It’s Social Media Week!

This is Social Media Week!  A week for reflecting on the global impact of social media and its role of driving cultural, economic and social change in markets.  Over 150+ different events taking place in London!

As it is Social Media Week, I would like to take this opportunity to talk about a couple of my favourite social media campaigns.

BMW “What Drives You?” Graffiti Contest

To honor BMW’s “1 Series”, the German carmaker created an online graffiti contest where participants answered the question, “What drives you?” through creating their own designs on the outline of the car.

9,000 designs were submitted which, in total received 500,000 total votes.  The winners of the competition received BMW car models.

Audi’s #ProgressIs Super Bowl

The German carmaker merged old school advertising with new media, making it the first company to use a Twitter hashtag in a Super Bowl advert.

Their advert featured jazz connoissuer and two prisoners breaking out of a luxurious prison and making a getaway in a new Audi A8 Sedan.  The message of the advert, to break the confines of old luxury with Audi’s more sleek and modern take.  However, more importantly, the advertisement features the promoted Twitter hashtag  #ProgressIs and Twitter users who take part in the hashtag relay will automatically enter themselves in a competition to win a series of prizes.

The hashtag competition created a lot of online reception and the Twitter account saw a 47% increase in followers taking them up to 28,000 but noticed a spike in visitors before the Super Bowl started.

Your social media plan

When creating your social media plan, remember that creativity is key in order to grab the attention of your audience.  Does your social media strategy tell a story?

The creative aspect of your plan will incorporate the key benefits  of your company/brand and how your audience can benefit from using your service.  You should add topics for discussion which will entice people to engage with you, thus creating excitement about your company and building relationships with people who are potentially going to be advocates for your brand.

Give your brand a personality 

This is where some companies get it wrong.  Your social media plan shouldn’t consist of blasting people with sales messages, this will only alienate people.  Over the years, people have learnt to switch off to sales messages, instead why not think about what your audience will like.  What can they relate to which will tie in with your brand??  Get into the mind’s of your key target audience and think carefully!  How old are they?  What do they enjoy?  What would interest them the most? (also refer to my blog post “What is your social media strategy?”)…. Now, include this into your social media plan!

If you want to learn more about the ways in which you can “humanize” your brand on Facebook, then take a look at Aaron Lee’s post, “7 tips to humanize your brand on Facebook”

Here’s what I did…

I used to work for a wholesale corset company and they wanted to go down the retail route and sell their corsets through their own website.  Their main objective was to reach the first page of Google for the search term ‘corset’ and ‘corsets’.  At the time, I had no real idea of how to use SEO, so I decided to try achieve this through the use of social media and blogger relations focusing on burlesque, curvy ladies and anything to do with 40’s and 50’s pinup glamour and that’s when my 50’s pinup character was born!

I created a pinup character called Paulina and had a vision of what she would look like, wearing the corsets from the website and she would be the ‘face’ of the social networking sites and blog.  So we had her designed by a graphic designer and gave her a real personality!  including the retro lingo i.e. “Hi guys and dolls”.  Every two months she would change her outfit and be re-designed accordingly which again gave a reason to chat to people across the social sites, i.e. “Hey everyone, I’ve changed my outfit for the winter…I’m now polka-dot Paulina” and “How do all you dolls like my new blonde locks?  I dyed my hair for the Summer season” etc

People loved Paulina, she was even mentioned in some of the popular blogs, such as Old Hollywood Glamour , 100% People and Oola la Vintage blog.

Over a period of 3 months, the website was promoted to the first page of Google and Paulina gained many friends 🙂

What is your social media strategy?

Once you have figured out why you are using social media for your business, you then need to plan your strategy.  Your strategy should include either, some or all of these objectives:

Maintain relationships

Build relationships

Raise awareness

Manage negative social media

As noted in my previous post (the best social media monitoring tools) before even applying the strategy, you must ‘listen’ to your audience to decipher what they already saying about your company/brand.

Here are a few steps that I usually follow when analysing the general tone of audience conversations:

• Assess the most influential high profile discussions/social networking groups and summarise their views, noting example content and any surprising findings.
• Research which individuals who are most influential with your key target audience.  If you are using Twitter, try using Klout – another social media tool which will provide you with a score as to how influential they are.
• You can then make concrete recommendations based on what you have learned, for how you can apply your social media strategy, whether it is improving the tone of online discussion, amplify positive content or win over skeptical or neutral influencers.

If you are a small business just starting out with social media, then I would suggest using Facebook Ad’s as a way of creating an audience for engagement.  Facebook Ad’s works like PPC.