Wow. That sums it up. What an awesome event. I can’t believe how many people were at this event, despite all the wind and rain on Thursday night. Thank you to #ourhashtag for putting everything together, finding great speakers and securing a central meeting place. It’s not an easy job to put all of this together, as well as market the event. Again, big shout out to Ryan, Jeff and Wayne for all their help in making the Triangle Social Media Club a success. We were very happy to host the event this time at Twine Interactive, and hope everyone had a great time. We also enjoyed the company afterward at the Big Easy (just 2 doors down from our office).  So let’s get down to business and talk about some of the great content shared with the crowd.

Our first speaker was Karlie Justus.  She is  the PR/social media officer with the N.C. State Fair and N.C. Dept. of Agriculture. First of all, if you do n ‘t know Karlie, she is an absolute delight to talk to. She always has a smile and is very upbeat.  The topic was the NC State Fair case study and their outreach strategy using social media.  Karlie had some great information to share with us and awesome statistics.  Not to mention lessons learned, which are always imperative in any case study.  We all like to know and hear about success stories.  However, we also love to learn what not to do.

One of the main points of Karlie’s presentation was the ultimate goal of the campaign, which was to reach new audiences. They wanted to reach the media but in a new way. They understood that the local media is also using social media and wanted to reach out through those channels.  They changed the website with a new design that also included their social media networks as well as key blogs around unique content only found at the fair.  Deep fried types of food is always a hit when it comes to the fair and proved to be a good blog resource as well.

A great strategy that I saw was their reach out strategy to local bloggers and to get local community  people involved.  Suzanne from the Pretty Swell blog was named the Ambassador.  I really like this strategy of using local firestarters and their networks to help outreach involvement. They help you do some heavy lifting around creating content and they do it because they want to.  That means more organic content coming from a reputable source.  They used Facebook and Twitter to drive awareness, contest creations, customer service, monitoring feedback, and just building buzz.  They found that each platform had a specific niche and yielded better results around different outreach initiatives.   The Deep Fried Tweetup at The Fair was also very popular.  There were over 150 people in attendance.  This event also was broadcast via livestreaming.  Thursday proved to have the highest online activity of any other days surrounding the fair.  There were over 60 tweets per hour, over 2000 unique visits to the webpage and 43 uniques viewing the live streaming.

Successes:

• Brand awareness
• Relationship building
• Community engagement
• Customer service
• Media attention
• Understanding which tools function best for to attain specific goals

Challenges:

• Internal commitments because of time (heavy volunteers)
• Content creation
• Tonality through social media
• Need for a social media policy

What’s next? A focus on more specific content, year round exposure, annual tweetups and internal education on using social media. And of course, a social media policy.  Great job Karlie. Thanks for all the information.

Speaker 2 – Jason Peck

Jason Peck is Social media manager at @eWayDirect, a sports enthusiast and an all around good guy.  Tonight Jason talked about online and branded communities.
One of Jason’s main points was that branded communities bring you closer to your customer, and brings your customers closer to each other to share their experiences. I completely agree with this notion as well. Many times when doing a website, we only focus on the website and don’t tap into a marketing strategy that can co-exist with the website.  Driving traffic is one thing, but then having a reason for your customers to interact with you is a completely different ballgame (in other words conversion).  I am convinced that branded communities with the right customer can be a game changer for customer experience, interaction, overall online presence and a bottom dollar increase.

We all know that Facebook fan pages are trying to become an online community for most brands.  Jason points out a couple of good examples of the differences between Facebook Fan pages and a branded community. Some things that a branded community can offer that Facebook may have challenges with are:

• Protection of data
• Exclusivity
• Acquisition
• Research
• Measurement
• Aggregation
• Loyalty program integration

All of these are actually good points.  A question I have is, will Facebook ever incorporate more features into its fan pages in order to give a more community feel?  Wordpress has some great plugins for creating a community found here via mashable Great article that allows you to increase some of the features in your community.

Jason talked about a client they have called ELF or eyes, lips, face.  You can imagine the products that they sell are around beauty and cosmetics. One of the main goals of this campaign was to identify brand advocates and deepen relationships amongst current and even new customers. By becoming a part of this community, customers have exclusive access to beauty tips, current deals, customer service, feedback on products, a customized desktop alert program and many more features. It also allows them to aggregate all of their content from the social media sites.

Results are as follows:

• 4500 current members
• 56k visitors in the last 3 months
• 5k unique visitors
• Average revenue 270 percent higher among current members than non members.

Which goes to show that building a community develops deeper relationships,  increases customer retention and the ability to re-market to a specific niche that is not only familiar with the brand but trusts the brand and products they provide.   Great job Jason.  You definitely challenged me to think outside the box with some of our current customers and how to get them better engaged with their customers.

The after party next door at the Big Easy was also a hit.  I think the best part of the night there was TheRab showed me a new iPhone app called stachetastic. Here is a picture of me using stachetastic. Anyone think I look like Chuck Hester? he he. Movember shout out.

To all those that missed the event, we hope you show up for the next one in December.  Details to be provided.  Keep checking the Facebook fan page for updates.  Once again thanks to Karlie, Jason and Ourhashtag for creating such a great event.