“Three Killer Social Media Case Studies from SMC San Francisco”

On Tuesday night, the San Francisco/Silicon Valley Chapter of the Social Media Club hosted a night of social media marketing and PR case studies. That’s right, six companies pulled together their best campaigns from the last couple months and threw them into PowerPoint presentations.  Some might call this a geekfest, we at socialTNT call it heaven.  All the presentations were amazing, but we’ve chosen some of our favorites to bring you notes from the front line.

Starbucks Gets Feedback From its Customers Through Online Community

Matthew Guiste, program manager for mystarbucksidea.com joined us live via Skype video from Starbucks HQ in Seattle. Like Dell’s Ideastorm, Mystarbucks.com is a community set up to increase communications between the company and their customers.  It serves two primary functions: to respond to the community and to review and promote ideas.  Customers join the online community to submit suggestions/comments and vote on others’ ideas.  There are also forums where customers can talk directly to Starbucks representatives (roughly 200  moderators) from departments like beverages, cards, food and Human Resources.

For Matthew, the biggest challenge has been maintaining engagement to keep visitors involved and excited.  Anyone can create a community, but creating sustainable activity takes work.  Starbucks handles this through six “pillars”

• Visible Action
  • Starbucks has to show visitors that their ideas are implemented.  You have to show the community that their voice is being heard
  • To date, Starbucks has made approximately 50 changes based on customer suggestions.  Some of these include Splash Sticks and Gold Cards
• Great discussions
  • Mystarbucksidea.com strives to be like a group discussion with the company. It also  encourages discussion between customers
• Promotion
  • Ads and placards in stores that show this idea brought to you by community
• New Features
  • Mystarbucksidea.com includes dynamic new features to keep customers engaged and interested.  One successful tool has been polls–like one asking: “If the barristas were able to have tattoos, would you still come”
• New Geographies
  • Starbucks plans on adding other countries to the mix
• New ways to use site to have people engage in brand
  • One upcoming feature will let customers with stores under renovations connect with employees so they can help decide things like what art, books and music will be included when their store opens

Since it’s launch in March of 2008, Starbucks has had these results:

• 3 million unique visitors
• 60,000 ideas submitted
• 100,000s of comments
• 460,000 votes
• 2,500 moderator comments

LSF Interactive Launches Successful Viral Video Campaign for Hooman TV

David Peck, social media strategist at LSF Interactive, presented a case study around the promotion of a YouTube video.  The video, sponsored by Palm, was created by Hooman TV to get out the vote during the election.

LSF Interactive agreed upon on these objectives with their client for the video:

• 3,200,000 views
• 3000 comments

The campaign started with Facebook.  David and his team shared the video to their newsfeeds.  They also targeted political-oriented groups, posting a brief synopsis of the video and a link to the group walls.

The bulk of the outreach, however, was based in YouTube.  The team focused their efforts in a three pronged approach:

• Active facilitation of conversation and discussion in the comments section
  • The team had around four moderators watching the comments on the video.  Whenever anyone commented, the managers commented back.  They disclosed their affiliation through their name
  • Because it really helped get conversation going, David believes this form of engagement was crucial to the success of the campaign
• Daily modification of SEO terms to draw viewers from related videos
  • YouTube recommends videos based on the keywords.  Each day, the team looked at top political videos and matched the Hooman TV keywords to reflect the most popular on the relevant channels
• Active engagement with blogs or sites who link back to the video
  • YouTube offers free stats and link data on each video you upload.  Using this information, the LSF team could track linkbacks and then comment on the blogs who have shared the video with their readers.
  • This active participation created more discussion around the video and also positioned Hooman TV as active members in the online community.

At the end of the campaign, LSF Interactive’s efforts yielded these results for their client:

• Posts on blogs and sites like CNET, Yelp, Huffington Post and DailyKos (14,00 views from this site alone)
• 5 million views
• 3,692 comments
• Video has 4.5 stars from 3,700 user ratings

Swirl Uses Social Media Outreach to Successfully Promote an Event

Cory O’Brien and Bo Jacobson, both account managers at Swirl, presented how they promoted the Dwell on Design event for sustainable design magazine Dwell.

The team’s number one objective was to sell out the event.  Because they wanted to reach audiences and interact with them where they live, they chose to use a combination of Twitter, Facebook and blogger outreach to build their campaign.

Some obstacles the team encountered:

• Since the event was located in LA, the blogger outreach would need to be limited to regional targets.  The team would need to check the location of each blogger to ensure they weren’t sending them irrelevant information
• They were running an online campaign for an offline event.  The team would need to be sure to keep messaging clear and easy to understand
• The client had a PR firm to promote the magazine. That PR firm had already claimed top tier bloggers

The team started by creating an online media kit to house all the digital assets.  Kinda like a social media newsroom, this repository became the place that bloggers could get anything they would need to build their story.  This included all the creative work like videos, photos, banners, widgets and slide shows.

The blogger outreach started with a listening phase.  Using technorati, blogpulse, blogcatlog and google blog, the team complied a list of blogs.  Before beginning outreach, the team vetted the targets using these qaulifying questions:

• Does the blog cover events in LA or the Southern California region?
• Does the blog focus on design? Have they covered Dwell Magazine in the past?
• Does the blog cover sustainability?
• Would they want information? Will they want to participate?
• Will the promotions be fun for them?

The team narrowed it down to 200 blogs.  Some of their outreach included discounts to the event.

Since Dwell magazine already had a Facebook page, the team decided to create an Event page on Facebook.  The goal of this page was not to drive traffic outside of Facebook, but instead to serve as a central hub to point people in correct path.  This included schedules and other information to help people decide whether they wanted to attend.  The event page is also easy for people to share with friends and it shows up in people’s newsfeeds.

For Twitter, the Swirl team searched for people already talking about Dwell magazine.  Sometimes this role took on a more customer service slant.  During one search, they found a Dwell reader who’s subscription had ran out.  The reader was hesitant about renewing because he had questions about the sustainability of a print magazine. The team informed himt hat a digital version was available.  They also encouraged him to check out the event.

The Swirl team’s campaign ended with these results:

• 15,000 tickets sold (sold out)
• ongoing facebook community
• Satisfied client

ROI was key to winning over the client.  The team presented their results in an Excel graph showing outreach with response at a quick glance.  They also showed a Facebook graph, denoting spikes when messages came out.

Hope these case studies gave you as many ideas as they gave me!  What other things would you have done in these campaigns to make them more effective? Have you run similar campaigns? Share your battle stories below!

Special thanks to Cathryn Hrudicka, Mike McGrath and Shashi Bellamkonda for great presentations!

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