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Creating a "social media campaign" doesn't have to be as daunting as it sounds. In fact, in many cases, your customers and evangelists are already doing the heavy-lifting for you, you just have to bring it all together.
Here's how painfully easy it can be to create a social media initiative. Josh recently posted about how the Georgia Aquarium is harnessing the content that its visitors are creating to serve as a powerful endorsement tool for the attraction. Officials from the Georgia Aquarium started spending some time on the popular photo posting/sharing site Flickr. And they quickly noticed that members were posting a ton of photos taken while visiting the Georgia Aquarium.
So the GA created a Flickr group and invited members that had pictures taken at the aquarium to join and submit their "five best" shots to the group. Some of the photos will also be shown inside the Georgia Aquarium itself, and on the aquarium's relaunched site.
And speaking of the relaunched site, it will include photos from visitors, as well as their stories from their visits to the aquarium. All the Georgia Aquarium has done is utilize the content that its visitors were already creating, and then put it in a central location to serve as a very powerful visual promotion for the attraction. Then they call on the visitors to add their own personal stories about their visit to the aquarium.
One of the smartest marketing moves you can make is to find your existing evangelists, and empower them to market for you. Social media makes it incredibly easy to do just that.
 Pic via Flickr user Hyku
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Comments
Good move for Georgia Aquarium, also its a beautiful place to visit, especially if your into fish. Good post, keep up the good work.
Posted by: Dedicated Hosting | 11.13.07
Blogging is the extent of SMO for me. The ROI on these networking sites just doesn't look to be worth the effort. However, YouTube has real potential.
Posted by: geri | 11.14.07
My letter to Revilution magazine: Customer satisfaction is the key, as your October editorial stated. Customers broadcast their disappointment and evangelise their delight. Myriad blogs, specialist forums and other social media provide the soapboxes for sharing brand, product and service experiences.
However, in the analysis article Web Communities flex their muscles, Nick Keppel-Palmer (Wolf Olins) argues that monitoring every last thing that's said on the web is not really practical . The right combination of technology and human analysis makes listening to consumers on the internet possible and can provide proactive insight that is fast, candid
and less expensive than reactive MR.
In the Revolution Masterclass on social media usability, Catriona Campbell (Foviance) advises that:
" ... people really have to understand their peer-to-peer marketing and word of mouth before they get involved in social marketing."
Extracting insight from online dialogue helps in understanding and engaging with consumers. As Katrina Burchell, Unilever points out:"User-generated content sites are very much our consumers', so the insights they give us about what they're interested in, what they're watching and what they're doing can be invaluable."
You certainly cannot control every web comment but you definitely need to perceive before you can protect, participate and project.
Posted by: Jonathan Moody | 11.14.07
A timely article for me. We are dipping our toe into the water for social media and are looking for genuine, real methods to capture our evagelists in action in the outdoors. They share so much with us privately that contains beauty without boundaries. Thanks for reinforcing a great way to reach out in an authentic way.
Posted by: Diane Davidson | 11.14.07
"A timely article for me. We are dipping our toe into the water for social media and are looking for genuine, real methods to capture our evagelists in action in the outdoors. They share so much with us privately that contains beauty without boundaries. Thanks for reinforcing a great way to reach out in an authentic way."
Good stuff Diane. The key to empowering your evangelists is to find ways to make it easier for them to perform the activities they are already engaging in. Shoot me an email and I'll be happy to give you some advice.
Posted by: Mack Collier | 11.14.07
Nice Article. For me social media marketing is where search marketing was a few years ago. Both can successfully build web traffic and they should be used in concert by great strategic marketers. But the social media stuff is entertaining, it's content and for creatives it is the new wild west.
Steve
Posted by: Steve Byrne | 11.20.07