Why does bad weather steal all the press? We recently worked on a campaign with Mullen that challenged this unfair notion, bringing glory back to good weather.

Nobody’s outside more than CSX, one of the nation’s leading rail-based transportation services. With over 21,000 route miles on this Class 1 railroad, CCSX sees mother nature on the daily—good and bad. So instead of the highlighting storms and gloom on the radar, they called on people to seek out the sunshine and document beautiful days across the country. Together with our friends at the North Carolina Mullen office, their agency of record, we helped make this campaign really shine.

The plan was to coordinate a social media-based scavenger hunt, centered around exploration and the rewards of spending nice days outside. To participate, users would submit photos for frequent weekly challenges to win prizes throughout the month. We planned, designed, and built the Perfect Weather Chasers microsite as the campaign hub to aggregate all that user-generated content. Propelling it all were big social media, advertising efforts and CSX employee activation by Mullen, and some clutch sunsets.

Photos of landscapes, sunshine, and #cloudporn flooded in over a 30-day period from the #PerfectWeatherChasers hashtag on Twitter and Instagram. We also worked in a handy manual upload feature on the microsite to cater to as many participants as possible. With a custom content management system (CMS) using Symfony, admins easily accessed and moderated the photo entries. All 3,568 of them.

We’re thrilled to see the results. Site traffic soared over 80,000 visits throughout the month, 85% of which were on mobile devices! Three quarters of those visitors even scrolled through to the bottom of the gallery viewing other entries. In other words, the contests were great, and the content even better.

It’s been a real pleasure working with the fine folks at Mullen and CSX. Though the campaign is over, the microsite lives on. Check it out, and more importantly, start giving perfect weather the attention it deserves!

Chasing Perfect Weather with Mullen & CSX

Developing With Vagrant Flavors