ARIN

Objectives

In 1981 Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) was created for an experiment called the Internet as the principal means of communication for relaying information on the web. That experiment soon grew into something that no one expected. Every device that connects to the Internet (laptops, mobile phones, printers, etc) must have an IP address, and the rapid growth of the Internet now calls for more IP addresses than IPv4 can manage. In an effort to meet this demand, IPv6 was developed. A successful implementation of IPv6 addresses is imperative for the Internet to continue to evolve and grow. The entire community surrounding the Internet needed to be educated, on a technical and relatively esoteric topic, and quickly.

ARIN enlisted LEWIS PR to create a campaign to highlight the IPv4 address depletion issue. Educating key influencers about its details well in advance of the depletion date was a key priority, to avoid misconceptions once urgency was at hand. As Forbes’ David Carr would ultimately write about the campaign, “The End of the Internet As We Know It” struck many of the same notes and tones of the Y2K hysteria of 2000. And it was the PR team’s job to assure that people recognized this wasn’t another case of “crying wolf.”

The campaign around IPv4 depletion and IPv6 adoption notably did not involve promoting any product or service. Without a profit motive and with specific instructions not to use “panic” tactics to interest the media, LEWIS was nonetheless tasked with creating an appropriate sense of urgency surrounding IPv4 depletion. This was also to be done without a definitive depletion date for IPv4.

BUSINESS GOALS

Campaign goals were unlikely to measurably impact the revenues or costs of the organizations the program sought to reach – they were just a necessary task. It needed to be a grassroots campaign that inspired action because it was “the right thing to do.”

AWARENESS GOALS

  • Raising awareness and understanding of the subjects and issues of IPv4 depletion and IPv6 adoption.
  • Create an educational awareness campaign to highlight the importance of and explain the small tasks certain businesses needed to execute to ensure the continued growth and functionality of the Internet.

Strategy

LEWIS began working with American Registry of Internet Numbers in August 2009 with the shared objective of raising awareness and understanding of the subjects and issues of IPv4 depletion and IPv6 adoption. The goal was to create an educational awareness campaign to highlight the importance of and explain the small tasks certain businesses needed to execute to ensure the continued growth and functionality of the Internet. LEWIS clearly required a deep technical understanding of the issues.

Its team engaged in one-on-one education sessions with ARIN’s subject matter experts as well as leading secondary research to gather data on how the transition would affect a multitude of industries, including Internet Service Providers (ISPs), hosting providers, government agencies, every day businesses, gaming companies, and the every day consumer. The findings ultimately both informed strategy and helped form the central repository of trusted information to which all outreach-earned traffic would funnel. Organized into a separate microsite from ARIN’s organizational website, this knowledge center would also be key in ensuring that media could access a fact-checking resource with the most up-to-date information available throughout the program. Based on this knowledge, LEWIS knew it needed a campaign that leveraged both traditional media and social networks.

From the outset of the campaign, LEWIS targeted key journalists to explain how IPv6 impacted each kind of Internet stakeholder. The team focused on key depletion milestones, spiking outreach volume when the free pool reached 10, 5, and finally 0 per cent of IPv4 addresses remaining. In doing so, LEWIS created multiple ‘news events’ and literally hundreds of interview opportunities in advance of the depletion deadline. LEWIS also implemented an equally aggressive speaker program to reach both technology strategists and their technical staffs. This required creating compelling content and newsworthy presentations to draw crowds at speaking engagements for ARIN CEO John Curran at over 30 events, including landing prized slots at Interop, FOSE, HostingCon, CES and COMPTEL.

At the same time, a social media program needed to be created organically from the ground up, from establishing initial channel presences straight through to relying upon them as deeply as mass media to drive interest in the topic.

LEWIS clearly defined phased objectives (build, populate, promote), benchmarked and established analytics for each phase, researched audience communications preferences and trends, developed content, and, ultimately, measured and refined results against increasingly sophisticated KPIs. The team focused on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, leveraging ARIN’s community through social media interactions via microblogging, polls and videos. The team also monitored all social media channels to inject ARIN into the daily conversations about IPv4 depletion and to surface opportunities to earnestly start new ones. By answering technical questions, re-tweeting interesting community offerings, and creating frank and useful content proactively, the team was able to promote ARIN as a subject matter expert not only with media but also among need-expressers whose tweets formed the beachheads for deeper technical conversations.

The education strategy required a means to inform the media and general public with totally accurate and trusted non-commercial content. LEWIS created a user-friendly microsite and embeddable blog widget that dynamically pushed ARIN’s updates to constituent websites. The microsite housed the ‘Team ARIN’ Blog, calendar and other tools to help users better understand IPv6 adoption and promote action. The microsite even served as the lynchpin for an April Fools’ joke around IPv6, for which the team built a special Twitter application that removed the I’s, P’s, V’s and 6’s from any Twitter stream and re-presented it to them as if it were their actual Twitter stream gone haywire. It cleverly reminded people to consider a world without IPv6 while providing a humorous, action-oriented viral quality to the campaign. Traffic to the microsite spiked as a result, with over 500 hits per hour at its height, surpassed during the campaign only by the actual depletion press conference event.

The IPv4 depletion campaign hit its most fevered pitch at the joint press conference hosted by the Number Resource Organization, the parent organization of ARIN and the 4 other Regional Internet Registries, and ICANN, in Miami Florida on February 3, 2011, when it was announced that the free pool of IPv4 addresses had finally been officially depleted. LEWIS managed a marathon of embargoed and day-of media briefings, over 30 in all.

Results

Nearly every North American major top tier and mainstream publication and many broadcast outlets covered the depletion news the day it broke. These included CNET, CNN, Forbes, Network World, Reuters, two Wall Street Journal articles, and the Washington Post as well as the hundreds of dailies that picked up articles from Associated Press, Bloomberg News and other syndicates.

Looking at only the day of depletion, the team reached over 40 million readers in North America. And according to ARIN’s own experts, in contrast to the confusion and panic stoked during the supposed Y2K crisis of 2000, there was not a technical error nor misconception included in any North American media source that covered the depletion event – an accomplishment thought impossible at campaign onset.

This is largely because the team had already succeeded in generating a steady and constant flow of coverage throughout the education campaign in the months preceding the event, securing over 450 pieces of coverage, including broadcast interviews with Fox News and NPR, as well as key techie media such as Ars Technica, ReadWriteWeb and others.

In terms of social media evaluation metrics, at the top level, the LEWIS team drove over 500,000 visitors to the ARIN microsite. Klout scores moved from negligible to leader score levels for specialists (currently 56), pushed by 100+ list memberships and 500+ total re-tweets by 250+ unique re-tweeters. On the day of the depletion announcement, in addition to the coverage blanketing the media, 109 unique tweeters among pre-identified reporters, bloggers, influencers alone helped push eyes to over 1.1 million followers while linking to coverage highlighting ARIN within the IPv4/IPv6 discussion.

Metrics

  • 40m readers reached in North America on day of depletion
  • 450 pieces of coverage leading up to the event
  • 500,000 visitors to the microsite
  • 56 current Klout score from negligible at start of campaign
  • 100+ Twitter list memberships
  • 500+ total re-tweets
  • 1.1m followers reached with the IPv4 / IPv6 discussion

Testimonial

  

LEWIS had a tough job with us as a client: making Internet infrastructure interesting to the media and public, while making sure all information was 100% accurate to appease no-nonsense network engineers with no tolerance for PR fluff.

- Megan Kruse, Public Affairs Officer for ARIN

 
Associated Documents
ARIN-Case-Study.pdf