Social Media Presentation

Last week in class we discussed how businesses were using different forms of social media to get develop a greater connection with potential customers, and how they were establishing an online presence.  The company I work for only had a presence on the web as a corporate web site, which was created about a month ago and is probably one of the most boring web pages one will ever come across.  (link deleted ;) )

Instead of just doing nothing like I have been doing for the past seven years, I decided that it would be beneficial to the company if we were to develop a greater internet presence.  While management had already been thinking about Facebook and Twitter, I decided to also introduce FourSquare.  After I took a minute to show them how it worked, I was told I would be presenting at the company meeting in 4 days about our strategy on social media.

Being a now part time graphic designer that makes enough money to only have to borrow hundreds of dollars a month from my parents to survive instead of thousands, I really had no business making such a suggestion.  On the plus side, it gave me something to add to my resume, and at least I would have shown initiative once in seven years instead of being known as the guy who does homework instead of work.  So I created a company page on Facebook and started a Twitter account, as well as signed us up for FourSquare.

At the presentation, the company (maybe like 6 of them have Facebook) had no clue what I was talking about but the statistics spoke for themselves.  The fact learned in class that Social Media overtook Porn in 2009 as the #1 internet activity, along with the fact that Charlie Sheen has more Twitter followers than the population of Jamaica showed the company that there was definitely potential with my plan.

The main social media tool that I set in motion was using FourSquare to let our customers know where our Promotional team would be so that they could come down to the accounts.  Now, every time we have a promotion, our "Bud Girls" will check in, and hopefully draw more business into the account which is a bonus for the account, for our products, and it allows us to discuss our offerings with an increased number of customers.

Along with FourSquare we will use Facebook and Twitter to keep Budweiser and our other brands on consumer's minds.  At almost no cost to the company we can reach all our followers with at least a small marketing message every few days.

This literally just happened and our first step is to build a network... You can like our page here!  Then hopefully our company will see some results with a marketing strategy I developed in an hour and cost the company $15.65.

In conclusion, I feel it is very important for a company to have a social media presence due to the low cost and low amount of time and effort to maintain.  It becomes increasingly more important in developing and maintaining brand awareness, and becomes a nice bonus marketing tool.  It also helps the company connect with younger crowds (in our case 21+ beer drinkers) and gives the company a reputation of being current and not antiquated like the way our Bud Bottles & Cans look.