In our former blog post we shared our views about social media and our own company’s experience with the media. Now, we’ll share some companies that inspire us with their understanding of how SM can be used with great success to enhance brands.

IKEA doesn’t just specialize in cool inexpensive furniture and surprisingly delicious meatballs. This worldwide corporation, based in Sweden, has also been able to unite its global customer base using the opportunities granted by robust social media. Ikeafans.com is a viral community for customers ranging from one hemisphere to the next, offering a place for forums, blog posts, an encyclopedia for the obscure IKEA items, a marketplace with deals shared from one customer to the next, and a gallery to show off the IKEA furniture at home.  Now, you may be thinking that this doesn’t count because it’s just another website. But, we will counter this argument by saying that IKEA has tapped into the idea of existing social media platforms, such as blogger and Flickr, in order to create their own web-based community for their customers.

IKEA also has Twitter accounts that are unique to each country in which it has a presence. While a single corporate account couldn’t hurt, the individual Twitter accounts show customers that IKEA is attuned to their specific needs, no matter where they are. Twitter is not just used to offer basic info and special deals, but also to address customer concerns and to communicate through dialogue, photos and shared advice. With over 114,000 followers for the IKEA USA account alone, we think this furniture & accessories store is doing pretty well on the social media market.

Jeep has created a counterculture community that is reflective of the rugged appeal of the Jeep vehicle. Through their Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as their corporate website, Jeep has formed a viral community that emotes a sense of rebellion, adventure and disdain for the comfortable… easily illustrated by the minivan or compact car. Jeep uses social media as a baseboard for launching community events. This includes their nationwide scavenger hunt to win one of three new Jeep Wrangler Islanders. Through clues left on FB, Twitter and their corporate website, Jeep gave out the challenge for Jeep fans to find three hidden tiki dolls in order to win the prized vehicle.

The idea paid off, because the social media campaign was repeated with the release of the Arctic Yeti Dig. Combining the use of their Facebook and Twitter accounts, Jeep was able to engage and interact with their customers and fans in a way that could be realized both on and off their website.

Starbucks is #1 in social media. At least, that is what was determined in a study done by advertising research firm PhaseOne between July 2011 and January 2012. We don’t need to look up the details of the study to believe that Starbucks has come out on top in the social media race. Here’s why:

1. Starbucks created one of the most successful online/offline campaigns by displaying posters in major cities, then challenging people to be the first to find and tweet pictures of the posters. Even Starbucks store employees were included in the campaign with the challenge to submit headlines for future ads.
2. Starbucks sponsored a single 60-second television commercial on “Saturday Night Live” advertising a coffee giveaway on the previous Election Day. Starbucks then posted the video on YouTube. Within days, it was the fourth-most-viewed video on YouTube, and people were mentioning Starbucks on Twitter every eight seconds.
3. With 33 million Likes, the Starbucks Facebook Page is a large forum for debates and dialogue. The company has created a community beyond coffee, for spirited discussion on hot button topics such as marriage equality and bans on firearms.

With 33M Facebook fans and over 3 M followers on Twitter, the numbers are proof that Starbuck’s social media presence has recreated the way it views connecting its brand with its customers. Chris Bruzzo, SVP Channel Brand Management, said that social media is the, “Difference between launching with many millions of dollars versus millions of fans.” Clearly, Starbucks is one of the businesses using social media the right way, having such a presence online that those “millions of fans” are probably resulting in those “millions of dollars.”

Now, a quick quiz:

Q: what do these three social media hot shots have in common?

A: They are all Business-to-Customer (B2C) businesses.

They are all aimed at the consumer, the everyday people who buy furniture, cars and coffee. But, what about the B2B businesses (like our company, Hile Design)? Is social media an uneven playing field, with the B2C guys getting the advantage?

Yes: We think it’s pretty clear that it is easier for a B2C company to set up a Facebook page and begin to appeal to the average user via interesting posts, special deals, campaigns, and coupons etc. B2B companies have a harder time appealing to the right people, i.e., other business execs and owners, with something as simple as a status update.

But, also, no: It is possible for a B2B business to have a successful presence on the social media scene. The key is not to forget what we’ve said from the beginning: that social media is not a place to sell things; it’s a place to enhance and build relationships.

Successful Social Media for a B2B Company

Who is using social media effectively within the B2B world? One of the first names that come to mind is Caterpillar, the Peoria, Illinois-based manufacturer of large earth hauling equipment. Uh, Caterpillar? Who’d want to follow them on Facebook? Well plenty of folks it seems, since they have over 105,000 FB Likers and 28,000 Twitter followers.

