As social media channels become more and more powerful they also seem to become more and more varied, it feels like every day we learn about a new cool tool, as an interactive marketer, it can be challenging to figure out which one is the best fit for which marketing strategy. I read an article in Marketing Sherpa on how to use social media in a more effective way. The article gives specific examples from IBM on how they have combined social media strategy with traditional tactics for application development, event promotion and demand generation. I have highlighted here one of them, where social media was used to promote SOA’s events and tools. 

Social Media Marketing for Event Promotion and Lead Generation

IBM wanted to bring together the SOA community and generate leads for its SOA tools and solutions. So the Marketing team organized a road show that included 100 cities. To complement the traditional marketing methods of promotion for the event which included direct mail and one-to-one invitations, IBM used an animated 3D person on the SOA website, a Twitter campaign, blogs and a widget.

- 3D Animated Character

The animated 3D character was added to the SOA website, it walked with an invitation in its’ hand, when users clicked on the character or on the invitation they were taken to a registration page. Visits to the registration page increased by 600%.

- Twitter

Messages were sent on Twitter with a promo code, users that signed up with that promo code were allowed to talk directly with one of IBM’s CTO for 30minutes. Within 3 days, over 40 people registered in Amsterdam alone.

- Blogs

The marketing team blogged about the conference on multiple development oriented blogs. The buzz created around the event caused many developers to mention the conference in their own blogs, feeds, profiles… Customers even created Facebook and LinkedIn groups supporting the event. The buzz caused by the social media ‘add-ons’ increased their event registration by 10% at no cost to the company.

- Online Community

For connecting customers after the event the team used a third-party company to build an online community website called SOAsocial. They let the third-party host the community as the goal was to make it less company/IBM focused and let it grow on its own.

- Consumer generated content

They encouraged customers to take pictures at the events and post them on Flickr afterwards. This not only increased engagement through user-generated content, but it also helped the company save thousands of dollars on hiring a photographer.

- Widget

Since the attendees of the events were potential customers for the SOA tools. The marketing team built a widget that supplied the events’ presentations. The widget could be added to a blog, website or downloaded to a computer. The widget was driven by RSS feeds, so the company could push news and products demos to potential and existing customers. 67% of the conferences’ attendees downloaded the widget.

One of the “key lesson learned” for Interactive Ad Agencies is that social media is a channel and not a strategy in itself, it is most effective when used to complement other marketing initiatives, including offline and traditional marketing.