GOSO

By: Korenne Richardson As GOSO's Social Media Liaison, Korenne specializes in social media innovations and popular culture. After she graduated from Wellesley College, she worked in media marketing for the US Census Bureau.

It’s summer time. Which mean two things: it’s going to be hot and new movies. The summer is when all the great movies come out. JM Lexus, the number one volume Lexus dealership in the world, realized it was time for summer fun and launched their “Night at the Movies” campaign. The promotion awards two Muvico movie tickets each day until the end of summer to JM Lexus fans on Facebook and Twitter.

The rules of the promotion are simple:

• No purchase is necessary.
• Register at either Facebook or Twitter.
• Check both Facebook and Twitter each day between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. EST.
• Click “Get Tickets” when it’s posted at a random time each day.
• Promotion ends August 31, 2010.

JM Lexus recently expanded its online presence to a variety of social media networks as part of its overall business strategy. The Muvico giveaway is their first social media promotion. JM Lexus is known in South Florida for their excellence in customer service. Their social media initiative takes that excellence one step further.

The promotion was built on and administrated through our GOSO platform.

By: Chris Garrett Co-Author of Best Seller of ProBlogger, our celebrity blogger, Chris has helped thousands of individuals, non-profits, small businesses and blue chips make the most of the web.

Every week there seems to be some pundit talking about the end of blogs, or even worse, the end of websites.

“Who needs a website when there are social media sites and Facebook pages?” they say.

Crazy talk.

Of course we have been hearing this for years.

• I don’t need a blog, I have a super flashy website, an in-house web designer, and an SEO on retainer.
• I don’t need a blog, I have a newsletter.
• I don’t need a blog, I have a Facebook Fan Page.
• I don’t need a blog, I have a sales team.
• Etc etc etc.

So why should you blog rather than go with those arguments above?

Blogs are a crucial part of social media for good reason.

They combine the best parts of having a …

• Website – You can have static AND dynamic content. For example sales pages and articles. The articles make the site sticky, meaning people want to return, and also blogs are famously good with that SEO stuff.
• Newsletter – The content is the reason people WANT to return, but allowing people to sign up to receive that content via email is the mechanism people prefer to return. Online, searchable content and navigation beats content that can only be found in an inbox. That SEO stuff again.
• Community – Attract people with content, retain them with conversation.

In a nutshell, you get a greater audience, keep them interested, and they are easy to maintain. Of course, you do a good job of that and you sell more too.

What about Facebook? Do both, but make sure your Social Media followers know about your great blog content, because one day Facebook or whoever comes next might switch your account off. Yup, much as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are great, we do not own our accounts, they do.

Go out and find your market in the social media sites, promote your content, but make your blog your home.

By: Liz Presson Brand Evangelist for GOSO, social media advocate, writer, PR, marketing professional. Central Michigan University Alum and food lover-Arlington Restaurant Bars Examiner.

AutoNation prides itself on being the “un-dealer” and as being the automotive company that’s changing everything. Ryan wrote a couple of weeks ago about their social media game plan, and briefly mentioned their Mosaic Campaign.

It’s been a few weeks, and we’ve kept our eye on the campaign so I’ve wanted to go into a little more detail. Part of the reason I wanted to write about it was because we created the campaign, but the main reason is because it has really taken off.

AutoNation came to us with a challenge: How can we reward our customers for their loyalty, while showing them that they are AutoNation?

The first challenges were getting past customer’s skepticism of giveaways. What’s the catch? What do I have to buy? What am I signing up for?

All legitimate concerns. So we devised an idea to allow anyone with a Facebook or Twitter account to participate. They don’t have to sign up for anything. We offer the option to share your participation with your social groups, but it’s not required. We wanted to alleviate all of those concerns and allow participants to simply receive a gift from AutoNation.

The second challenge was how to visually represent the idea that AutoNation is its customers. So we took the AutoNation logo and  turned it into a mosaic of the faces of all the giveaway winners. By the end of the giveaway the entire logo will be engulfed by the smiling faces of the winners, and the mosaic will be complete.

Campaign Summary By the Numbers:

• 3o day campaign
• 300 gift cards to be given away
• Over 24,000 page views…so far
• 5,000 unique visitors…so far

Although, these are great numbers for a campaign that was born, promoted, and lived on social media alone, in the end the feedback was the true metric of the success of the promotion. We spoke with every winner and learned a little bit about each, then sent them a personalized thank you card with no strings attached.

By: Ryan Riley Marketing Strategy Manager for GOSO. Ryan provides analytical data and departmental support for GOSO. Ryan is an experienced writer and blogs for GOSO, BOALT and other sites.

Everyone has seen the recent growth of social marketing. One of the perks of such marketing is hopefully a great product, but also a socially conscious product. Through doing good, brands are able to maintain customer engagement.

