The Great 2009 Flint Hills Design Koozie Giveaway
Thanks to all of you who came to our gathering after Bethel College’s Fall Fest football game. We appreciated having each and every one of our guests, and enjoyed the chance to hear more about what you are doing and share some of our work with you. We are also glad for all of the feedback and brainstorming that took place–some of you provided excellent ideas that will definitely influence our work in the future.
What Are You Talking About?
For those of you who have no idea what we’re talking about, we decided to have a little party. We invited around 150 of our close friends to come check out our new building and see what we were working on. We sent out the invites through nicely designed HTML emails and by creating a Facebook event:
HTML Email Invite
Facebook Event Invite
Tracking and Reports
We also decided to track the activity generated by the process, and then turn that into a very brief report that we could give to interested attendees, to show one aspect of the work we do.
Tracking Report
We had such a great time that we’re planning on making this an annual event, so if you weren’t able to make it hopefully you can join us next year!
Growing Your Social Media Presence
While still young and often misunderstood, social media has quickly grown to become a very valuable (some would say necessary) tool for businesses of all shapes and sizes. Most groups we work with are anxious to “leverage the power of Facebook, Twitter, etc.”
However, I’ve found that many groups have a very shallow understanding of these tools–mostly name recognition from an article proclaiming the miraculous power of social media and demanding all business get involved right now!
I think that many businesses (and individuals for that matter) can benefit from joining conversations online, but I always encourage learning about the options and ways to most effectively utilize the tools before simply diving right in. Perhaps more importantly, you need to understand how much work will be involved in maintaining your presence.
Gardening Metaphor
In addition to common sense, I’ve found that a gardening metaphor can be useful in helping to understand the requirements of a successful social media campaign. In a recent blog post, David Armano provided a very easy to remember and understand version of the gardening metaphor. He breaks it down into three parts:
- Seeding
- Feeding
- Weeding
To add my own explanation to his memorable framework…
Seeding involves
- Identifying your goals and the best tools for the job – choosing your plant varieties
- Setting up accounts and creating initial content – planting the seeds
- Beginning to engage others in the conversation – root stimulator
Feeding involves
- Creating content that provides value to your prospective readers – watering your plants
Weeding involves
- Monitoring your efforts, and removing those that seem detrimental to the health of your campaign – weeding and pruning your plants
Of course, no gardening metaphor would be complete without identifying the fruits of your labor! As in gardening, the payoff can be truly rewarding. Cultivating loyal followers who find value in your offerings can easily be translated into improvements to your bottom line, by establishing your expertise in a field you may realize that opportunities find you rather than you needing to seek them out, and perhaps most importantly, you may find that the effort you put in is multiplied through the natural process of growth!
Cherries from our orchard
