Where's the Wine? Social Media Day

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Monday, March 29

As you know if you've read the case study or some of our other blog posts, we're working on the Red White and Food campaign, which advocates allowing retail food stores to sell wine. Our client is the Tennessee Grocers & Convenience Store Association.

We're in our third year of reaching out to the public, making sure they know about the issue, and encouraging them to participate by contacting their legislators, telling their friends, and attending events. Last year we began to use social media in earnest to engage Tennesseans who want wine in their food stores. Beyonding tweeting, talking to members on Facebook and blogging, we created a few online events to help focus activity.

We held a "Facebook Day" where we encouraged members of our group to change their profile pic and update their status with a message supportive of the campaign. "Blog Day" came a few weeks later. That's when we reached out to influential Tennesseans bloggers and asked them to write about the issue all on the same day. We also asked any of our members with blogs to write a post.

Flash forward a year to March 25, 2010. We designated last Thursday as Where's the Wine? Social Media Day. We wanted to make full use of all of the social media tools we regularly use and concentrate them on one day. Our goal was to increase Red White and Food membership, as well as gain Facebook fans, group members, Twitter followers and blog readers.

Here's what we did

The first step was an important one - we planned. We thought about what worked well last year and what could be improved. We outlined goals, strategies, and tactics. We assigned tasks and deadlines.

Some of the tactics included:

New graphics. We created our take on wine labels that members could use as profile pics or blog badges. We wanted to give them something special that they could debut on Social Media Day.
Incorporating Twitter. We hosted some lively "happy hours" on Thursday afternoons last year during the legislative session but never had a special Twitter "day." We wanted to include it in Social Media Day plans and make use of the #tnwinesales hash tag so people can track the conversation.
Contests. To encourage participation, we created four different contests. We gave away $100 grocery store gift certificates to the person who: wrote the best blog post, wrote the best tweet, referred the most friends to join as members, and had a drawing for the people who joined that day.
Blogger outreach. Tennessee is fortunate to have a vibrant and active political blogging community. In addition, several active Red White and Food members have personal blogs and have written about the issue before. One group that we know is largely supportive are moms, but we'd never made an effort to reach out to them specifically. We divided our key bloggers into groups by the topics they write about (politics, parenting, etc.) and created specific pitches for each. We reached out to them a few days before Social Media Day and asked them to participate.
Happy hour. We often interact with Red White and Food members online, but we also wanted to get the chance to meet them in person. We hosted a happy hour at a wine bar in Nashville to cap off the day and celebrate the successes.

The results

Where's the Wine? Social Media Day generated a lot of activity. We counted more than 15 blog posts (some before Social Media Day that encouraged readers to participate), 50+ tweets that either referenced @RedWhiteFood or #tnwinesales, and dozens of Facebook messages and wine label profile pics.

But the real results were in the membership numbers. As a result of Social Media Day, we gained:

150 new members since that Monday (for 24,500+)
50 new Twitter followers (we have 800+)
100 new fans of our recently created Facebook page (820)
144 new Facebook group members (8,200+)
273 blog views on Social Media Day and 277 the day after (average had been around 30)
Nearly 400 visits to the Web site on 3/25 (had been hovering around 150 for the past month)

We're now much closer to meeting our goal of 25,000 members. For some perspective, we had about 12,000 members at the end of March 2009. We think it was well worth the staff time and $400 for prizes.