A few months back, I had the notion to Tweet about interviewing any business in Wisconsin who was using social media. I got a couple of responses including Cousins Subs. The headquarters is in Menomonee Falls, just a straight shot east from Madison. I spoke with Justin McCoy, senior marketing manager. They have only been using social media about 1 1/2 years but have gone slow, listening first, planning and building a strategy.
The most useful tools have been Facebook for overall brand conversations and Twitter for a news and conversation stream. It was refreshing to talk with Justin, who seems to have put in a lot of thinking time and assessment before putting his toe in the water. Even with that, he says he spends only about 20% of this time on social media related activities. Keeping a couple of extra tabs open - one for Twitter and one for Facebook - keeps him very responsive to his audience.
I was surprised that they haven't used video more, seems like a natural connection. But Justin assures me they plan to do more video on their Youtube Channel in 2010.
Here are a few questions I asked Justin:
1. How do you measure success in social media?
2. What advice do you have for businesses just getting started?
Be sure and follow Cousins Subs on Twitter (@cousinssubs)
In true extravaganza style, The National Mustard Museum had their Grand Opening on Friday April 9 through April 11, starting with "The longest Mustard Pass in History." Covering approximately 17 miles along country roads from Iowa Dane county's Mt Horeb to Middleton.
This caught my attention. A quick search found no history of any condiment pass longer than 20 feet while this pass should be roughly 17 miles - supported by the cross country and track teams of Mt. Horeb and Middleton high schools.
The National Mustard Museum partners with bratwurst.
Levenson has taken his passion to great lengths when he created a museum with his vast collection of English and American mustards. He ultimately quit his "real" job to take on the curator role full time with Mrs. Mustard, Patti Levenson.
The history of mustard has a sordid past but can be found in early Roman reference and even by Pope John XXII . In that reference the Pope was "reportedly so enamored of mustard that he established a new Vatican position, Grand Moutardier du Pape, which means “mustard-maker to the pope.”
The only reference I could find to a historic pass was the longest football pass in the NFL. That was a 99-yard pass play which has only occurred 10 times in NFL history.
Mustard Lore and Legend
German lore advises a bride to sew mustard seeds into the hem of her wedding dress to assure her dominance of the household.
In Denmark and India, it's thought that spreading mustard seeds around the exterior of the home will keep out evil spirits. The Danes also had an interesting "cure" for a woman's frigidity which involved a potion made of mustard seeds mixed with ginger and spearmint. It was not indicated what exactly one did with the potion. I wonder.....
Moving to historic digs.
The museum has been very successful up to now in their location in Mt Horeb, but the move to Middleton should be a different but successful environment to grow its business.The building was the original "Friendly Building" and the contractor was able to reuse the original bricks to match the old Opera Building across the street.
How could this business really leverage social media - let me count the ways.
Working in the business to business space for over 25 years doesn't give one many opportunities to have fun like Barry Levenson does with mustard. The closest I came was during my 7 years as a sales engineer calling on Harley Davidson. Talk about an enthusiastic engineering and manufacturing force almost giddy with enthusiasm and pride for their product. This type of evangelism is hard to come by and in the social media space of today is the real social capital that success with this channel will be measured by.
The events planned for the weekend at the National Mustard Museum really play to the fun and quirky nature of curator Barry Levenson and mustard in all its forms. While they have made good use of traditional marketing efforts for print, TV and radio along with their website and e-commerce store, social media presents a great way to help them tell their story, sponsor contests, showcase video and pictures all while having fun. The National Mustard Museum has a lot of content to leverage into the social media spaces and with an e-commerce site as well as a retail store they need to drive all sorts of traffic.
Lets assume that the National Mustard Museum has invested the necessary time and resources to assess the market and their target audience for products they want, issues that could be solved and opportunities that the National Mustard Museum is uniquely qualified to solve.
5 Social Steps
Here is a look at 5 social media tactics they could consider using to drive the results they are looking for and build a evangelist community.
1. Brand - The National Mustard Museum is a unique entity and a tourist attraction - likely no matter where they reside. They should claim their brand on every social media site they can - today! Check out www.Knowem.com
2. Blog - The Museum should have its own blog identifying new products, new recipes, crazy ideas, contests, etc. Mr. and Mrs. Mustard (Barry and Patti Levenson) are creative genius who could have a lot of fun (as if they need any more excuses) with a blog. Creating valued content for sharing gives back to the audience and community that buys their products.
3. Pictures - there are 407 images referring to "mustard museum" on Flickr.com but none are front and center referring back to the National Mustard Museum website. The National Mustard Museum should start their own Flickr profile and share with images with a creative commons license and requested linkback to their site. This would allow them to share easily information about the site. For example, On google their are 353000 images with the title "mustard museum" and non of the first several pages tie back to "Ol' Poupon University."