Why are they so successful? One word, “innovation,” comes to mind. Like Starbucks who continues to ask their customers what could make their coffee and service better, Caterpillar invited their followers to become involved in the design development of their CT 660, a multi-purpose truck body that can be customized as a cement mixer, refuse hauler, or dump truck. They incorporated feedback from the actual operators who would be driving the vehicle. That really communicates their genuine interest in serving their customers in a tangible way.

The company actually has quite a diverse product line, so they have created Twitter subpages to address the particular needs of these niche users. They eventually plan to create pages for almost all of their individual products.

Their FB followers feel so connected with the company via social media that they are now beginning to actually place orders and ask for technical help on Facebook. Of course Caterpillar follows up these requests with traditional emails or phone calls, but it speaks a lot about how successful their online engagement has become.

Get the full story on Caterpillar’s social media success.

Let’s Wrap This Up

Social media is an optional business tool, for those with the infrastructure to manage it. It’s something that is available for people that are seeking to connect with their customers on a more personal level and are committed to maintaining this relationship over the long haul.

Hile Design would not invest in social media if we didn’t have writers who love to blog, designers who are willing to provide graphics, industry peers willing to be interviewed or provide a guest post, or an owner (me), who devotes about an hour, each morning, to finding and posting interesting content to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. If you don’t believe me, visit our FB page, and while you’re there, go ahead and share this post, and Like our page, and comment on a status or two. (Oh, come on, you knew that was coming, right?)

It seems that everywhere we turn there’s an article or blog post titled:

(Fill in number here) Steps to Mastering Social Media

Some are written with dogmatic certainty while others leave us with more questions than answers. We’d like to stay away from identifying ourselves as “gurus,” telling you how to attract more Facebook followers or how to leverage LinkedIn to its full potential. There’s just such a deluge of that kind of information already out there. Instead, besides sharing some general thoughts on social media, we’re going to offer our take on the role it’s played in our own company. Then, in Part 2, we’ll share some success stories of several big name brands that we think “get it.”

Defining Social Media

Social media encompasses more than blogging and “The Big Three.” While Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are the most widely embraced venues in the social media kingdom for business, there are many other communal sites such as YouTube, Google + (Google’s attempt to compete with Facebook), BranchOut (Facebook’s LinkedIn wannabe), Blogger, Flickr, Delicious, and Pinterest to name but a few. But that doesn’t begin to tap the industry specific social sites. Currently our company participates (to varying degrees) in no less than 28 marketing/advertising/design online communities. We won’t spend time describing them, but we do want to get across that social media is more than “Likes” and instant updates, especially when it comes to specific industries.

Social media allows for web-based community where you can unite, share, be inspired and create. For instance, one of our favorite industry-related sites is Behance (http://www.behance.net). It’s a great place to get inspired by other creatives from around the world and bounce around ideas with peers. Through the site, we’ve developed valuable professional relationships with talented creatives. As a matter of fact, several of them have either been interviewed or written guest blogs here on Hileites.

What Social Media Isn’t

We’ll start with discussing social media for Business-to-Business (B2B) entities, since this is how we, and most of our clients, utilize the media. To fully appreciate how it can affect business positively, it’s important to understand what it’s not; namely, an advertising medium. (We acknowledge that for Business-to-Consumer (B2C) companies there’s an advertising aspect represented through the announcement of sales and the offering of coupons. But even this should be used with discretion so as not to be perceived as hard sell tactics or worse, spam.) So, if it’s not about advertising per se, what’s it all about?

Social media is about, well… being social. It’s about building business, peer, and customer relationships, which lead to brand affiliation and (hopefully) eventually, to brand loyalty. Pardon me if you already know this and are thinking “Well, Dah!” But as we work with clients ten years after LinkedIn was born, nine years after Facebook changed the way we communicate, and seven years since the first tweet got tweeted, we are still questioned by new clients about the purpose of these platforms and how they can enhance their businesses.

Although the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company sites that 72% of all companies are using some sort of social technology, many business owners who don’t have internal marketing departments still don’t have the time to follow the latest trends about what SM is and how it should be used. In fact, most of the people who follow this kind of information are marketing professionals, not business owners since they’re too busy running their businesses.

Social Media May Not Be for Everyone, Right Now

Ha! That got your attention, didn’t it! An article in the Huffington Post recently deemed social media an “indispensible business tool.” But, is this really true? Our company works with a lot of start-ups, who regularly ask us if they should blog and set up Facebook and Twitter pages. Sometimes our answer is “Maybe not right now.” It takes so much effort to get a new company off the ground that often the effort to launch requires the allocation of limited resources elsewhere, like a website that really addresses company goals, search engine optimization (SEO) that allows potential customers to find them on major search engines, and other marketing venues.

