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From BlogWorld: Social Media Success Stories

Brian Weigand, Alice.com
Samantha Gammell, Oscar Mayer
Justin Levy, New Marketing Labs
Frank Eliason, Comcast

One of the panels at BlogWorld this year covered social media success stories and brought together four individuals with extensive knowledge on using social media to create rewarding campaigns. Here are a few of their remarks about how they are using social media.

Brian Weigand from Alice.com said that they’re using social media to tie everything back to purchases and reaching out to mommy bloggers. They have many different blogs that they’re very active3 with, including Facebook and Twitter as part of a campaign geared towards lead generation and customer retention.

Frank Eliason talks about how people get into social media – it’s all about passion. Companies need to teach all their employees how to use social media. Frank is NOT passionate about the product. He’s passionate about the people. Cites that Zappos is a great example – they’ve taught their employees how to get out there with social media. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, is passionate about culture. Don’t try and be something you’re not. Be yourself and you’ll be well known.

Frank has a “one-tweet resolution” at Comcast. There are a few things out there that will help to generate ROI in social media. Frank can learn a lot more about a company in seconds with Twitter. Recalls a story where during a hockey game that went off the air. Frank looked on Twitter and found out that it wasn’t just Comcast, and affected other broadcast companies as well. He put the message out on the 800 number and other areas and this helped save Comcast time and money.

Frank thinks that Twitter is good for reaching out people before anything goes wrong. But he acknowledges that every social application has different uses and purposes. He started using Twitter by simply listening for two months before actually engaging. With forums, they don’t interfere because it could destroy or demotivate the community. With Facebook, Frank thinks that it’s a good tool to check up on friends but it’s not a good place to meet people.

Samantha Gammell says that the Oscar Mayer weinermobile is to better engage the consumers. Having this be online is just a natural extension of the offline promotion. They realized that there was a lot of love and excitement over the weinermobile, but they wanted to set some goals beforehand. They set up a blog, a Twitter account, a Flickr and YouTube account and just recently, a Facebook page.

Justin Levy recently bought into a high-end steakhouse where he realized that his business partner has previously been spending about 80% of his allotted marketing budget on a newspaper advertisement that wasn’t really targeted towards the right audience. Justin felt that the better way was to try and compete against the larger steakhouses like Ruth’s Chris by trying to secure the website placement on the first page of Google. Instead of losing money by 20% a month, Justin indicated that the restaurant reserved its course and now has become more profitable by 20% each month.

What is the value behind getting ranked highly in Technorati? Who cares?

Justin Levy responds that with one of his clients at New Marketing Labs that valued the high ranking on Technorati, they didn’t care about the ROI of having the high rank. What they cherished was the fact that people were paying attention and the awareness. The client was more concerned about establishing themselves as a thought leader.

How can I justify having my team monitor Twitter after-hours?

Frank Eliason says to track what is being said over a period of time to see if there’s a pattern and then also look at the blogs that mention your product or company.

Brian Weingand said that it’s good to get everyone involved and Justin Levy states that it’s now a 24 hour news cycle. Sometimes in brands, you have great passionate people – with Frank, he did everything all on his own without permission just to show that he cared about the customers and that soon spanned to be a team effort.

How have the social tools helped transform the story you tell?

Samantha Gammell talked about how social media has helped contemporize the brand of the weinermobile and has enabled the company to expose more people to it through their connections to digital influencers.

Make sure that your brand has personality before you try and bring it to life. It’s not always going to be a natural fit.

Is being first at something a good thing?

For Frank Eliason, Comcast was not the first in the market. He said that the trick is to learn from those that came before you and learn from what you can to take away. Find out what you and your team will do better. The rules in this space have not been written yet. The reason why Frank has succeeded is that he helped Michael Arrington out and a blog post was written on TechCrunch with people offering their support on Comcast’s customer service. Everything is a learning process…always learn and evolve.

Brian Weingand said that if you’re first, then you’re really an authority figure in the space. Being first allows you to establish a mindshare and can make you a leader in the topic.

Justin Levy says that you can be the leader as well. He thinks that you have this unique opportunity but won’t have any case studies to reference in the industry, but you’ll be able to speak about your thoughts at conferences and events all centered around what you’ve done.

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