There are many kinds of social marketing, one of the biggest right now is green marketing. GOSO recently created a Facebook campaign for the upcoming Nissan LEAF (Leading, Environmentally Friendly, Affordable, Family Car).

Although it hasn’t been released yet, the LEAF is already making waves as the first all electric, zero emission electric car to be produced for the mass market. The Nissan LEAF Plant a Tree Campaign was born of our client’s desire to sell a car while doing some good, much like the LEAF itself.

So we devised a concept that combined social media and social marketing by creating a green campaign which allowed people who liked our client’s Facebook page could plant a tree in one of four locations around the world: Haiti, The Philippines, India or Brazil.

The locations were chosen based on the recommendations of our partner in the project, Trees for the Future. Each site had a very specific need for the trees. Haiti for example needed to replenish forests devastated by recent hurricanes.

Campaign Stats:

• Created custom Facebook page tabs for 23 dealerships.
• Increased Facebook fans by more than 25% in two weeks.
• Client committed to planting up to 50,000 trees.

Overall the campaign was extremely successful for two reasons, we were able to connect the buzz surrounding the LEAF with dealers, and hopefully we’ll hit 50,000 trees to be planted.

What successes have you had in combining social marketing with social media?

By: Sichon Domrongchai Chief Creative and Marketing Director for GOSO. Primary responsibility is delivering engaging experiences for end users. Sichon is an award winning designer and accomplished digital artist.

Unless you’ve been living under a car for the past two years, you know about the Fiesta Movement. The social media marketing campaign behind the 2011 Ford Fiesta that has pulled down:

• Nearly 500,000 YouTube views
• More than 70,000 Flickr views
• More than 10.7 million Twitter impressions

The Movement has been huge for Ford in terms of creating brand awareness for the Fiesta, even before the car was released. In December of 2009 the second chapter of the Fiesta Movement began.

For the second chapter of the movement, Ford is tasking teams with developing creative advertising for the 2011 Fiesta, hitting the U.S. this summer. Then everyone votes for a winner. Crowdsourcing meets advertising, if you will.

Although the campaign is successful at creating buzz for the Fiesta on a national level, we wondered how to bring that buzz to the market level. How can we connect the two? How can we bring an OEM’s national campaign to the front steps of the dealer?

In the spirit of the Movement the obvious choose was through social media outlets. So in a matter of days GOSO created custom YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter assets for 36 dealerships across the nation.

Included in the assets was a custom Facebook tab where users could check in with their favorite teams on a dealer’s fan page without leaving Facebook.

The design is based on Ford’s Fiesta Movement website, including color and layout. We were able to bring feeds from team members social media outlets to provide real-time updates of each team within Facebook. Viewers were also given the option of choosing one of the Movement cities so they could see what was happening locally.

Overall the campaign successfully connected a national brand awareness campaign at the dealer level, where people actually buy the cars.

To the dealers out there, what successes have you had in bringing national OEM campaigns to your dealership? What are the benefits of bringing national campaigns local?

By: Chris Garrett Co-Author of Best Seller of ProBlogger, our celebrity blogger, Chris has helped thousands of individuals, non-profits, small businesses and blue chips make the most of the web.

We very quickly learn how important listening is when we join social media.

One of the things I say ad nauseum is “We were given two ears and one mouth” and I tell people they should work to that ratio in social media as well as life. Another thing I try to reinforce is the idea that if you don’t have anything worthwhile to say, don’t say anything.

Taken these as a given, we need to take a step back and really think about what this listening thing is all about.

You will often be advised that there are certain things you should do, especially when first venturing into social media:

• Find people who are leaders in your niche and follow them.
• Seek out people who are “doing it right” and monitor what they do.
• Discover interesting people and read what they talk about.
• Do targeted searching using search.twitter, tweetdeck columns.
• Add social CRM tools and other sophisticated software and services.
• Monitor “sentiment” and work out how your brand is being discussed.
• Watch out for keywords so you can pounce when someone is asking about something, especially your area of expertise or what you have to sell.

All good, solid advice. In fact, these are foundational pieces that are worth considering if you want to be in this for the long haul. Should you be setting up plans for customer service, loyalty, brand monitoring, and PR, they are pretty near essentials in fact.

That said, there is a problem lurking that we need to address.

What many times people fail to mention is something simple and a basic human trait that seems to get lost in the mix.

Where does empathy fit into all this?

Listening is not just about searching, it is not about a feed that pulls in a stream of data, and it is certainly not just a metrics analysis!

If you want to make this stuff work you need to listen, then you need to seek to understand. What is this information-gathering teaching you? What are people trying to tell you? How are these conversations going to make a difference to your business.

What good is more data if you can not action on it?

1. Gather your information, home in on the most important and useful
2. Work to understand it, with further interrogation and insight
3. Use it to make a difference, to make plans

Rather than a “listening station”, build a research center!