Social Media Case Studies

For those of you expecting for this to be about film, turn away now.

You are awfully daring for choosing to stick around.  Congratulations.

In order to fully gain respect for the applicability of social media, we have to study it.  The idea of this is novel.  Social media is relatively new.  However, its concept is ingenious.  It takes marketing yourself from just between you and your friends and introduces you to the world.  All for the great five-finger-discount of free.  How does that sound?  Pretty nice.  Making it into the first round of the social media case study insight are The Travel Channel, Klondike Bars and The American Skiing Company.

Enjoy.

Building A Loyal Community for the Travel ChannelJuly 2008-December 2008

Ask anyone who has watched the Travel Channel and force them to say they were not in some way influenced by what they watched to then want to go and do exactly what they saw.  Samantha Brown offers a passport to anywhere in the world from the comfort of our own living rooms.  Anthony Bourdain worries about the fact that we have No Reservations as we just watch for sheer entertainment value.  Needless to say, people are talking.

The Travel Channel realized this and identified the fact that in order to make themselves more in-tune with their audience they wanted to know what people were saying.  The easiest form to this: social media.  By identifying influential blogs that dealt with the Travel Channel, they were able to then – through the help of pre-existing sites – monitor what was being said and then engage themselves likewise.  By taking an active role in the management of fan sites and other forms of social media, the Travel Channel was able to bolster its memberships to over 200,000 in just a six month period.  Making this all feasible was the use of: Digg, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Yahoo! Buzz, Mixx and Viddler.

As the study proved to be positive, we can see the effectiveness that a detailed and comprehensive approach to taking on social media is the true reason for success here.  If not for monitoring over 15,000 conversations within the blogosphere, the Travel Channel would have had no means of which to even coordinate such an undertaking of a social media campaign.  Essentially, planning and coordination becomes the most important aspect of the entire situation.  Sure, anyone can use social media, but if you are not effective then you are all but wasting your time.

Klondike May 2008-present

What would you do for a Klondike bar?

User generated content has become the latest and greatest buzz of the advertising world.  Why?  It’s fucking cheap.  Rather than paying Clive Owen to be the spokesman for Dewar’s Whiskey you could essentially just put me on a poster or in a commercial telling you how much I love to drink Whiskey.  You don’t have to even pay me, just make if a contest and surely there will be millions of others claiming to be the next “Dewarista”.

"Yo Soy Dewarista." I saw these advertisements everywhere in Spain.

I digress, point is, it’s effective no matter how you look at it.

So what exactly would you do for a Klondike Bar?  Although this question has puzzled me for ages, Klondike finally figured it out when they engaged in the simple task of asking their consumers what exactly they would do for said Klondike Bar.  In order to jump start the campaign, Klondike utilized the great help of celebrity endorsement from Andy Samberg and The Lonely Island crew to jump start the campaign and get the customers excited to make videos and send them in for what they would do for a Klondike Bar.

Now is where social media took over.  Klondike used Twitter, Facebook, podcasting, social bookmarking, blogger outreach and video sharing as the tools to their campaign.  It is that simple.  Putting a new spin to the same age old question.  And by proving to the effective, the user generated spots then showed up on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno and My Name Is Earl.  See how easy it is?

At the end of the day, it comes down to planning and effectiveness.  Without it, these campaigns are useless.

American Skiing Company — MyA41.com Passholder CommunitySeptember 2006-May 2007

Often times we are faced with questioning just how good something is or may be.  As many know, we prefer to get our information first hand or by a friend me may have.  Fact is, we trust them.  The American Skiing Company took this concept and ran.  By engaging multi-mountain season pass holders in the northeast (Killington, Mount Snow, Attitash, Sugarloaf, and Sunday River) the ASC made the mountain experience yours.  With the help of Affinitive, the ASC set out to create their own brand of social media.   The pass holders were given online accounts where they were able to upload photos, keep skier logs, create profiles, told stories, shared tips and uploaded videos.  The content was then filtered by mountain and then served as an up the minute news source and first hand accounts of what was going on on the mountain.

The approach proved to be successful.  However, this campaign was much different than others.  Rather than using pre-existing social media platforms, the ASC created their own unique platform for their patrons.  By doing this, the ASC made the experience truly one of a kind.  The result of the campaign was seen in more than just participation.  Advocates for the program defended it.  Loyalty is something all creators strive for.  ASC accomplished this with the help and use of social media to engage their most prized consumers.  The skier.

Well, I think that proves to be sufficient in the world of social media case studies.  It has been quite the process.  I hope I was not of too much a bore.  Rather, I hope you found the content to be insightful.  Ain’t it convenient how useful of a tool that social media can be?  Free.  Easy.  Effective.  Engaging.  Yours.  When we take that into account, anything is possible in the world of social media.