Case Studies

Moms Clean Air Force faced a daunting task. The organization wanted to harness the power of mothers throughout the United States to advocate for clean air to local, state and federal governments.

Why mothers?

The group knew that unclean air—whether in homes, schools, or outside—causes disproportionate health hazards to children.

Moms Clean Air Force logoHarnessing a crack editorial and social media team, the organization received funding from the Environmental Defense Fund and many celebrity endorsements.

Digital Director Shaun Dakin knew early on that the group would have to advertise in addition to reaching beyond traditional editorial channels. A skilled marketer in the public-private sector, Dakin also knew that stories were important to connect with audiences, but successful organization leaders rely on metrics, not just anecdotes.

“I asked Silver Beacon Marketing to help us solve advertising on search engines, on Twitter, Facebook and other social media,” said Dakin. “I worked with them in the past and knew that they don’t present fluff or fake numbers. Everything they do is strictly ROI driven.”

Silver Beacon’s passion for return on investment paid off handsomely for Moms Clean Air Force.

“We collaborated on powerful tracking reports immediately,” Dakin said. “Those reports helped the organization decide our priorities. Then Silver Beacon began advertising and found ways to match actions through multiple channels. Using analytics methods that most organizations can’t create for us, Silver Beacon showed us which channels worked for building community and the actual costs of adding a new community member and having that community member convert to our mailing list. The bottom line success metric is moving people from the web to our email list.”

Silver Beacon’s focus on return-on-investment (ROI) gave Moms Clean Air Force the confidence it needed to build a Facebook community that engaged with decision makers and also joined the group’s mailing lists for local and federal activity. The company continued weekly reporting to the leadership team on costs and ROI.

More responsibilities followed. A request to audit the organization’s website found more opportunity for improvement, and Silver Beacon Marketing built a new website for the organization while assuming responsibility for search engine optimization, website analytics and web development.

Successes of the Social Media Case Study, Advanced Search Optimization & Advertising

  • Cost-effective social media and search engine advertising opportunities
  • Search engine optimization of the organization’s website
  • Analytics reporting and analysis to organization leaders
  • Rebuilt and hosted the organization’s website

 

Articles

Sharing Business Value Reports

Antivirus company AVG pushed a great report to me earlier today called a “Threat Report”.   The security company with the ‘Freemium’ model wanted me to give them credit for protecting one my computers from a series of problems.  It’s a smart, relatively passive way for the company to prove its product’s worth to a user who is a potential up-sell.

silver-beacon-marketing-logoSilver Beacon Marketing does a similar thing, showing clients their return on investment (ROI) for advertising campaigns or other goals from our search engine optimization efforts.  That is proprietary data that few would publicize, but I’ve lost count of the number of times a referral has quoted their friend’s ROI to me. Sharing your business value is easy.

Bragging about the number of threats your computer stopped is something you might share with anyone.  The whole thing sounds like fun.  And even a small adoption rate can mean some great exposure.  Let’s say that the report showed your level of web savvy and a fun rating about your computer’s strength along with some Twitter and Facebook share buttons.  Your product gets valuable exposure every time someone sends that report to their Twitter or Facebook stream.

Enabling that sharing function is only a part of the battle though. Sharing has to be simple–absolutely frictionless–to get the best possible return.  And that’s what I experienced today when I reactivated a StumbleUpon account.

Signing up was easy–only four fields after I clicked “connect with Facebook”.  And the company was smart enough to ask, “Hey, since you’re recommending pages to strangers, how about recommending them to your friends?”

Why not?  That makes perfectly good sense.  And with each post to my Facebook page, StumbleUpon gets a big endorsement from me to anyone connected with me.

Asking that question is smart.  My Facebook friends might not have a StumbleUpon account, but all the work is done for me if I want to post a link to my Facebook page or other social media channels. That is completely frictionless.

Your takeaway as a small business leader is to consider how your company communicates its real business value to stakeholders.  Special bonus points if you make sharing that information easy.

Articles

Facebook is for people you used to know. LinkedIn is for people from work. And Twitter is for people you want to know.

That was the secret sauce of connection types using social media from television guru Jerry Ferguson at Fairfax County’s Channel 10.  We shared a laugh over it at the time, but as I continued using all three, they did seem to cluster that way.   There is overlap, of course, and a broom closet full of sweeping generalizations, but there is a lot of truth there too. Jerry’s joke, shared during a committee meeting for a non-profit, made me think a lot about the way we use web services.

Reviewing The Social Network on a movie site we run, I wrote that it’s no longer enough to simply say that Google is the cluster of sites providing us utility (searches, email, maps, data) while Facebook is the site that provides fun (chats, messaging, games, apps). Both companies are fascinating because of their attempts to diversify. Facebook already is a substantial search engine in its own right and is rumored to have a new communications platform ready to roll.  Google, meanwhile, is supposedly hard at work on socializing the organization even more after the failures of the standalone Orkut and integrated Buzz.

All of this brought my thinking to Big Thinking for Small Business and what this blog might be used for.  I talked with coaches and developers, equity holders and designers.  The issue really boils down to the audience for this blog, which is something Sara and I thought was defined a long time ago. We don’t want to be your breaking news source although we will tell you when there is online marketing news that might change your organization.  And we don’t want to be a how-to primer either.  Many good sites do both things well.

Instead, Big Thinking for Small Business is intended for the very people Silver Beacon Marketing serves–small businesses and non-profits.  We write for our clients, partners and corporate friends. We write about search engines, online marketing, advertising and even some things that can help you earn more profit. Starting March 1, we’ll integrate even more with Facebook and use their commenting section.  We’ll feature more guest bloggers, more reference pieces, more academic work and more content that will help you run your business. Our WordPress tutorials, previously open just for clients, will be open to everyone. We believe that any business can effectively compete in any market in the world.  Read along with us and we’ll show you how.   This is the next iteration of the Big Thinking for Small Business blog, Big Thinking 2.0 if you will, and we look forward to your comments and guidance on how it can help your organization.

Image: Shannon David French