Social Media

The following is a guest blog post from a KW Brand client.

Marketing maven Jonathan Kranz says this about the use of storytelling and marketing:

“Stories aren’t just for campfires and school children: they’re a powerful way for businesses to communicate their value, to create an emotional hook that sticks in their prospects’ imaginations.

Stories can make a business. Yet most businesses remain tongue-tied, not because they don’t have stories to tell, but because they don’t know how to tell them.”

My business–get b o r n magazine–an edgy, mouthy magazine for mothers, began with my conviction that, through story, the full realm of motherhood (that is, every stage and every experience, from adoption to grandparenthood to parenting an autistic, sociopathic or brilliantly gifted child) could be less lonely, and, therefore, less daunting.

As a bona fide evangelist for my product, I surmised that everyone would “get it” if only I could get five minutes of their time. Unfortunately, in the midst of raising four daughters, starting a business, having a limited marketing budget, and then being diagnosed with stage four breast cancer, finding five minutes to give to everyone became impossible.

I realized that my business is a classic niche business. I target moms and primary caregivers from a specific demographic and their support systems. I deliver an edgy, unpolished, though sharp product that doesn’t appeal to everyone, particularly not to any group of moms interested in keeping up a perfect image for the public.

We began to work with KW Brand Translation, defining, refining, and appropriately extending both our brand attributes and our brand definition. During a marketing retreat laden with my particular form of compensation—gourmet snacks— my staff, along with KW, fleshed out our focus, incorporating both short-and long-term goals for multi-faceted marketing strategies. At the end, we drafted a marketing plan. Our goals were lofty. We were working on a new website, doing some direct marketing, facilitating sponsored events and launching a social media strategy. Since our marketing budget is modest, Kyndra suggested we approach the “budget” question by filling in the number of hours each of the (entirely) volunteer staff would have to spend for each initiative in between their other jobs as moms and professionals.

And, because such a large portion of our demographic are at home with small children either full or part time, daily conversations (stories—see quote above) encouraging participation was a no-brainer. So we began a “get born” FaceBook fan page effort.

During the retreat, we’d reviewed our brand position and attributes so when we divvied up the job of administering the content, volunteers know what types of things to post.
We post at least one new thing a day but monitor the site for interaction throughout the day.
We’ve learned what types of posts tend to elicit the most reaction: We start with a personal anecdote of sorts, then lead into an evocative question. We post content that is honest and highlights our humanity. We look for humor and truth.

These parameters have facilitated the ongoing stories on the fan page, allowing our demographic to write their story as we write ours. Since the retreat, we’ve watched the FaceBook page grow:

We started with under 100 fans to and today have over 800 (700%!)
Every week we have approximately 150 interactions and the FaceBook post quality metric suggests that close to 10% of our fans are responding on a weekly basis. Sometimes it’s as high as 25%.
Our website traffic has also dramatically increased from between April 2009 to March 2010:

Category	April 2009 to September 2009	October 2009 to March 2010	%
Visits	1,808	3,788	109% increase
Total Page Views	4,959	25,920	422% increase
Page Views per Visit	2.74	6.84	149% increase
Bounce Rate	53%	19%	34% decrease
Average Time on Site (minutes)	2.24	4.03	79% increase
Primary Traffic Source: Referring Sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)	37.18%	54.49%

Of course the big metric is revenue. I’ve watched my revenue increase, albeit slowly, as a result of the social media activity. Patience seems to be the ticket here since our demographic is leery of a hard sell, and prefers to feel like they’re a part of a legitimate community. But, because our brand embraces a mother’s mental health and her sense of belonging in a community, this approach fits us well.

Our long-term goals will continue to involve a more steady revenue stream through an increased subscription base as well as maintenance and acquisition of loyal advertisers. We plan to continue the use of social media while also branching into both direct marketing and events as our fan base continues to grow and build loyalty. We’re also considering other ways to leverage the community we’ve created.