If a company is going to embrace the social landscape, they need to have the infrastructure (staff and resources) to consistently formulate something compelling to say (or share), because effective social media is all about interesting and/or valuable content. Since it requires lots of time and resources, companies who jump in need to commit to doing SM for the long haul (or they can decide to hire an outside professional company to handle this service for them if they can afford it).

Need statistics? The Harvard Business Review surveyed 2,100 companies utilizing social media and found:

• A mere 12% of those businesses felt they were using the medium effectively.
• Another 45% felt like they were “getting there” and
• A whopping 43% confessed to be “ineffective users.”

Wow, only 12% felt like they were being effective, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are gaining meaningful financial return on their time and investment. But it’s not just about time and resources. Social media can also affect brand perception for good or ill.

There’s nothing quite as telling as a blog or corporate Facebook page that hasn’t been updated in a year and a half. Believe it or not, it’s not that uncommon to see. What does this communicate? Whether true or not, it suggests a business that’s not going anywhere. Other pitfalls? To borrow from an article in Forbes magazine, business owners make some consistent mistakes when taking a stab at social media, including: one-way communication, expecting instant “results,” and spamming. So, in these instances, social media can actually do more harm than good to a company’s brand.

Our Approach to Social Media

For us (as well as many other companies), social media is a platform for presenting our company in a more informal way. It is outside of the dynamic of buyer and seller, allowing for the traditional corporate persona to diminish and to be replaced with a more personable identity. But social media means more than loosening the proverbial tie. It is also the place for us to present ourselves as experts in our industry, offering (hopefully) entertaining and/or valuable information, advice and interaction.

Although we are active daily on LinkedIn, and Twitter, we particularly like the engagement Facebook offers. This differs from many other companies who prefer to place most of their social media efforts on the former platforms.

On Facebook we take a low-key approach to blowing our own horn. In fact, only about 30% of what we share is actually about us. We use FB primarily to share graphic, product and architectural design executed by other designers and companies from around the world. If it’s interesting to us, we hope it will be interesting to our “Likers” as well.

We also supplement this with inner-office pictures, personal humorous status updates that convey our corporate culture, and occasionally a new project we’ve completed. We decided to concentrate our social media on creativity, because so many other agencies talk about the analytics and technologies of digital marketing engagement. There’s just so much of that out there that we wanted to talk about something else.

What Is Our Expectation of Payoff?

We’re not looking for instant sales generated from our daily engagements, but we are investing in the long-range goal of creating brand awareness and alignment. Our hope is that at some point in the future, one of our “Likers” may suggest to a family member or friend who is starting their own business to check us out. However we have experienced shorter-term results as well.

First, our social media is a strong generator of visitors to our website, and the time they spend on our site is significant. For 2012, after Google organic searches and direct links, Facebook is our leading visitor source followed by our blog (which you’re now reading) and then LinkedIn. Twitter is down the list at number 20, which is still significant considering we had 220 different sources for site visitation via links. Of course, visits don’t necessarily translate to customer conversions, but if we consider our long-term goal of brand awareness, it’s been very effective.

Secondly, a company whose marketing director and other management staff were regularly reading our FB posts contacted me. They asked if I would come and speak to their company about social media. I was glad to put a presentation together which I shared with their entire company at their annual sales meeting. Then about six months later, we were able to bid on, and then develop one of their product websites, providing tangible results of our Facebook efforts.

In our next post, we will share with you several companies that really understand the purpose social media plays in their brand and have used it with significant return.

Note: If you’d like, you can skip the off-color backstory and go directly to how FAQs can be useful, today.

The first time I saw the letters F-A-Q strung together was in the early 1990s at a grungy little club in Athens, Georgia. The one thing I remember about the otherwise unmemorable band that was playing is the three letters scrawled on the body of the lead’s guitar: FA-Q.

FA-Q? It took me a set, but eventually I sounded it out. “Oh. I get it. Faaah…”

A couple years later, the people’s Internet began in earnest. AOL was handing out CDs with “free trial hours” by the zillions and everyone was rushing to get on the Web. Frequently Asked Questions pages became as ubiquitous on websites as “home” buttons. Trouble was, early attempts at FAQ pages were a hot mess. From a user’s standpoint, they felt like more of a FA-Q from frustrated programmers than an honest attempt to answer actual F.A.Qs.

The troubled history of FAQs

In the early attempts to convert their brand to this new media, a lot of companies found that once their main site navigation was done, they had some leftovers—the content equivalent of what happens to me when I try to work on an “assembly required” project at home (a fistful of extra nuts and bolts). The thing is built, but what do I do with this stuff that doesn’t seem to fit anywhere?

