Social Media, Small Business and Real Returns (part 3)
October 28th, 2009
Continuing this week’s series of posts on small and medium-sized businesses (local and regional) who are using social media tactics in a way that’s delivering real return on their time invested, I want to thank Jill Harrison, who holds the title of Manager, Public Relations and Image Development for the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber. She was kind enough to share this social media case study:
Here at the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber, we use social media heavily for our twice annual trade show called SchmoozaPalooza. There are two main ways we use it: 1) to drive event attendance and 2) to update followers during the actual event.
Our event, called “Business After Hours,” had declining attendance. We decided to re-brand it (and call it SchmoozaPalooza) and spread the word in a new way – through social media.
We set up profiles on Twitter, Linkedin, Plaxo, MySpace and Facebook. We started by attracting “friends” before we tried to sell or promote anything. We figured out what our followers were interested in, and informed them on a variety of events, not just about SchmoozaPalooza. This helped us build credibility.
After a period of time, we began to promote SchmoozaPalooza. The closer to the event we got, the more we promoted it. By the time the event drew near, we had 102 followers on Twitter, 441 friends on Linkedin, 209 friends on Plaxo, 117 friends on MySpace, and 568 friends on Facebook. During the actual event, we encouraged our attendees to “tweet” what they were doing, what was happening and what they thought. A large TV screen in the front and back of the event showed the scrolling “tweets” to passersby.
After the event when we did our evaluation, we saw that attendance had nearly quadrupled – from 200 to 725. Our revenue doubled. The best part is that we can utilize these friend groups in the future. Social media helped us reach a whole new audience.
Double the revenue. Quadruple the attendance. For an event that was experiencing declining attendance. Now that’s a social media success!
Tomorrow: The proverbial “best of the rest” as I dig into the 50-plus emails I received from my HARO query and pluck out some of the shiniest gems for our social media edification.