Dissecting the Success of Nina4Airbnb
A White Paper on The Foundations of Marketing and
How You Can Apply The Lessons to Your Campaigns
By Nina Mufleh
July 2015

What’s This About?
In April, I launched the most exciting campaign of my career. After a decade of working with high profile personalities and Fortune 500 brands, I applied what I learned about marketing and storytelling to build a campaign that would show Silicon Valley com panies the value I would add to their teams.
W ithin two weeks, the website that hosted the cam paign received nearly half a m illion hits, m y resum e was viewed over 14,000 tim es and I achieved m y goal of interviewing with Airbnb and dozens of other high profile companies.
W ith global m edia attention and m illions of im pressions through social m edia, the experim ent was a hit.
I’ve worked on several high impact campaigns, and this is the most exciting one because it succeeded without a budget or a support team, proving that the success was completely tied to executing the foundations of marketing.
I never formally studied marketing, but I’ve always had an insatiable curiosity about what grasps people’s attention. I taught m yself the foundations by harnessing that curiosity, and I’m sharing my approach to creating
Nina4Airbnb with the aim of adding value to other curious minds and sparking m ore interesting campaigns.

The Background / The Challenge
I moved back to California in 2014 after a decade in the Middle East where I had built m y career. In 2009, I co-founded a com pany that grew into the leading social m edia agency in the MENA region with a client roster that included Pepsi, Saks Fifth Avenue, Mercedes Benz and Samsung. W e had
52 talented team m em bers the day I exited, and it continues to grow today.
Before that I was part of Queen Rania’s communications team and had the opportunity to lead one of the most exciting and innovative campaigns at the tim e where through YouTube she engaged a global audience in a 5-month conversation about stereotypes related to the Arab world.
The success of those endeavors becam e irrelevant almost as soon as I landed in a new m arket. I wanted to work at a high impact tech company with a stellar team. I found myself struggling to get any interviews where I could contextualize m y experience to recruiters.
After one year of utilizing traditional tactics, it was time to shift gears. As a m arketer, I had to think of m yself as a product and identify ways to create dem and around hiring me.
This whitepaper outlines how I tackled this marketing challenge, and points to the foundations that are essential for a cam paign to succeed. On the final page, you will find a practical checklist of how to start your next campaign.
Dissecting the Success of Nina4Airbnb
A White Paper on The Foundations of Marketing and How You Can Apply The Lessons To Your Campaigns

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The Start
Once I fram ed the issue as a m arketing challenge, it was clear how I should start. Before developing a strategy, and before thinking of the tactical approach, I had to analyze m y opportunity by identifying m y assets and shortcom ings.
My Assets:
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I know how to design results oriented cam paigns
I’m familiar with conversation drivers
I have a decent size social media footprint

Benefits of targeting Airbnb:
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Airbnb is a global com pany with growing recognition
There is acute media interest in stories related to Airbnb
I’m an active community member in Airbnb and understand the brand
Executives at Airbnb are active on social m edia without being oversaturated with conversations directed at them

My main weakness was that I didn’t have a budget to attract others to work with m e on this project. But as anyone who has built a company can attest, that is never an excuse and always an invitation for creative problem solving.

Setting The Goal
I love designing and managing experim ents. My approach was to deal with this as an experim ent – if it failed, as in if no one talked about it, then it would be ok because it’s alm ost as if it didn’t happen. Unlike my previous work, I would have no clients to answer to. I’d be at the same starting point.
If it succeeded, I’d have the opportunity to start interviewing with companies that I’d be very excited to work for.
Mission: To create dem and around hiring m e as part of a high im pact team.
Objectives/Goals: Showcase my attributes as a creative, driven and talented professional. Strategy: Generate m ass conversation by associating m yself with a high value brand.
Tactics:
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Focus on one com pany that has a global appeal;
Create a high level industry report that would add value to their organization and wow onlookers;
Make the report easily accessible;
Share it with relevant contacts and directly with the target com pany.

