Sep 11 2008
Dipping My Toe into the Social Media Waters
I figured today it would be good to pick up where we left off with my last post…social media. If you have not heard the term over a million times by now you may want to check your surroundings…because you may be living under a rock (and I’ll refer you here). So social media, for many of us it has become second nature as we participate in our social communities, send out a new twitter every other minute, post our latest vacation pictures to Flickr, or read our favorite blogs. But what about the business world, how are they using social media?
In the recent past I had the pleasure to work on a social media venture that explored many different facets of the social media marketing spectrum. Our client, a major tourist attraction site, was interested in boosting attendance and engaging tourists who visited in a unique way.
In order to give this project wings we needed to leverage a few different tools. Our team was able to take a map of the Earth and manipulate the API of Flickr to create an interactive map that allows participants from around the world to post pictures and stories of their visit to the Tourist Attraction. We created a group for members to join and interact with each other (using the provided message board) on Flickr. To bring in members we used both online and offline marketing to promote the project.
One of the primary methods of promotion was the use of social news sites (digg, reddit, newsvine, mixx, etc.). Typical advertising and marketing methods should definitely not be sidelined (yet), but if you are not using social media as a marketing tool, feel free to jump on the bandwagon anytime now. A successful social media marketing effort can return very nice results (see chart below)
After only one month of launching the project, we had over 300 members who had posted over 800 photos. The project was also very successful in bringing new visitors to the Tourist Attraction to take their own pictures and participate in the project.
In order to track the buzz we used Google Alerts to assist us in catching blog posts written about the project so that we could participate in the conversation and dispel any misconceptions that people may have about it. This proved to be extremely effective and offered us a level of visibility that we may not have received had we not monitored the blogoshere. This is just a taste of what is possible with social media and I would love to hear some ideas about what you think and what you might have done differently! Feel free to chime in and there is most definitely more to come…
Yes, I really liked the way this campaign took content and images already created by potential prospects. It was very cool. But I didn’t realize you’d use alerts this way.Congrats.