Doritos, Facebook, Social Media in Wichita Kansas, Social Media Strategy, Super Bowl, Twitter, Wichita

At JuggleMedia, we help you tame the social circus by bringing you tips on how to localize your marketing based off of what the big brands are doing. If there’s a few things we can learn from Budweiser spending $3 million for :30 seconds on Sunday, it’s that they are maximizing their time online to boost the outreach of this traditional marketing channel. You can too!

USA Today posted this article today about how the Super Bowl ads will mix old and new media together. Pushing people from the $3 million :30 second commercial to places like Facebook, Twitter, iPads, smart phones and custom websites.

How can you benefit from these social media and online marketing tactics here in Wichita Kansas? Creating a Facebook Page may be a step, but as these brands are leading, it’s not enough to build a Doritos page and hope people show up.

To get the most locally out our social media, here are three tips to consider.

1. Create strong, meaningful, content-rich and brand-appropriate social media channels.

You and I can both tell which local company had a professional set-up their Facebook Page and which one’s didn’t. Sure, we both know that you can get going on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube yourself, but what apps are you going to use? How are you going to transition people that visit the page to fans? How are you going to maximize what little attention you grab from your potential customers? Creating a strong, meaningful, content-rich and brand-appropriate channel requires a tremendous amount of thought that can’t be achieved by an intern on a Friday afternoon. Places like Doritos spend hundreds of thousands of dollars setting up their Facebook page and developing a specific app. Now, you don’t need to go quite that far, but we do encourage you to take it serious.

2. Integrate your old and new media marketing.

Integrating your old and new media marketing is not accomplished by putting a Facebook and Twitter logo on your newspaper ad. Sorry. Integrating is about connecting the dots and making the conversation last over all of your channels and not just one. Use your Facebook page as a place to connect to people and tell them when to catch, call, connect in person. Set-up Twitter relationships with influential people that can help you when it’s time to promote your next golf tournament. Realize, as that USA Today article states, that the new water cooler isn’t in the break room, but online, in your hand, on your iPad, in the coffee shop, on YouTube.

3. Know WHY you are doing it!

How many times do you see an ad in a local paper, magazine or even television commercial that says “Find us on Facebook”? Um, WHY? What’s in it for me?!? I don’t know you!

You see, social channels like Facebook are personal. Your business is trying to connect with me in my personal space. Intermixed with my friends, family and that creepy old high school “friend” is your business trying to connect. You simply must know why you are there and WHAT you are offering. It’s not enough to simple say connect. Creating a plan is a vital first step to connecting properly across even one channel, much less multiple. The guys at Sketchers have spent an entire year and millions of dollars to get Kim Kardashian ‘s private gym rocking, and for what? :30 seconds of fame? Nope, much more with her current twitter follower count of 6,148,629 followers. Sure the :30 second Super Bowl commercial may pull an audience of 100 Million, but its the added bonus of Kim tweeting before, during and after the big game that Sketchers is counting on (and has contractually signed. If not already in the sending que.)

At JuggleMedia, we help Wichita businesses make sense of this crazy social media circus to create actionable plans and campaigns designed to make businesses connect more effectively online. We with with your business to create, integrate and socialize your brands products and services. To contact us, drop us an email off to the right or call us at 316.747.9266 and we’ll help you Tame the social circus.

Facebook, JuggleMedia Wichita, MailChimp, Social Media Strategy, Twitter, Ustream, wedding, Wichita Social Media, YouTube

Usually, I try to keep the blog posting here on JuggleMedia.com about social media and how it pertains to companies in and around Wichita, Kansas. Today, however, I’m going completely off the reservation.

IT’S MY WEDDING WEEK!

Yep. It is. Boo-yah! I thought this day would never come!

So what does this mean to you, and more important, why am I writing about this here and not on my Facebook Page? Well, simply put there are some things that even businesses can learn about social media when it comes to the social channels we’ve set-up for our wedding

First, let’s start with our Wedding Website. If you go to ryanandkelsi.com, you’ll see it looks a lot like another site somewhere out there, say, oh, JuggleMedia. That’s because we use WordPress.org and the Mystique theme. Being that I know the Mystique theme pretty well, I didn’t want to spend hours and hours creating a site from scratch. WordPress gives you the tools to get online and pretty fast.

Instead of going for a “Save the Date” card, about 80% of our guests are on Facebook, so we opted for an event called “Ryan & Kelsi Save-The-Date.” We were going to call it Ryan & Kelsi Wedding, but we wanted our audience to know that this was something they were getting and it needs to be written down. That and Facebook Events offers some pretty sweet calendar export tools that allows our guest to click one button and they’ve got it down.

Now that the event is FINALLY here, we are using different channels to continue to promote how we’re doing. For example, our personal Facebook Pages have been an excellent place for our audience to interact with us. Also, we use our personal Twitter accounts to keep the wedding party up to date. We’ve even used GoogleDocs to capture our RSVPs and then we can send an email blast to all of our guest using MailChimp to update them on where they need to be and when. Finally, we’re still kicking around the idea of using my UStream channel to stream our wedding live to a few guests that can’t make it, like my cousin who is on the no-fly list because she is so pregnant she is about to pop. We’re still deciding for personal reasons if we want to do that. I’ll let you know.

All of these different channels connect a different segment of the audience that we need to communicate. It’s about overlap and not just picking one and saying that’s it. Not all of our guest are on Facebook (although that’s by far the largest portion) and not even there are they guarenteed to connect. Social Media is about using these channels together to get your message across while understanding your audience and who they are.

In business, it’s the same way. Setting up all of these different channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, UStream, GoogleDocs, MailChimp and the thousand other channels is important ONLY IF that’s where your audience hangs out. I still had to send my Grandma a paper invitation, but was able to talk to her over Skype about it. (Funny side-note- She did say that if she knew she was going to be on TV she would have put on more make-up. Pretty funny stuff!)

So when you are thinking about events, business meetings and marketing in general think about these different social channels and the audience. When you need help call me at JuggleMedia, Wichita’s Social Media Company after Labor Day. We help Wichita companies understand these channels, how to connect people and how to transfer the audience into actual customers. We have a proven track-record of successful campaigns and pages including one currently running that has gained an average of 40 new followers a day on Facebook. Enjoy your day!

Cancun, here we come!

Ryan

Facebook, Social Media Strategy, Twitter

A little pre-lunch rant…

Today I recieved the worst objection to date: I’m getting an intern to handle our social media.

Awesome. Good luck.

Social media needs to be done right. Here’s what’s going to happen. This company will get the intern and they will set them up with a typical Facebook page, it’ll probably have the necessary information, but it’ll stop there. Then what?

A proper social media strategy is super important to the long-term success of the company. There’s a huge difference between having somebody “manage” something and somebody “leading” something. Social media sites like Facebook and tweets on Twitter are actually communications that are VITAL to the organization. They are the virtual face of the company. Would you throw an intern in front of the local newspaper and have them handle all the questions that arise? Would you have the intern set up the website? Would you have the intern run your company? Would you have an intern handle customer objections on day one?

Now, although I may be a little harsh, my point is that social media is a HUGE deal. This is the future in the way we will communicate. It’s incredibly important for a business owner, especially a small one named after the owner, to control their social media presence. “I’m too busy”‘s and “It’s not important”‘s are garbage. Are you too busy to talk to the people giving you money? Are you saying that your customers aren’t important?

That’s what you are telling me if you hire an intern to handle your social media. It doesn’t take long to figure it out, just simple training and success from JuggleMedia.

Thanks. Rant over.