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When Upwell saw the news about Cathay Pacific banning shark fins from their cargo, we thought two things:

• Let’s get some new audiences talking about shark finning.
• This is a great opportunity to do a positively framed campaign, and get people to say “thank you” to Cathay Pacific. 

As always, our aim is to increase the number of people talking about shark finning. Before we jump in to what we did and what the results were, first, a graph of our Cathay Pacific & sharks profile in Radian6. 

Social mentions September 4 - 13, 2012 of the Cathay Pacific Shark Fin Ban keyword set, built by Upwell. 

The first thing that is evident from this graph is that there is a slower drop-off after the initial news bump than we usually see with similar stories. The spike lasted several days - unusual for a news item like this. 

Upwell used a two-pronged approach, first helping to spread the news about the ban, then following up the next day with a call for people to thank Cathay Pacific for their decision in our Tide Report and social media channels.

This image spread through our social media channels was shared on hundreds of Tumblrs and in hundreds of tweets. By combining a “shark love” message with an element of urgency (the shark fin traders’ protests), it effectively activated people to voice their support.

Image macro encouraging support of Cathay Pacific’s shark fin ban

We saw over 250 tweets thanking Cathay Pacific, and over 250 posts on the Cathay Pacific Facebook wall (counted by hand) congratulating the airline on a decision well made. The majority of these thank yous aren’t captured in the above graph because they don’t include keywords in our set. It wouldn’t be time efficient to sort through every mention of “thank you” on the internet.

Overall, quite a success in pulling together a quick social media storm in support of sharks.