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JESS3 Labs

The State of Wikipedia

Categories: Animation 

Earlier this year, JESS3 teamed up with Jimmy Wales and the Wikimedia Foundation to create a video commemorating Wikipedia's 10-year anniversary. Narrated by Jimmy Wales, the animated video detailed the rich history of the site, profiling the expansive community and explaining Wales' longterm vision for the encyclopedia. On January 17 we released both a YouTube version and Vimeo version of the video. JESS3's PR team immediately went to work on promoting the video to journalists, bloggers, and social media users. Using our micro-targeting techniques, we first focused on tech writers who had already written about the coming anniversary. Within our first few hours after the release, TechCrunch -- arguably one of the most influential blogs covering the tech sphere -- had embedded it and covered it Not long afterward, Mashable -- the most widely read social media blog -- had written about it as well. Combined, the TechCrunch and Mashable posts alone generated over 2,000 retweets and 500 Facebook shares. ReadWriteWeb also covered the video. After this initial success we began fanning out and pitching other communities. We successfully pitched dozens of design, advertising and animation blogs, getting hit after hit after hit. We then moved into the long tail, pitching smaller blogs and Wikipedia enthusiasts who had influential audiences. We secured too many hits to mention in this case study, but here are some examples: 1 2 3 4 5. We then moved to more general interest geek blogs. We secured a hit "on BoingBoing, one of the most popular independent blogs on the planet. We also got coverage on Laughing Squid and Neatorama. Within a few days the video had begun to spread outside the network we had pitched. It received hundreds of blog hits, thousands of retweets, and thousands of Facebook shares. The YouTube video received over 100,000 views and the Vimeo version received over 50,000 views. It was one of the most-viewed videos on YouTube that week and received dozens of YouTube traffic awards.