Dissecting the Success of Nina4Airbnb
A White Paper on The Foundations of Marketing and How You Can Apply The Lessons To Your Campaigns

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Aiming For A Reaction
Across all the m arketing cam paigns I’ve worked on, there are two forces that are guaranteed to generate conversation: an incentive based approach, or creating som ething that has intrinsic value. Creating something that has intrinsic value m eans that it needs to solicit a strong reaction – am usem ent, sadness, shock, or awe are a few top examples.
W ith both approaches, the volum e of conversation is directly proportional to the perceived value of the prize or to the perceived intrinsic value.
The incentive based approach is usually the “easy” one. W ith even the sm allest budgets, you can package something that people want. Side note: always keep the prize in line with the product.
My initial idea was to use my experience creating promotions to d esign a cam paign around m yself, and because of budget constraints, I had to think of prizes that wouldn’t cost much.
I had something valuable: an in-dem and Airbnb listing in San Francisco. To win a week’s stay, hosts would be invited to tweet promotional messages about why and how I would be a good candidate to work at Airbnb.
It was novel, and it could activate hosts around the world, and potentially attract m edia interest.
Eventually I pivoted into the second approach where I aim ed to create som ething that would solicit an em otional reaction. (The reason for the pivot is detailed in the next section).
Most consulting firms would charge a small fortune to create an expansion plan or even present an argum ent for why a com pany should or shouldn’t enter a new market. Because I know there’s real value in the information presented, I believed it would solicit a reaction if it was analyzed and presented for free.
The combination of details, novelty and value m ade the report conversationworthy.

Measuring The Progress
If you realize that there are too many obstacles along the way, reassess your approach My initial approach of creating a promotion to incentivize Airbnb hosts and com m unity m em bers to talk about m y work could have helped m e achieve m y goal. It was an exciting concept with a lot of tactical work, but as I
Dissecting the Success of Nina4Airbnb
A White Paper on The Foundations of Marketing and How You Can Apply The Lessons To Your Campaigns

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began to execute the project, m y progress was hindered by too m any factors outside of m y control.
Rula Nabil, a fantastic designer who works at The Online Project (the leading social m edia agency I co-founded), created the interface for the site that would host the cam paign. The next step was to build it and attract participants. W eeks after the design was com plete, the first line of code had yet to be written. Despite having access to a network of skilled engineers, the project was proving to be too com plex.
I also started facing challenges in sourcing the participants. I reached out to
Huzefa Kapadia and Jasper Ribbers, two high profile Airbnb community m em bers who wrote a “Get Paid For Your Pad”. The book is a practical guide for Airbnb hosts and over the years of promoting it, they’ve built great relationships with hosts around the world. Even through their network, though, the adoption rate for m y cam paign was low.
The experiment was proving to be too complicated and potentially costly. I had already invested tim e and some money into the idea, but from my experience building and m anaging products and cam paigns, I knew the results were the only thing that m attered – not the process.
W hen I realized that too m any factors were outside of my control, I reassessed the approach and pivoted into a m uch cleaner, sim pler and ultim ately m ore effective and authentic approach.

Simplifying Everything
W hether you’re designing a com m unications plan, a product launch, or a prom otion, the rule of sim plicity rem ains the sam e: m ake your m essage impossible to m isunderstand.
W ith m y original idea of creating a prom otion for hosts, there were too m any m essages in there and too many opportunities to lose sight of the m ain goal.
I had to communicate the value of the experience to the hosts, I then had to com m unicate to them how to engage their friends, and I would then rely on them to com municate that to their friends.
There was also the risk that their friends would not be active on Twitter or understand how to vote for them through Tweets (the prom otion was hosted on a microsite and votes would be tallied through a Twitter hashtag).
Other than having too m any obstacles outside of m y control, the original idea also had too many m essages and too m any steps.

Dissecting the Success of Nina4Airbnb
A White Paper on The Foundations of Marketing and How You Can Apply The Lessons To Your Campaigns

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In order to achieve my goal, I had to create something that was clear, simple to understand and easy to share.
Like m ost good ideas, the final form of this experim ent was born out of a conversation. I was speaking with a former colleague who had just heard
Jeremiah Owyang present at a conference in Dubai and was am azed at his rundown of the im pact of the sharing econom y.
Som ething clicked for m e during that conversation. I had been exposed to the trends in San Francisco for so long, that I forgot that the lifestyle here is not the norm everywhere else. W hat we take for granted – ordering our groceries through Instacart, summ oning car pool rides through Lyft and
Uber, borrowing jewelry with Rockbox, running errands through TaskRabbit
– all of these activities are the standard in San Francisco but have yet to cross the chasm in m ost of the world.
On the flipside, m ost of the world has yet to learn about the real M iddle East outside of the gloomy narrative that the media projects. There are opportunities I’m aware of only because I grew up there, did business there and understand the culture.
I had the chance to combine my unique vantage point to wow both sides of the pond with som ething new, and turn a perceived weakness (m y lack of local experience) into an actual strength (highlight my worldly view).
Suddenly I saw m y opportunity to create som ething that would generate a high volum e of conversation without an incentive. I stum bled upon the perfect storm : a passion driven campaign, tied to a high value brand, which would inspire people.

