Over the past week, we have experienced some social media success in two very different ways. We want to share both stories with you and we’ll be co-writing this post to do so.
Shelby shares Jim’s IndyFest story
Last weekend, Jim found out that he was chosen as one of the Social 26 of the Milwaukee IndyFest. This annual event is held at the Milwaukee Mile and features the cars and drivers of the IZOD IndyCar Series. This year, the event is being held from Friday, June 15, and wrapping up with the actual race and a Smash Mouth concert on Saturday, June 16.
The purpose of the Social 26 is to make the race more socially connected. Those who were chosen receive free tickets to the events during race weekend in exchange for the social media marketing they agree to do leading up to that weekend.
While this is cool all by itself, I was excited (and lucky) that Jim offered to take me as his guest to the first event this past Tuesday when the Social 26 was officially introduced.
The race is put on by Andretti Sports Marketing and, if you’re into racing, you know the name Andretti. The introductory event was at the Majestic Cinema and featured Michael Andretti with a special showing of “Super Speedway,” the movie he created with his father Mario Andretti. Before the movie, attendees were able to take photos and get autographs from Michael Andretti and he held a Q&A session after the showing.
I’m originally from Indiana, the home of the Indy 500, so this opportunity was especially thrilling for me. But I’m also excited for Jim and the rest of the Milwaukee Social 26. Being savvy with social media has landed them a great opportunity to promote the event and represent their community. There will be more events leading up to race weekend in mid-June so be sure to follow the hashtag #IndyFest on Twitter to hear more and you can view the race weekend schedule here.
Jim shares Shelby’s Social Madness story
About a year and a half ago, I turned the Twitter account for my other company ColorMetrix over to Shelby. At the time, the account had about 100 followers and most days had no activity or looked like me (@raffel) talking to myself (@ColorMetrix). By being active in Twitter chats and in general just being interesting and engaging, Shelby has grown our Twitter following to something like 600. And it’s not just 500 more followers. These are quality followers who, based upon their profiles, are active in the printing and graphic arts industry like ColorMetrix is.
A few days ago, after waiting more than a month to find out, Shelby learned that her nomination of ColorMetrix to the Social Madness contest had been accepted. Social Madness is a contest sponsored by the various Business Journals around the country that will seek to measure the effectiveness of our social media presence across Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. Initially, we will be competing in the small company (less than 100 employees) category in the Southeastern Wisconsin geographic region.
Shelby has a pretty cool campaign planned for the first 18 days of Social Madness. We are going to link color and emotion with a series of graphical images that will be posted on the ColorMetrix blog each day and then shared to Pinterest. From there, each image will be linked to our Facebook page, Twitter account and LinkedIn company presence. It’s going to be exciting to see what the current community of ColorMetrix followers does to help us promote the posts.
The goal is that our current community will vote for us in the contest and help us grow the community and find new voters. Even if we don’t win, we will have learned a great deal by running this campaign. So much of social media success is based upon experimentation and measurement of results. The Social Madness contest is just the catalyst to get the campaign going and help us measure our own success.
Do you have a social media success story to share? Tell us about it!
