Digital Hack Night

Over the course of 4 hours last night in Ohio, 2 things occurred:

- $100,000 was raised for the charity Feeding America.
- P&G executives learned - hands-on - the influence of social media.

The price-tag? $4,000.

Surely Digital Hack Night's charitable focus helped bolster the engagement and contributions of the marketing professionals' networks and those executives from other companies. But what impressed me most was how a basic training exercise was transformed into a major online event.

In essence, P&G spent $4,000 to help their marketing teams and executives become immersed in social media, while at the same time creating an excellent PR opportunity for the corporation, as well as Google, Facebook, and MySpace. Rather than simply hold internal training sessions on what 'social media' is, they got their hands dirty and let cross-functional teams compete in a widely tracked, online contest. No didactic presentations or PowerPoint slides. Competition and creative thinking. An experience vs. a class.

All of this resulting in a nice chunk of change for Feeding America.

Nice.