Driving Event Awareness and Attendance with Multi-Pronged Approach

Every summer for the past six years, Ping Identity brings together the brightest minds in the identity industry at the Cloud Identity Summit (CIS), the industry leading event for the “Identerati” community. As we gear up for the 2015 event taking place June 8 to 11, we did some reflecting on the campaign we executed in 2014.
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Last year, Ping tasked Mission North with driving higher awareness, participation and top-tier media coverage. We knew a multi-faceted campaign would be crucial to positioning Ping as a leader in the space, promoting new product announcements, generating buzz about CIS and deepening relationships with top-tier reporters. We couldn’t rely on content or reporter attendance alone — it had to be a power combination.

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Three months before the conference, we hosted an hour-long Twitter discussion about managing mobile security, multi-factor authentication and the future of mobile security. Participants, including reporters from TechCrunch and eWeek and analysts from Forrester, contributed a total of 202 tweets. Closer to the event, Dana Gardner promoted CIS and PingCon (Ping’s corresponding user event) in a three-part podcast that discussed how Ping’s leadership is driving the industry forward.

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At the conference, Ping announced three new product updates. We created one “umbrella” release featuring Ping’s vision for identity security in a post-password era, and explained how these updates fit into overall business goals and the product roadmap.

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The multi-faceted campaign increased conference attendees by 100 percent from the previous year and resulted in more than 4,239 mentions on Twitter, blogs, news outlets and forums in the first week of the conference. We secured 10 feature stories in publications including Forbes, InfoWorld, Network World and Denver Business Journal. The coverage resulted in Ping growing its share of voice to outpace its competitors that week. Two months later, positive momentum from the conference contributed to significant funding led by global investment firm KKR.