'System heroes' wins best customer relationship campaign 2008 for Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems - which provides industrial strength hardware, software and services - wanted to cultivate its relationship with system administrators (sysadmins) that work for companies in a relationship with Sun.

Sysadmins keep the company networks, systems and PCs going, but they are notoriously difficult to communicate with. They also tend not to respond to corporate branded marketing, preferring to find out things for themselves. To the sysadmins, they are the real 'heroes', and everyone else (the users) just get in the way.

The campaign was designed to encourage sysadmins to interact with the website, encourage them to register as a 'System hero', upload a personal profile and start blogging on the site.

Hero bait
The website was kept simple to avoid looking like a marketing piece. With a rough-and-ready design, alongside chatty and irreverant language, the site (www.systemheroes.co.uk) deliberately does not follow Sun's corporate guidelines. On the one hand there is factual material about Sun and its products as well as blogs from Sun experts; on the other there are cartoons, games, spoof ads and other light-hearted features.