Tomorrow morning I’m meeting with a client to brainstorm ideas for their brand spankin’ new social media campaign.
I’m very excited – despite my best efforts, so far my social media campaign ideas haven’t been terribly well-received and the implementation? a little half-baked. Usually I’m passionate about the idea and see the tremendous potential of social media and the client just isn’t ready yet.
Once the campaign rolls out, I’ll share it with you, but until then, I thought I’d share my process for getting started. If you have ideas to contribute, please (please!) feel free to include them in the comments, or take the discussion to your own blog.
****
Take Stock of the Conversation: I knew social media was going to be a good fit. When I did a Technorati and Google Blogsearch on my client’s brands, the results were great. I didn’t expect posts to be bad, but for a decidedly low-tech product, I was a little afraid that I wouldn’t find anything. Primarily what I found were posts and discussion forum conversations about customers using the product. Great news! The posts and comments were very positive and really showed the ingenuity of some of the product’s users.
Using this stock of current conversations, the next step was to pitch my ideas to the client. I focused on two strategies, a corporate blog and a YouTube channel. I talked about all the great reasons for participating, I referenced some successful campaigns and anecdotes and the return on investment that they saw and I walked through how we could work together to ease any worry on their part (mostly around staff demands and time requirements). In the end, social media will be more than half of our annual public relations budget.
Moving forward to the planning process, we’re going to spend a couple of hours talking about blogging and making videos. Client is on board with both, but I want to start out with some basics. I’ll show the Common Craft Blogs in Plain English video and share Rohit Bhargava’s 25 Basic Styles of Blogging slideshow (or part of it, anyway). I’m also looking for some popular videos that were low budget and fun/shareable, too. I like Will it Blend? – it’s relevant to this client/product and the response to Blendtec is remarkable.
Inventory Existing Content: The client’s product is project-related (think crafts, home improvement), so we plan to mix in a heavy dose of how-to projects alongside guest posts from product developers, posts related to the local community and others. To write (or even repurpose) the how-to posts, we need to develop an inventory of what we have and what we need. I know this client likes the how-to focus, so I think starting here will get them thinking and open up the discussion to wider posts.
We’ll do the same process for the YouTube channel ideas.
This process of taking stock of what’s out there, inventorying the projects and content that already exists and making a list of “what to order” will put on a good path.
Low-tech, project oriented and a lot of fun! I expect this brainstorm and the subsequent planning session and the implementation to be a terrific way for this company to connect with its audiences. I look forward to sharing more details with you in the future.
Comments