts to develop the Faces of Strength campaign, and sister initiative, the Year of the Noncommissioned Officer. The Faces of Strength campaign is designed to bring to life compelling stories of enlisted Army heroes, civilians who have performed a great duty to support the Army, and other individuals who make the Army life possible. As part of the larger branding campaign led by Belmont, Inc., Back Pocket Media created the social media strategy and implemented its tactics across the six-month pilot program.
The social media strategic plan involved harnessing the Army's existing network of advocates and connecting them online to generate a buzz that would pull in additional civilian interest. We selected popular and flexible social media tools to create the online network and generate residual exposure for the campaign, with the intent of making them deeper resources and expanding to other aggregators for phase two of the campaign. At the core of the online campaign is the microsite, www.army.mil/facesofstrength, created by Brightline Media. We coordinated with their team to create hooks into the Facebook Fan Page, YouTube Channel, and Flickr Collections to drive visitors to participate through ranking the assets, commenting, and passing the stories to friends. For the pilot program, we are posting the initial 12 professionally-produced stories to the Faces of Strength YouTube Channel along with other story-telling Army videos. The professional headshots of the individuals are posted to the Flickr Collection along with related images from the AUSA Convention where the campaign was launched, and the brand assets are made available for public use.
The Facebook Fan Page is designed to collect supporters who would be interested in nominating someone they know, learning about upcoming events, and reading stories from army.mil. The Army's New Media Team will be creating fresh content for the page as they are authorized Army spokespeople. We are working with the Army's existing network of Public Affairs Officers (PAOs) and Communications Officers to reach out to their contacts for online discussion support and to nominate more stories. Knowing that Army bases and divisions can be competitive, we are developing a Facebook Application that will evaluate the online support (number of fans, connections, and activity) of each location and keep a running scorecard of which base is creating the most buzz. As with most social media the destinations are slowly developing a following through passive exposure through the popular aggregators.
To enable the PAOs and motivated individuals to generate their own Faces of Strength-branded nominations, we developed an application within the microsite that allows visitors to upload their own nominee's photograph at any size and create a branded set of high-resolution PDFs for marketing their story and the campaign locally. The application is designed for a novice to use and results in small and large posters, as well as postcards for mailings. Each PAO's office likes to send out customized materials, but are often short on design resources, so this tool helps them help us. All of the information is collected in a database and administered securely online so the campaign administrators can contact selected nominators to create new professional video stories.
The Year of the Noncommissioned Officer website dovetails with the Faces of Strength campaign in the storytelling aspect, and shares many of the same resources. These stories focus solely on the NCO subset of the Army and is under a separate marketing campaign initiative. We supported Belmont, Inc., in developing this site to launch it under a short deadline, and we are working on the social media strategy on an ongoing basis.
