BC AIM hosted a sold out session October 8th at the Sutton Place Hotel entitled: Is Social Media Marketing all Hype?
The second of a two part series on Social Media, the engaging and informative luncheon consisted of a panel of 4 esteemed Social Media experts including George Moen, president of Blenz Coffee, Richard Sandor, managing director of DDB Vancouver, Chris Breikss, president of 6S Marketing; and Ryan Holmes, CEO of Invoke Media.
Moderated by Steve Mossop, president of Ipsos Reid, each panelist gave real-world examples on how their clients, and their organizations use Social Media to reach their goals.
When Blenz President George Moen discovered his customers were having conversations online without him, he realized he had to get involved to control his brand. Moen enjoys the instantaneous feedback he receives by regularly interacting with his customers on Twitter and Facebook. A Blenz promotion offering a daily $5 prize to anyone who uses word “Blenz” in their Tweets has helped attract over 1600 Twitter followers.
Moen admits to arriving “Late to the Party” but now looks at all Social Media options as a smorgasbord. By selecting the best platform for each task, Moen is able to maximum the features each platform has to offer. With the arrival of Foursquare in Vancouver, Moen was quick to get involved by recognizing newly appointed Mayors at Vancouver Blenz locations resulting in a story in the Vancouver Sun.
Moen says the biggest challenge to implementing a social media strategy is resistance to change within the organization. “Technology moves fast, people don’t”, says Moen.
Ryan Holmes, CEO of Invoke Media, outlined their social media strategy for the launch of HootSuite 2.0. HootSuite 1.0 was released in December 2008 as a free web-based professional Twitter client. Existing HootSuite users were offered the new version in advance of the release date by Tweeting, “I Upgraded to HootSuite 2.0 because …” Users could then have some fun and finish the Tweet anyway they liked. The promotion was so successful, HootSuite 2.0 became one of the Twitter “Trending Topics” within 7 hours after the launch. Aside from the time required to design the strategy and a few technical issues, there were no other direct costs to the campaign.
Chris Breikss, President of 6S Marketing, shared part of the Social Media strategy they designed and implemented for the Opus Hotel. Prior to working with 6S, their primary method of communicating with their clients was through their newsletter. 6S setup up a master Twitter account and 4 additional sub-accounts for each business group. They then gave the Opus staff a set of guidelines on Tweeting which bypassed the lengthy approval process of the newsletter. Breikss pointed out that while Social media ROI is harder to measure than SEM, there are some metrics available. With 1700 followers on their primary Twitter account along with 2500 Facebook fans, Opus was able to increase communication with their audience 100 fold.
Richard Sandor, Managing Director of DDB Vancouver, took us through the spectacular “Where is This?” campaign for the Canadian Tourism Commission (CTC). As with all their projects, they started by defining the business goal. In this case, the goal was to convince Canadians to travel within Canada on their vacation. Using a Flickr group, a YouTube channel, and working with bloggers to spread the word, they asked individuals and tourism sites to upload their best images of Canada to the localsknow.ca website. Using 4,000 uploads, they put together “Where is This?” TV spots that drove viewers to the Locals Know website where they of course they discover that locations are all right here in Canada.
During the Q&A Steve Mossop asked, “Canadians spend as much as 50% of their time online using some form of social networking site. So why are Canadian companies only devoting 11% of their adverting budgets online?” While no one had a definitive answer, with online advertising accounting for 24 percent of the total UK ad market, the opportunity for growth in Social Media marketing in Canada is enormous.