My advice? The first step is realizing that everyone loves a good story, regardless of the product involved. Because, we, as people, are made up of our stories. Once you’ve established your own story (and believe me, you’ve got one—unless your company is being run by robots), tell it bit by bit through social media, offering tasty morsels of humanity. Then, elicit a response from your customer or fan base asking them to respond in kind. The thrill of social networks like FaceBook is twofold: first of all, people love to see themselves in print, even if it’s online. Secondly, we all love instant gratification, which social networking hands out in spades. When you give your customers the opportunity to interact with you on this level, you don’t simply build a customer base; you build relationships, and in spite of the ever-increasing activity online, all any of us want, at the end of the day, is to be known. The cake is the revenue; the icing on the cake is knowing that you’ve built genuine rapport with real people.

Heather Janssen

Publisher, Editor and co-founder of get born magazine: the uncensored voice of motherhood

In May, I blogged about my opinions on the (high) emotional energy invested in social media like Facebook, Linked In and Twitter. At the time, I was skeptical of the real value of social media. It seemed to me that business leaders were acting less from a thoughtful conviction of strategy than because they felt the pressure to jump on the social media bandwagon lest they appear out of touch. I suggested that if marketing practitioners and business owners were going to insist on adding the social media options to their existing business activities, they should at least ensure that their efforts were an extension of their brand messaging strategy and adding real value to their audiences.

I’ll confess, I gave that advice with some skepticism because I had not seen solid evidence suggesting that the time and money (mostly time) people invest in social media is paying off.

Shortly after writing my little missive, however, I was invited by a local software company to a networking session during which we’d discuss the whys and wherefore’s of social media. I went, (mostly because my good friend and former client Meredith suggested it). The host kicked off our session with the disclaimer that he and his team were in no way experts on the subject of social media, but that they would—as a means of getting the conversational ball rolling (and a genius soft sell of their services)—share their own social media strategy.

What really hooked me was when they shared that you could use services like Peoplebrowsr to monitor and sift through all Tweets looking for the search parameters of your choice. This appealed to me because I frankly don’t care what Paris Hilton is doing or that my cousin has a head cold (sorry, I’m insensitive like that). The only reason I’d consider investing my limited time in social media is because I want to connect with people who might be prospective clients, business partners or are thinking about things that will inform what I do. I selectively follow people like that and—given Twitter etiquette—they typically follow me back. So I’ve generated a small network of people who are in the business of marketing in Colorado or otherwise doing brand strategy and research. Here’s what I’ve learned:

The key word to the optimal use of social media is “interaction.” Yet, very few business people who are on Twitter or Facebook use their accounts to interact. Instead, they’re basically doing the same old, one-sided, push marketing using new channels (“Check me out!” Look at me! Look at me!). And I can’t really blame them. It takes effort to come up with evocative Tweets or status updates that are on-brand and under 140 characters. But when it’s done right, it generates interaction and engagement. A client of mine does a great job: Get Born Magazine is a women’s magazine that publishes “the uncensored, unvarnished and wildly hilarious voice of motherhood” and has used social media to generate fantastic and thought-provoking conversations on-line.
There are a lot of really smart people doing great work out there. Some of my new Tweeps are doing some great research and publishing great insights. I’m happy to share valuable content like this with my own followers. I have never re-tweeted or posted a status update of someone who’s just marketing themselves.
By always posting my website link onto the ends of my Tweets or Facebook updates, the social media work I have done has lured people onward toward my website and I have seen my website traffic go up 20 percent and the traffic sources diversify to include more referring sites.
This is social media so if, for whatever reason, you’re being anti-social, the party continues without you. During my maternity leave, my social networking activities took a dive and so did my website traffic and number of new Twitter followers.

The real measure to any new marketing endeavor, should of course be whether or not it’s generating new business and so far, no, it hasn’t. Given the nature of what I do, I have come to accept I have a very long, highly relational, sales cycle, so for now, I’m giving social media the benefit of the doubt and operating under the belief that my activities are generating brand awareness for KW Brand Translation. But I haven’t yet tested that theory so the experiment continues.

What have you tried and learned with social media? Let the conversation begin!

Kyndra Wilson, KW Brand Translation

Story, Community and Social Media: A Case Study

Lessons Learned About Social Media (So Far)

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