Picking a Name
In one of my favorite business/ marketing books – Positioning, the Battle for
Your Mind – the authors dedicate an entire chapter to highlighting the importance of picking a good nam e. It’s necessary when you’re starting a com pany and equally valuable when you’re designing a campaign.
Names should be descriptive and easy to remember. In the era of 140character Twitter conversations and hashtags, cam paign nam es should also be short and easy to spell.
In the case of this campaign, I was lucky in that my name is short and easy to spell, as is the com pany’s nam e that I was targeting. Tying the two together was a no brainer as it imm ediately positioned m e alongside a high value and recognizable brand.

Dissecting the Success of Nina4Airbnb
A White Paper on The Foundations of Marketing and How You Can Apply The Lessons To Your Campaigns

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Be Unique
I spent the past year using the traditional tactics for applying to hundreds of openings at dozens of companies.
As a job applicant, I was working in a black hole of inform ation and I couldn’t tell if m y resum e was even being read for som e of the roles I was applying to. One thing I knew for sure was that I wasn’t standing out by using the same tactics as everyone else in a city that is oversaturated with brilliant talent.
Our brains are designed to recognize novelty, so the entire approach for creating Nina4Airbnb was to do something novel that would allow me to capture recruiters’ attention.

Paying Attention To Details
Research indicates that you only have 7 seconds to make a first im pression.
W ith the window so sm all, I had to m ake sure that m y target audience would be wowed without reading a word.
To do this, I divided my target audience into segments to determine which details would be worth including.
Segm ent 1: Executives, hiring m anagers and team m em bers at Airbnb
I left Easter eggs (intentional inside jokes and hidden messages) all over the site to achieve this.
The first and most obvious was the overall look and feel, which was designed to resem ble Airbnb’s site. This is an agency tactic that we learned while developing pitches for clients. W hen we presented to potential clients using their own branding, we had a higher chance of closing a deal. The tactic can be risky if you don’t understand the brand well, but when you do, it signals your fam iliarity with the com pany and aligns you in their eyes as part of their team .
W ithin the first page, and across all m y social m edia assets, is a second less obvious Easter egg. In my profile picture, I’m seen wearing a Coca Cola tshirt. It’s intentionally cropped yet visible. I used this im age as a hat-tip to
Airbnb’s CM O who is the form er Senior Vice President of Integrated
Marketing Communication And Design Excellence at the Coca Cola
Company.
A series of subtle m essages are em bedded within the “W hy I Belong At
Airbnb” slide. Knowing how much the company values their internal culture, I needed to come across as a fit. The headings are directly taken from their
Dissecting the Success of Nina4Airbnb
A White Paper on The Foundations of Marketing and How You Can Apply The Lessons To Your Campaigns

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values. The proof points reflect this too – including using the phrase “get shit done”, which is taken straight from them.
The next slide is more visual and includes a series of photos that I took while visiting their office. The first im age of m e with the logo is used to em phasize m y connection to the brand. The next two are photos from their unique interior design, which are used to reestablish my familiarity.
The final photo of that slide is probably my favorite. Two Airbnb employees started an internal project known as “Okay Coffee.” They run a hum orous
Instagram account where they showcase team members drinking average cups of coffee that they serve daily. I used this image from their feed, which coincidentally had m y nam e on a coffee cup, to em phasize m y appreciation of intra-preneurship.
Segm ent 2: Hiring m anagers at other high im pact com panies in Silicon Valley
Although the visuals of the report are all targeting Airbnb, I needed to m ake sure that I could highlight m y attributes to all potential em ployers in the valley. The slide “W here I’ll Belong” is intended to achieve this by highlighting m y relevant experience.
Segm ent 3: The Middle East
Most of the media focus on the Middle East revolves around war, extremism and crisis. In reality, though, that is not what the every day life of all of the
Middle East is about. The global media still hasn’t caught on to some of the great stories coming out of the region even as the entrepreneurial scene has been flourishing.
By injecting the report with details about the “other” side of the Middle East,
I was able to give a reason for people from the region to take pride in the content and spread it.
A second level of detail for this target segm ent was to include partnership opportunities by mentioning specific organizations and events taking place.
This gave me a great excuse to contact the people behind those organization and events and encourage them to read the report and share it.
Segm ent 4: The Press
W hen I released an im age to the press, I m ade sure to use a photo that com bined the Airbnb logo and me. The casual t-shirt and a hoodie is an obvious hat tip to the laid back culture of San Francisco and Silicon Valley, but m ore im portantly, it allowed m e to ride on their brand’s tailcoats to achieve wider recognition for the cam paign.

