There are a variety of additional ways that social media can be integrated into your organization’s marketing strategy to make sure people are able to stay connected online even while they are experiencing offline events. The lines are blurring between online and offline. The more your organization is able to stay connected to your online users, even during offline events, the more your organization will have deeper social media connections with your social media fans. Here are some examples:
Marketing materials – Add your social media pages to your marketing materials. No matter what it is, if your organization creates it and distributes it, make sure it has your social media channels on it. When people see your social media pages on marketing materials, they realize they can stay connected with your organization in a variety of ways.
Leadership Buy In – When the leader uses social media and guides the organization towards using social media, there’s a fundamental shift in the corporate culture. Customers see the organization embracing social media and employees see the leadership embracing social media. This motivates employees to use social media internally as well as communicate with customers externally via social media channels, thus increasing the online audience.
Events – Offline events need an online component. I have worked with churches extensively and during weekend services there are some churches that do a great job of interacting with people via social media. New visitors are greeted when they tweet they are at the church or check in via Foursquare. The organization thanks them for coming and sometimes offers free gifts for letting the church know they were there. Likewise, during conferences there are great examples of social media usage with examples such as adding hashtags to banners that are located throughout the conference. Letting attendees know the hashtag that represents the conference prior to them getting there, allows them to market the conference via their social networks. Providing a page on their website that lets people share conference content right from that website makes it easy for people to share by just clicking on certain icons and sharing information. Another great strategy I have seen for conferences is to have Google+ hangouts with key speakers of the conference. This hangout can be recorded and distributed via Social Networks. This type of video content generates interest in the event as well as providing potential attendees with shareable content that can be viewed and shared with their networks.
There are many more offline options that are available. Be creative and integrate social media into your marketing plans. Then sit back and watch how interactive your online results can be.
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