Leveraging Social Media

Our first challenge in the project was to develop a marketing plan to reach out to passionate individuals who could help our cause. Our initial research found that social media would be an effective tool for open innovation and idea generation. Therefore, our first step was to figure out whom we would target via our social media platforms.

Open innovation via social media requires a multi-target approach with many touch-points to your innovation community, your innovation ecosystem, and customers and users.*

Professor Ann Majcvhrzak, from class, shared with us the importance of including a big community to increase our chances of activity. She said that you could only expect up to 1% of your targeted audience to respond. Keeping this in mind, we made a spreadsheet of numerous links to disaster relief sites, Yahoo List-serves, and other contacts.  The spreadsheet computed that our target audience included over 5 million (only expecting to hear from a maximum of 500) individuals who have either experienced a natural disaster, support disaster relief organizations, or work in disaster response.

           Our next step was to plan the logistics of the marketing plan. We decided to do a single marketing blast the day the challenge opened in order to avoid overwhelming the social media communities with multiple postings. We made an eye-catching flyer to post on the social media sites that included a catchy tagline and a Bit.Ly link that connected to the BrightIdea platform. Our marketing blast also involved:

• Posting on Yahoo ListServes (we used a Gmail account-disasterreliefsolutions@gmail.com- for postings like this, as well as for creating our Facebook and Twitter pages)
• Creating and posting on a Facebook fan Page (Disaster Relief Solutions)

• Creating a Facebook Event (Disaster Relief Solutions Idea Challenge)
• Creating and “tweeting” on a Twitter account (@DisastrRecovSolution)

• Posting on Reddit World News
• Posting on Scribd

We incorporated Deirdre Walsh’s advice about social business in our marketing strategy as well. Deirdre explained that there is a unique role of each social media platform. For example, Twitter is for sharing industry news or just getting the word out; whereas, Facebook is for reaching loyal customers. We kept this in mind when choosing how to use each social media platform. We employed Facebook, for example, to contact the Facebook users who were loyal and active in contributing to the disaster relief Facebook pages, like the Red Cross; and we kept the Twitter account to promote the Facebook and BrightIdea link to the general public with hash tags such as: #disasterrelief and #CrisisSocMedia.

Were we successful in implementing our plan? Watch for the next posts to see how our marketing plan developed in each individual outlet…

*Source:

“The Impact of Social Media on Open Innovation” http://www.ideaconnection.com/open-innovation-articles/00322-The-Impact-of-Social-Media-on-Open-Innovation.html