Dissecting the Success of Nina4Airbnb
A White Paper on The Foundations of Marketing and How You Can Apply The Lessons To Your Campaigns

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Knowing When It’s Good Enough (The MVP)
Once I saw the opportunity to create this report, I knew there m ust be other people out there who had sim ilar ideas. I had to do it fast and publish it before the novelty aspect was lost.
In product development, there’s a concept known as the Minimum Viable
Product (the M VP). I didn’t need it be perfect, I just needed it to be good enough. I im m ediately identified the qualifiers that I needed to achieve: a valuable dataset that could support an interesting story, and a visually appealing way of presenting that story.
Many developers and engineers who sent feedback on the report com m ented about the way the site was built. They couldn’t understand why I chose to build it using im ages only. It m ade the site ‘clunky’ and lim ited SEO opportunities. I completely agree with every one of them , but neither of those concerns was im portant in this case.
The best coding in the world would be useless to me if it took too long to go live, or if som eone else launched a similar concept while I was spending tim e and m oney to build the site. I had to move fast as soon as the design was done, yet I had no coding experience.
I discovered several fantastic (and free!) website builders. W ix was the most flexible one for m y needs. W hile m any of the website builders only have predesigned tem plates you can fill with your own images and text, W ix has that plus the ability to start on a blank page and design the layout however you like.
The best part was that it also gave me the opportunity to easily redesign the site for m obile. This was important since I would be sharing it directly with m y primary target audience through Twitter, which meant they’d be most likely to view the site from their phones.

Seeding the Content
Most global campaigns use a combination of paid, owned and earned med ia to seed their content. W ithout a budget, I didn’t have the luxury of sharing the content through advertising, so I had to bank on the owned media in the hopes that it would generate earned m edia opportunities.
The owned channels that were within my control in this case are m y social m edia channels. I shared the content through Facebook, Instagram , LinkedIn and Twitter to cover a wide base of m y contacts.
Em ail was another valuable owned channel and proved to be the m ost effective for seeding the content.
Dissecting the Success of Nina4Airbnb
A White Paper on The Foundations of Marketing and How You Can Apply The Lessons To Your Campaigns

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I intended to share the report with 500+ of my personal and professional contacts as well as the organizations and individuals mentioned in the report. I compiled all of their addresses into a MailC him p list and drafted an em ail that encouraged them to read the report and share their reaction via
Twitter using the hashtag #AirbnbME. As Murphy’s Law would have it, though, Mailchim p blocked the em ail because the language in it seemed to have violated their term s and conditions. Oops.
My next option was to select 50 of the 500 people and send them emails directly. I was nervous about this hiccup because my initial assumption was that of the 500 people I would contact, half of them m ight open the em ail within 24 hours, a quarter would click through and read, and a sm all fraction of them might take the action I was asking for. W ith a smaller pool, the num bers were not in m y favor.
I was happy to have this assumption proven wrong: 80% of the contacts that
I shared the report with responded within 24 hours and shared it through their own social m edia channels.

Picking The Right Platform
I shared the report on all my social media channels (except my blog because
I didn’t feel it would add value to have a post about it there since m ost of m y readers are m y Facebook friends).
In every campaign, it’s important to have a primary platform that you focus your efforts on. Though I shared the report through all m y owned channels to widen my initial reach, the true power of the spread of the cam paign cam e via Twitter.
Twitter is the only platform where I could have reached the founders of
Airbnb and engaged them in public and visible conversation. Though
Facebook is working to include more features that might m ake this possible in the future, the flexibility and openness of Twitter conversations was the essential driver in the success of Nina4Airbnb.