4. Video - although there are many videos on Youtube under "mustard museum", none are controlled by the mustard museum through a custom video channel. Various people have posted, media sources, vendors, but the Video channel for the museum is missing.
5. Facebook - Let's face it, if your consumers are on Facebook and you need to go where they are. Create a strong strategy here, share your blog, bring in your Youtube channel, collect your feed from Flickr, identify your special events, upcoming promotions, ask questions and engage the audience. consider taking the leap to incorporate your e-commerce site directly into Facebook as well as your website (check out Best Buy's Fan page as an example). Include the feature that lets your fans evaluate and rate different mustard.
6. Promote - Share your social places on the web, in print, on your cards, and emails
By the way, my favorite mustards are variations of honey mustard. Although the Tomato vodka Mustard got my attention at the store this week. According to Barry Levenson, the Mayor of Middleton made it illegal to eat ketchup within 300 feet of the Mustard Museum!
Here is my capture of the event on my YouTube Channel - Wendy Soucie Consulting
Thrive, an economic development organization in Wisconsin, is using social media to further their efforts to promote business and economic growth in this 8 county region.
After our February meeting in of the Social Media Breakfast Madison group. I am trying to find our businesses and organizations who are using video in their efforts to get the word out.
Thrive's Jennifer Smith, shared with me how they use Youtube, FaceBook , eNews links , Twitter , and direct emails for message sharing.
At the SMB Madison event she also mentioned that they product DVDs of the video clips and provide to those who are less technology savy or who would prefer a non web version. All great ideas to share valuable content that can brand you and carry your message farther.
Wired Wisconsin is a coalition of concerned individuals, businesses and organizations working to put the state of Wisconsin on the cutting edge of technology. However, like most nonprofits they face challenges in trying to raise funds for outreach and marketing of their message. With only two or three employees and a couple of interns, how do they accomplish statewide what they need to do?
A social approach
After meeting several key staff members of Wired Wisconsin during the recent event - Government
2.0 | Utilizing Social Media - I looked at how they are using social media efforts to accomplish their organizational goals and the partnerships they are forming along the way.
Wired Wisconsin is actively using social media in their public relations and outreach efforts. They appear to have started their blog about 1 year ago in October of 2008 with weekly updates to Twitter included. The blog does not identify the author(s) in anyway, and its lacking a personality at this point. They have a Website setup as a home base for traditional media and social media. They have links to their Twitter profile, Facebook, Youtube, Podcasts, and a RSS feed for their blog.
Practicing what you preach
At the conference I attended, Wired Wisconsin was educating government agencies and elected officials on social media. They are actively using a variety of tools and promoted the event using social media channels as well. You can see that they started slow, with a website and added a blog.
You should have a strong "home" for social media links. Just consider that with a bio area of 160 characters on Twitter, you don't have a lot of room to state your mission and issues. So take the time to have good landing pages on your website to explain your mission. If your budget doesn't allow that yet, be sure to create a solid LinkedIn profile or other social media profile with very complete details
that can help deliver more of your brand and various content for you, but one should be designated as home.
The first six months of blog posts are all Twitter weekly updates of news articles that they added to the Tweet stream. This is an inbound marketing tactic. This is a good way to start with baby steps based on resources and time. Starting in February 2009, Wired Wisconsin began to offer monthly blog opinion blog posts about the issues they have coalesced around.
May 2009 brought a new addition to the action plan. Bring article content around core issues from other journalists and editorials directly into the blog posts. The Twitter updates continued and in fact they are longer and appear to more much more active during this time period. Wired Wisconsin also penned more opinion posts covering issues.
While it appears that their Twitter activity is all about outbound press and news media type content, by creating a blog post out of the update (through the use of TwitterTools plugin on their blog) it does help to give them weekly posts and document activity for the non Twitter users who may want to stay in touch with these issues.
Incorporating video posts
Emily Lenard, Associate Director, explained that they have used Youtube to post their videos for free and feed to other social media sites such as Facebook. They have an ongoing program to interview state politicians on their stands for issues pertinent to Wired Wisconsin and post them on their Website.
She also said they they follow a particular strategy for blog writing described in this interview:
Other uses that they have planned to put in practice for social media include:
After a year, it may be time for Wired Wisconsin to take stock and review their activities, audiences, spaces and places for social media sites interaction. Evaluating and benchmarking the progress over the past year for subscribers, comments, membership growth, partner additions and activity should shed some light on any changes in directions that they should pursue.
Ideally they should be blogging 2-3 times per week. If the goal of the blog is to strictly be a news source they are doing a good job of that. I think that they could increase the Wired Wisconsin opinion pieces to give someone a sense of the passion and drive this organization has to make change happen. And personally, I would like to get sense of who the authors are.
Social media is about people after all and we don't connect with companies and organizations, we connect and share passions and interest with the people inside them.
