IMC Live Blog: Social Media Marketing Success Stories

After this morning’s keynote we’ve migrated into another conference room to see Darren and Julie of Capulet and their presentation: “The Many-Armed Starfish – Social Media Marketing Success Stories”.

I’ve had to park myself at the back of the room since my MacBook is going to lose power but hopefully I’ll still be able to catch the slide that I’m (apparently) on.

Julie is up first, outlining five social media marketing success stories.

The first being: Blogs and the Brother Printer campaign (in which John and I participated). Darren and Julie outline their unique approaches, from snail mail campaigns to bloggers, to their unique comic book pitches. 17 of 20 of those pitched, agreed to participate.

Update: 10:10am – The next is success story involves Twitter and we’re treated to a CommonCraft In Plain English video. Julie gives some examples of businesses that are using Twitter for marketing purposes. The example given is Carnival Cruise Lines. [Editor’s note: Grouse Mountain and Whole Foods are two other companies I know of that are using Twitter]. Julie’s next example is Magnolia, that uses Twitter for tech support and status issues. Twitter can also be used for news channel updates.

Update: 10:20am – The next case study uses YouTube and EA Sports’ engagement with clever ads in response to user videos online. “Go where the users are,” suggests Darren.

The fourth case study is Flickr and Julie uses DeSmogBlog as an example. They helped them run a “greatest photo ever” campaign using Flickr as a platform. It allowed for many user-submitted entries, tags, comments, and already had its own sort of community.

The final (fifth) case is Social Networks with Gretsch Guitars who wanted to celebrate their anniversary. They created a MySpace network, held contests etc. without any advertising, and by simply ‘adding friends’ and aggressively using social media, they had thousands of entries. Since so many bands are listed on MySpace it really made sense for the guitar company to launch their campaign in that online realm.

Final notes of wisdom: Go where your users are, do you research, be original. Also, Darren and Julie wrote an eBook (check the back pages for a shout out to the Bollwitts on that big list woo!) which you can get at SocialMediaReady.com.

Read all of my IMC posts and view my Flickr photos