The Social Media Advantage. Holly Berkley

Our customers include Target Stores, Celadon, HH Gregg, Interstate Distributing, and Knight Transportation, among others.

      Marketing Goals, History

      Our goal in using social media has been to better connect with our current customers, while finding new prospective customers and associates to work with. We also wish to maximize our web presence and engage our demographic through a more personalized experience.

      In 2009, we launched our social media presence, and have since established accounts on Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google’s G+ and LinkedIn, along with our Brandwire Blog. As with all our networks, we expanded our Flickr presence daily by publishing new photographs of our work, searching for current customers and prospects (Flickr search), and searching via common keywords respective of our industry. New contacts were emailed a brief, personalized note to welcome them, which led to my (Josh Humble) connecting with a print broker in St. Louis, IL. I then introduced him to Glenn Burris, one of TKO’s national account representatives. Glenn drove to St. Louis, where they talked about how we could help each other. The broker was contacted by an ad agency that needed a large format graphics company with traveling installation crews. This led to TKO presenting to a large national company. After meeting with the national company for a second time, TKO provided a proposal and was awarded the contract.

      A Multi-Faceted Marketing Plan

      • Social Media: Publishing our portfolio to Flickr, while adhering to best practices for titles, description tags.

      • Social Networking: Proactively seeking prospects and engaging with target audience via the network.

      • Traditional Networking: Meeting face to face with prospectives.

      • Sales Presentation: Presenting in-person to the prospective customer.

      In the middle of a very challenging recession, 2009 was our best year yet, thanks to the power of social media and engaged marketing.

      We re-branded over 4,000 vehicles at 221 locations in North America for the national company. We also manufactured all decals and wraps, de-identified their vehicles, and installed new graphics, while creating an online fulfillment program for easy ordering.

      Understanding and using all traditional forms of applicable marketing, in conjunction with new media marketing, has been one of our biggest lessons learned. Social media works - however, we always need to be where our audience is.

      Considering our markets are composed of both traditional AND new media demographics, keeping a balance of mediums and tools used has been greatly beneficial.

       —Josh Humble

       Interaction Designer, Photographer, and Social Media Strategist for TKO Graphix

      www.tkographix.com

      Focus on relevant, quality messaging, not quantity, to attract your audience.

      When local plumber, Tim McKenna of McKenna Plumbing canceled his newspaper and Yellow Page ads to save money, he eventually turned to Twitter to drum up business. He quickly learned that a subtle, more conversational approach won out over direct, hard selling. Although his Twitter handle @itstheplumber, identifies his profession, his bio is friendly, sharing that he “loves tango, yoga, rowing, endurance sports.”

      “Forget about the number of followers,” said Mckenna, “It’s most important to connect with the people who do follow you.”

      McKenna learned this first hand when a follower with a plumbing issue reached out to him on Twitter. The follower’s kitchen sink lost water pressure and she was hoping to find a quick fix online. McKenna ended up resolving her issue via a phone call, however the expert advice resulted in a quality Twitter testimonial for everyone to see.

      In specialized fields or niche industries especially, quality trumps quantity every time. In other words, it’s better to have a few hundred Twitter users who subscribe to your tweets (“followers”) who are your core audience and care about what you have to say, than to have thousands of followers that will never notice you or become your online advocates by retweeting and responding to what you have to say. The same idea holds true with blogging*. Its best to have well-crafted, thought out blog posts that convey your brand messaging while providing insightful opinions and information than to post mindless chatter every day. It’s the quality posts that will get forwarded, linked to, picked up by various RSS feeds* and help your online presence grow.

      Figure 2.2: Building a focused social presence and crafting quality content will generate a targeted following that is more likely to engage and help share your messages.

      Understanding not only who your target audience is, but why they are engaged on a specific social network, is important. You want to understand what kind of information they are seeking in a particular social space and be able to provide that to them. For example, your Facebook friends* may want to see different types of information than those who subscribe to your blog. Through testing and tracking which types of posts and information gain the most feedback in the form of comments, likes* or shares*, you will be able to optimize each social communication channel to benefit each audience, and therefore get closer to reaching your specific business goals.

      A 2011 study by Razorfish found that among all social networks, friends, followers and fans cited “feeling valued” as the most important element of engaging with a company online. Therefore it isn’t just about providing your audience with the type of information they seek; “companies should worry less about building out numerous channels and touch points and more about ensuring each customer interaction communicates value,” Razorfish says.

      Ensuring value and quality posts is something PlaceMakers, LLC seems to weave effortlessly into their communications. The principals of PlaceMakers create well-thought-out blog posts that generate emotion and response, while they also fit powerful observations into 140 characters or less on Twitter. Creating a message that generates emotion and response is what social media is all about. After all, social media is designed to spark dialogue between individuals to create a feeling of community. It is not a successful tool for simply pushing company announcements and press releases. Those types of posts and tweets will probably not succeed in the social media space.

      “We see ourselves less as individual planners, designers, marketers, etc. and more as cultivators of community,” said PlaceMaker’s Doyon. “Instead of just writing for other planners, we’re building relationships with environmentalists, developers, city boosters, bike and pedestrian advocates and all kinds of other folks who care about community improvement.”

      PlaceMakers has cast a pretty wide net to cover their target audiences. But they don’t do this by having one marketer or sales person doing all the tweeting, posting and chatting. Instead, PlaceMakers is able to reach many different types of audiences with valuable, thoughtful information, because they allow each team member to blog, tweet and post about subjects that are most important to them. This approach helps pave the way for each team member to begin establishing themselves as potential thought leaders in their specific areas of interest and expertise.

      Deborah Reale, community manager and marketing specialist at Reed Construction Data of Norcross, Georgia (http://www.reedconstructiondata.com/), has developed a similar social media strategy for Twitter. Rather than trying to push messages out and listen to all the feedback and chatter at once, she recommends segmenting Twitter followers by area of expertise, to keep better track of feedback as well as provide useful information in a more organized and powerful way.

      “I’m a doctoral candidate in business, so to me, Twitter is similar to a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) chart,” explains Reale of her Twitter strategy. “If a firm has its ’following’ organized and lists them properly, management should be able to discern the SWOT for products, the organization, competitors, customers, prospects; even the industry itself.”

      By using social media sites like