Winner: Kaiser Permanente - share.kaiserpermanente.org
In 2013, the PR team at Kaiser Permanente realized that hypercompetition in the healthcare field, along with the unknown impact of the Affordable Care Act, would make it harder for the company to reach and influence critical audiences. What’s more, Kaiser’s existing PR websites were neither optimized for growing mobile and social audiences, not designed to support so-called “brand journalism,” which has been growing in leaps and bounds. So the company decided to combine two external sites—the corporate news site and the corporate social responsibility site—and launch all the content on a mobile-friendly platform.
The idea was to create not just an online newsroom, but also a brand journalism property that would showcase the content for journalists and bloggers, of course, but other key stakeholders, such as employees, employees/physicians and health seekers.
Kaiser created navigation labels that conveyed actions and purpose, ranging from Thinking to Healthy to Taking Action, while the design emphasized SEO. Social-charting tools were placed on on every piece of content, as well. Another major social media tactic: changing the company’s main national Twitter handle to @kpshare, from @kpnewscenter.
The new website has yielded positive returns, with usage rates 60% higher than the two legacy sites combined and 22% of page views stemming from mobile devices (more than twice the percentage from the two previous sites). Meantime, the pages-per-visit rate is 90% higher than the legacy sites. In a sharp indication of how people view the site’s content, The ‘My Collector” function of the site, which allows users to compile content from the site and send through a single URL, was used 900 times in the first three months of the relaunch.
Honorable Mentions:
- Cisco Systems - The Network
- Johnson Controls - Building Efficiency Media Center
- Oncor - TheWire.Oncor.com
- Southern California Edison - Launching an Online Newsroom
- Wieck - NissanNews.com Goes Mobile