The social butterfly effect
As published on page 13 of the December 31, 2010 edition of The Keene Sentinel, and online.
Tweet. Follow. Friend.
Internet-based social media has been adding new shades of meaning to old words for years. But what once may have seemed a frivolous pastime for the young and idle has become a daily part of doing business in a range of local industries, from retail to manufacturing and hospitality to professional development.
A recent survey by the Retail Merchants Association of New Hampshire found almost half of that organization's members are using social media, with several more commenting that they plan to begin in the near future.
Online networking has become a "necessary" marketing tool even when it doesn't offer the immediate, trackable results of traditional targeted advertising, according to Peterborough innkeeper Eric R. Lorimer.
"We view it more as a long-term business development activity," he said. "On the other hand, on the day-to-day view, there's definitely some of our guests and potential guests for whom Facebook is their preferred means of communication."
What makes social media different, marketers say, is interaction.
"We have this whole branding and esthetic that's really community-based. They talk to us, we talk to them," said Jentri Provenzano, marketing coordinator for Gilsum-based W.S. Badger Co. "It's really nice to have that level of contact."
Badger makes a range of organic skin-care products, and turns to its more than 4,000 Facebook fans for market research.
When the company was re-formulating its soaps, for example, Provenzano was able to go directly to Facebook and ask if people there would prefer hand-cut or molded soaps -- the majority preferred the hand-cut option.
"People love to give their opinion, especially when they feel the company on the other end is really listening," she said.
Tiea Zehnbauer has been using social networking to help promote her organic T-shirt company, Zhen Naturals, for about three years.
"We have some great fans," she said. "We have certain people who comes to almost all of our focus groups, and have all of our shirts."
About a third of Zhen Naturals' online contacts are stores and other businesses, she said. And like customers, professional contacts respond well to interaction.
"People respond better and better to you the more you're on it," she said. "It takes a lot of time, and I feel like people reciprocate -- so the more you're paying attention to their business the more they pay attention to yours."
Your Kitchen Store, on Main Street in Keene, has been using Facebook since this summer to promote sales and events such as cooking classes.
To build community and activity on the page, store Manager Shannon M. Hundley recently invited the store's Facebook "fans" to post pictures of their favorite kitchen tools to the store's page. She's also considering starting a recipe exchange, she said.
Being active is a key to reaching out
Successful social networkers say it needs to be a daily activity.
"I knew when I started it was going to be a commitment," said Jennifer C. Bennett, who manages social media for Matheson Systems, a Keene company that offers training in workplace safety and personal-injury evaluations.
Bennett's posts are not restricted to promoting the company's own activities. In addition to announcing products and events, she shares snippets of information and links to online articles that would be of interest to physical therapists and people with an interest in ergonomics and workplace safety.
Lorimer, who runs the Jack Daniels Motor Inn, a 17-bed motel in Peterborough, keeps up the inn's Twitter feed with a daily stream of observations about the Peterborough environment and whatever he and his wife and co-owner, Pam, are doing to keep busy. On Wednesday, he tweeted about going for a cross-country ski.
"Ideally it would be something we're actually doing, some hands-on experience. And if that's not obvious, we're looking for unique events or things that are going on around town," he said. "Most of our focus is on getting the word out about other businesses in the area ... That may be because we're in travel tourism and we want, in the long term, to build knowledge of the local attractions."
Internet technology can help small, local companies reach a global audience.
People travel from around the world for Matheson Systems' workshops on evaluating whether or not an injured person is ready to return to work. This make the firm's online presence crucial, Bennett said.
"If people are looking for this certain kind of training we want to be the ones who are found for that, and definitely having Twitter feeds and blogs and Facebook are a way to get found," she said.
Of W.S. Badger's 4,000-plus Facebook fans, more than 100 hail from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, making that distant city the best-represented location in the group, followed by Manchester and Keene, according to Provenzano.
This borderless quality of the virtual world can cause awkward online moments.
"Somebody posted: 'I love your products, I wish you were available in Iceland,' " Provenzano said. "I don't really know what to say to that ... I posted 'We're working on it!' "
Your Kitchen Store has Facebook fans from all along the East Coast, Hundley said. By putting pictures of the store and its products online, friends of friends from as far away as New York and Florida can be enticed to stop by when they're in the area.
"It's absolutely a way to get new people into the store," she said.
Web familiarity breeds success
For help getting started, Provenzano says you need look no further than the Internet itself.
"Social media loves to talk about itself," she said. "You can go online to learn how to use your Twitter and how to use your Facebook."
Hundley, 26, recommends the help functions on Facebook, and said she turns to the store's younger employees for advice.
Twitter and Facebook, the two major players in social networking, have different tempos and styles. Several of the marketers interviewed found Twitter harder to get comfortable with, at least at first.
Provenzano finds Facebook more social, while Twitter is "a good way of broadcasting a very small piece of information through a large network."
Tweets are fleeting, while a Facebook page will retain the history and context of a conversation. "There's a little more interaction on Facebook," Lorimer said.
The power of Twitter, on the other hand, is that one can listen in on the conversations of strangers and build new contacts. Lorimer and Provenzano both use extra software (SocialOomph and HootSuite, respectively) to monitor the twitterverse for certain key words.
If a skier in Kansas is considering a Monadnock vacation, or a woodcutter in New Zealand wonders if Badger Balm could cure his chapped hands, Lorimer and Provenzano will reply right away -- as long as these distant potential customers tweet about it first.
Provenzano recently used a giveaway offer to attract the five Twitter followers she needed to reach 1,000.
"There's a lot of people on Twitter who are just looking for free stuff, and it's a pretty quick way to get a bump in followers," she said, though she warned that giveaways might not attract the kind of followers you most want to see.
"It's just as important to find quality social media contacts," she said.
Nonetheless, she thinks Badger will have 10,000 Facebook fans by the end of 2011.
"The more fans you have, the easier it is to get more," she said.
tagged with: business, feature, marketing, social media
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