Networking for 'Life’ at Charter

A “broadband for life” auction conducted by Charter Communications finished March 26 with a final bid of $71,500.

“We had some internal bets here, but no one was even in the realm of ($71,500),” said Barbara Hedges, senior vice president of consumer marketing at the St. Louis-based operator.

But running up a high bid wasn’t the goal of the campaign (its proceeds will be donated to Habitat for Humanity). The goal of the auction was to attract the attention of social-network users and the blogosphere, the executive said. In that, the campaign succeeded, attracting 500,000 unique users to the auction landing site and 1 million page views overall.

Charter got networkers’ attention with teaser banners at such sites as Facebook stating “What would you pay?” and linking to the landing page. The company also bought search terms that would lead people to the auction, and planted blog posts about the auction.

The campaign, designed by Jim Gallagher, online marketing director, created a direct response infrastructure that Charter, with the results of this campaign, can refine and repeat on subsequent campaigns, Hedges said.