Incorporating Social Proof
Social proof is the positive im pression created when som eone finds out that others are talking about or doing something. I knew that I had to use several form s of social proof in order to m ake the report attractive to m y target readers. The first form of social proof was the idea of proof in numbers. It didn’t m atter who was doing the talking, so long as there was chatter. I aim ed to

Dissecting the Success of Nina4Airbnb
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A White Paper on The Foundations of Marketing and How You Can Apply The Lessons To Your Campaigns

get that by having my contacts share their reactions to the report. I also asked them to use a specific hashtag so it could all be easily discoverable.
The second form of social proof was to solicit expert mentions.
In selecting the 50 contacts I would share the report with, I made sure that a significant num ber of them were high visibility Twitter users who were also high profile tech personalities. These were people that I had already built relationships with over m y career, and I was hoping that because of the relevance of the approach, they would be m ore willing to share it. And when several experts begin talking about something on the sam e day, others are bound to becom e interested.
Finally, there was the unexpected third, and arguably m ost powerful form of social proof: the celebrity endorsem ent. Once Queen Noor tweeted about the report directly to Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s co-founder and CEO, the report becam e im possible to ignore.

Timing It
There is a predictable pattern to viral conversations. They take place in high volum e during a concentrated period of tim e and then they level off quickly.
W hen I shared the report with the initial group of 50 contacts, I asked them all to take action within 24 hours. This would guarantee that the buzz would begin picking up on the first day.
I also took advantage of different time zones. Because my contacts in the
Middle East are 7 – 10 hours ahead, I could get them to start talking about the report while people in the US were sleeping, so that when they woke up there was chatter that had already started.
Finally, I shared the report publicly via my social media accounts on Tuesday m orning. I assumed based off of experience communicating with recruiters that Mondays are harder to get their attention. Tuesdays and W ednesdays are usually m ore ideal, and Thursdays and Fridays are too close to the weekend. Having fun
The day I started working on creating this report and turning into a cam paign, I found m yself thoroughly engaged and enjoying the work.
Though there were many obstacles, I had so much fun designing and executing this cam paign!

Dissecting the Success of Nina4Airbnb
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A White Paper on The Foundations of Marketing and How You Can Apply The Lessons To Your Campaigns

Luck
I can’t discount the role luck played in the success of this cam paign. I m entioned all of the factors that I could control to design the experiment correctly, but there were m any beyond m y control.
I was lucky that nothing major happened in the news that day which could have overshadowed the chatter as the cam paign picked up steam .
(Thank you @DickC for not resigning in April!)

The Results
My goal was to focus on only one result: getting a job with a high impact team where I can do really cool work. In the end, that’s the only KPI that m atters.
Still as som eone who looks at m arketing as a com bination of art and science, I of course had to look at the num bers surrounding the cam paign so I could analyze the chatter funnel, and learn ways to improve future cam paigns that I work on, which is something I recommend everyone do.
These are the numbers:
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445,000+ Visits to Nina4Airbnb
Hundreds of thousands of Tweets and millions of impressions
30,000+ New visitors to my personal blog
14,000+ LinkedIn profile views
2,000+ Emails and messages of support from around the world
Global m edia coverage
An interview with Airbnb
A pipeline of interviews with dozens of other high im pact companies

And as an active Airbnb com m unity m em ber, I’m of course proud that the cam paign spread awareness about their platform and their values in a way that paid campaigns can’t achieve.

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A White Paper on The Foundations of Marketing and How You Can Apply The Lessons To Your Campaigns

The Practical Takeaways
1. Be clear about your end goal. Everything you do should support getting there. 2. The two factors that generate conversation are either an incentive based approach or creating som ething that has intrinsic value.
3. Measure your progress against your goals. If you realize there are too m any obstacles along the way, reassess your approach.
4. Simplify everything. Make your message impossible to misunderstand.
5. Pick a memorable name. Keep it short, descriptive and easy to remember.
6. Be unique. Our minds are trained to recognize novelty.
7. Know when it’s good enough to launch.
8. Pay attention to the details and include touches that will add to your story. Authenticity and coherence are key.
9. Seed your content. Use your own network to get people to start talking.
10. Pick the right platform. Focus on the one that is m ost in line with your goals. 11. Incorporate different forms of social proof.
12. Time it right. The timing of a campaign will determine how long its life cycle will last.
13. Have fun!
14. Analyze your results. Measure the data around your campaign and analyze the chatter funnel so you can learn how to im prove your next one.

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A White Paper on The Foundations of Marketing and How You Can Apply The Lessons To Your Campaigns

For more marketing insights or to connect with me directly, follow me on Twitter @NinaMufleh

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A White Paper on The Foundations of Marketing and How You Can Apply The Lessons To Your Campaigns