Human nature is to be curious. This principle set the stage for the following mixture of public relations and social experiments, which turned out to be greatly successful for all parties involved, including the public.
Industry leading IT association, ComPTIA commissioned the project. Their goal was to establish brand authority in cybersecurity, before the introduction of their new CyberLaunch program. The employed B2B agency’s plan was to create a social experiment. For a campaign that would bring public attention to cybersecurity, and provide measurable and valuable results for story telling.
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Since its beginning ComPTIA have issued nearly 2 million certificates for experts. For this reason their reputation is well-established in the professional scene. However, they aimed their new program, CyberLaunch, at everyday employees, who have little or no insight into IT. In addition, up until this point, they mainly focused on network and server technologies, not cybersecurity.
From these points two main objectives emerge. Firstly, one to address a new and less tech-savvy audience. Secondly, another to claim credibility in a new field.
As a solution, the agency created a program for National Cyber Security Awareness Month in October. A campaign, that had to be convincing for the tech community, and eye-opening for company decision makers. The project centred around a social experiment testing security practices in the workplace. It all started by distributing 200 USB sticks in public spaces in four major U.S. cities.
All of the devices contained the agency’s information, with instructions to contact the company. This made it possible to track how many USB sticks were used and where. The unsuspecting public people connected 17 percent of the pendrives to company machines. This willingness to insert unknown devices to workplace networks that could contain malicious software was alarming, even for non-professionals.
Tell it as a story
When the social experiment ended, the company complied all information into one convincing package. They sent it out to media outlets, cybersecurity experts and HR divisions in the form of a white paper complemented by infographics and an IT security habit survey of 1,200 employees. Finally, a four part video summarised the whole experiment.
The campaign was extremely successful, CompTIA became a household name for IT and HR professionals. They appeared in 115 media placements during October and November in The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, NBC and HR Magazine. Their stories generated 53 million impressions and 30,000 social media shares. Furthermore, the white paper had 2,430 direct downloads.
With the help of public relations and social experiments CompTIA created a unique and valuable campaign. They drew attention to a modern threat present in everyone’s life, by generating a compelling story about a niche topic.