Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan Wins Ragan’s 2014 Content Marketing Award for Best Blog
David Murray
| 2 min read
David Murray is the Manager of Social Media for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. He is responsible for overseeing all social media strategies and executions for BCBSM. David is the founder of Social Media Club Detroit, and is a national speaker on digital communications and social media best practices. He has also been featured in Wall Street Journal Online, and David Meerman Scott’s book, The New Rules of PR and Marketing.
As a social media team our day to day focus is on creating strong and meaningful content that helps our audience. For AHealthierMichigan.org, that means providing people information they can use to lead healthier active lifestyles. It appears we must be doing a good job, because A Healthier Michigan was recently awarded with the Ragan 2014 Content Marketing Award for Best Blog. This is the second best blog award A Healthier Michigan has received, and we couldn’t be happier. How is content the key to the success of our social media program? Our social media strategy does not revolve around the available channels like Facebook and Twitter. Instead, we start with identifying content we should be creating. By doing this we find that certain social channels organically identify themselves as appropriate communication vehicles for certain types of content. This is just one of the many reasons we are able to create over two thousand blog posts a year while reaching an average of 32k Michiganders every day.
What is the significance of the Ragan Award? Although the Ragan 2014 Content Marketing Awards are new, they are hosted by one the public relations industry’s leading trade journals, Ragan PR Daily. These awards recognize leaders in the industry that focus on customer-centered content, outstanding videos and capturing infographics. A Healthier Michigan was up against reputable blogs led by Exact Target, Arcadia University and ViSalus. What did we do to qualify for this award? To qualify for this award we had to share our research, strategy, execution and results. Some highlights include:
- Research: After conducting extensive research, we found that a health and wellness leader in Michigan had not yet been identified and, as the largest insurer in Michigan, we had the opportunity to emerge as the state’s go-to resource with aHealthierMichigan.org.
- Strategy: Create content based on strong analytics, develop contests and promotions to grow participation, use real-time data to develop future content. Use the #HealthyMe campaign to develop material that is relevant to our audience.
- Execution: The launch of #HealthyMe allowed us to provide members and potential members with tailored content based on interest. After one month the #HealthyMe campaign saw more than 5,000 sign-ups and over 10,000 goals were created to date.
- Results: A Healthier Michigan currently has a community of more than 650,000 unique visitors, and has grown 250 percent in one year.
Of course, none of the accolades we’ve experienced would be possible with you, our dedicated readers. Thank you for helping make AHealthierMichigan.org the go to resource for health and wellness in the state of Michigan. We’re just getting started.
