QWEST needed a more direct way to connect with small and medium sized business owners. So instead of just another ad campaign, we gave them their own online community: the first-ever sponsored LinkedIn community.

In February 2010, we teamed up with Bloomberg Businessweek and LinkedIn to help us facilitate peer-to-peer discussions among midsized business owners.

While Businessweek offered award-winning editorial content, LinkedIn provided an unparalleled professional networking community.The combination of partners gave the group immediate credibility and reintroduced QWEST to its target audience. QWEST was there to stimulate discussions and provide answers where needed. “Listening” was the skill of the day.We saturated the site with fresh content, including tech videos, case studies, white papers, podcasts, RSS feeds, relevant industry articles and polling questions.

Traffic to the community was driven through full-page print ads and co-branded display banners.

In just three months, we blew through our six-month participant benchmark, 65% of which were key decision makers.

Engagement rate with QWEST marketing content hit 30%.

Brandweek, Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch and MSN Money all featured the community. The media value of the effort was equal to a yearlong, full-page Computerworld print campaign.The concept created a sizeable new revenue stream for LinkedIn and global brands several times bigger than QWEST followed with similar efforts.

Along the way, QWEST proved even a big telco can listen. And that sometimes, to start a conversation, you don’t have to say a word.