I'd like to share some background information on a social media project that might be of interest to you.
The purpose is to give you something you might be able to take to your clients or implement yourself.
It might be worth reading on unless you constantly run social media campaigns yourself that are leaving your customer and their clients 100% satisfied.
BACKGROUND
This campaign is for the TÜV Rheinland. They provide technical certifications for a vast array of technical devices and operate in over 60 countries.
They are also responsible for the technical inspections for cars in Germany. Germany has very demanding security standards for cars. Cars are being inspected thoroughly every 1 or 2 years. Any modifications to a car in Germany can very quickly render it illegal to drive.
Therefore the car tuning freaks and the TÜV traditionally have a rather "challenging" relationship.
SOCIAL MEDIA LANDSCAPE IN GERMANY
The focus is on 4 major platforms. Instead of wasting efforts and loose focus by being present every where:
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Flickr
- YouTube
YouTube and Flickr are widely known in Germany and have a pretty decent userbase. Friendfeed is our tool to create feeds that we embed on other sites.
Twitter is still an very early adopter tool. BMW ran a campaign for its upcoming X1 with a lot of power by an Austrian agency behind it. They had 72 followers on Twitter after 2 weeks and it was considered a huge success - that gives you an idea about the numbers on Twitter in Germany.
As for Facebook:
StudiVZ is a clone of an earlier version of Facebook - without all the widgets and plugins and apps of the latest Facebook version. It is still the #1 social media site in Germany. We decided to focus on Facebook and build a fan page because we strongly believe that this is where the momentum will shift to. We like the advanced opportunities of Facebook fan pages and this was a good way to show them to a broader audience.
BUILDING THE FOUNDATION
The of the campaign name had to connect with the audience: Leg Mich Tiefer could be translated as "lower my ride". An edgy name by their standards. But the TÜV had the courage to along with it.
The same logo and a background is being applied it to all platforms so the visitors can easily recognize them as part of the overall campaign (see the screenshots below).
ADDING CONTENT
The TÜV didn't have any videos to start with, they favored other videos that would be of interest for their audience.
The TÜV had tuning car images available and used the best ones in order to load the Flickr account with quality content.
They started to follow car blogs in the US on Twitter and translated the best news into German.
TYING THINGS TOGETHER
Friendfeed is used to embedded the feeds (Twitter, Flickr, YouTube) into the TÜV Tuning Portal itself.
Various widgets automatically transfer new content automatically into their Facebook Fan Page.
After the groundwork was done the visited EMS - the largest car tuning show in Europe - served as a stage to create more content (videos and images).
CAMPAIGN RESULTS
- The TÜV is very pleased in how well the target audience was reached. It exceeded their expectations.
- They received many messages from Tuning Fans among these lines:
"Cool! We would have never thought that the TÜV would ever do something likes this" - They also caught many bloggers and the press by surprise. This is a showcase of targeted cross-platform social media use - done by the government?
- The employees of the TÜV itself also feel very positive about the new online presence. Employees will be introduced and get trained on the use of social media.
NOTE
The total numbers of followers on the social media platforms is still very low by US standards.
But this is the beginning of a long lasting effort. There was no intention of artificially inflating the numbers - they could have easily done that.
BOTTOM LINE
Some basics of social media were applied to this campaign:
- Being authentic
- Knowing & respecting the audience
- Knowing the "language" of each platform they choose to join
- Making sense
- Not being afraid to take the plunge
- Being in for the long haul
Klaus Holzapfel Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Klaus_Holzapfel |
