Microsoft Build: Live Event Amplification
Real-time social coverage and influencer programme for Microsoft's developer conference — turning a 6,500-person in-person event into 3 million video views, 45,000 shares, and a 285% spike in web traffic.
Microsoft · 2018 · 
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The challenge
Microsoft Build is the company’s flagship developer conference — the Super Bowl of the Windows ecosystem. But in-person attendance is capped at just 6,500 people. For a platform trying to reach millions of developers worldwide, that’s a significant constraint. Our job was to extend the event’s reach to the largest possible online audience and drive real consideration for Microsoft tools and technologies — all in real time, over five days.
What I did
The programme had two interlocking parts.
Real-time content production. We built an on-the-ground team to capture, edit, and publish keynote highlights and session clips as they happened. Speed was everything — a clip published within minutes of a keynote moment drives exponentially more engagement than the same clip published hours later. Over five days we produced and promoted 280 pieces of content.
Build MCs — the influencer layer. With over 200 individual sessions, even the most dedicated developer couldn’t keep up with everything. We partnered with influential developers, each specialising in a different area of the platform, to give our audience curated, credible guides to the conference. By using separate influencers for specific developer types — front-end, systems, game dev, cloud — we built a much more precise audience strategy than a single generalist voice could deliver. The #BuildMC programme drove 174,772 social engagements on its own, plus significant halo effects in video views and web traffic. Influencer involvement also put 70 more videos on the ground year-over-year.
The results
- 3 million social video views during the event window
- 285% increase in web traffic driven by engagement retargeting post-event
- 45,000 social shares across 280 pieces of content in five days
- 75% reduction in online RSVP cost using lookalike and custom social audiences
- 174,772 social engagements from the #BuildMC influencer programme alone