I have a drawer at home where I toss all my surplus hardware. For many early Web builders, the FAQ page became their site’s equivalent of the junk drawer. Read the rest of this entry »

Logo – that little spot of ink (or cluster of pixels) that communicates the persona of a company. We’re all familiar with the logos of major brands: Target’s red and white bull’s eye, Starbuck’s mermaid, the Nike swoosh, and You-Know-Who’s golden arches. These marks seem so simple, don’t they? And if you’ve spent any time looking for logo design services, you’d think it’s a simple process too. With online companies offering $50 logo design “packages” (including unlimited revisions), and sites where you can build your own logo, developing a logo can seem like a commodity similar to buying your company’s office supplies.

So why do discerning companies pay substantial amounts of green to hire a firm to custom design their logos? Perhaps the answer is that to really capture the essence of a brand, it takes a lot of thought, creativity, experience and trial and error. Ask any designer and they’ll tell you that designing a logo can be one of the most challenging projects they’ll tackle, because a successful logo says so much with so little. And regarding the cost? Well, a logo, like a company’s website is one of it’s most important brand assets. So the question really is, what’s the value of a corporate brand?

At Hile, we tell our clients that their logo is the clothes their company wears in public – a visual synonym for their business, and much more than a pretty graphic/type design – their logo should reflect the core of who they are.

We recently developed a brand identity for Go Docs Go, a medical start-up providing home medical care (read house calls) for homebound and geriatric patients. After going through the logo design process with our client, we thought we would provide a picture into how we do it.

Our first step was sitting down and talking with our client to discover who they were as a business, and how they could differentiate themselves from other competing firms. We needed to understand their core purpose, their customer promises and how they planned to prove those promises. We needed this information in order for the logo to have “authenticity.” While their competitors had typical corporate medical logos, Go Docs Go expressed a desire to have a friendly, contemporary logo that presented a sense of accessibility to their patients and their families, while still representing a professional organization that participating health care providers could align themselves with. These attributes were right on the mark with the way we experienced our client.

Next, we pass the torch to our designers and they develop an assortment of logo concepts. Then, internally we select the designs (sometimes as many as twenty) down to a few options to show our client. For Go Docs Go we also developed a tag line to communicate the company’s purpose: “Go Docs Go – The Doctor’s Office at your Door.”

Below are the designs we presented along with the reasoning behind each option. Our designer, Charlie Szczygiel, provides our narrative:

“The main thing we needed to communicate was ‘doctors (and other health care providers) coming to your home’ and we wanted to be clear about that message, so it shouldn’t be too abstract. There were some common medical images such as a stethoscope that we needed to avoid since our client’s competitors were already using them. Despite the ‘speedy’ reference in the Go Docs Go name, we realized early on that we should avoid visual references like the image below, as it might communicate speed at the expense of thorough patient care.”

The logos below are those we presented to our client. See if you can guess which one was selected, and click on the link at the bottom of this post to see if your selection matched the client’s final pick!

“This one was a softer option, but we still needed it to stand out. We wanted to try blue in order to give the logo more of a soothing feeling than the more typical medical red. This was a design where the messaging was incorporated in the typography.”

“This idea was the same concept as our first design, only in icon form. Initially, I was just playing with the icons and needed a way to contain them, so I ended up trying a pill image since that is a simple, medically recognizable shape. Then, we decided that if we put a slant instead of a straight line in the middle of the pill, it would communicate the travel aspect. The logo is saying three things (literally representing the tag line), but it is contained in a way that all the messaging works within a single icon.”

“This design communicates “medical” and “homes” in the simplest icon I could think of – the medical cross. The neighborhood graphic makes it a friendlier logo. The only downside of this might be that some people wouldn’t see a red cross right away, but it still works aesthetically and conceptually so I didn’t see a problem with the design.”

“This was a little abstract. ‘A little too feminine’ according to Dave (Hile). He felt this might be more applicable for, say, hospice care. But several designers argued it should be included and Dave gave in.”

“This one is pretty self explanatory. We wanted to present an option without a medical cross. The heart rate monitor delineates the shape of a house.”

“This design highlights a doctor or healthcare provider (developed from universal walking man) entering a home. It’s a literal and straightforward treatment. But that was okay since it was our goal to provide the client with a range of options.”

Click the link to find out which logo was chosen: The Winning Go Docs Go Logo.

How did you do? Leave a comment!

In Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug gives a spot-on guide to website usability— all that stuff that helps visitors to your site find what they’re looking for. What Krug’s book doesn’t touch on is the relationship between usability and search engine optimization (SEO) —how visitors actually find your site in the first place.

I really don’t fault Krug for this (too much) since it’s not his area of primary expertise, and there’s plenty written elsewhere on SEO. Still, a nod to SEO might have been nice since some principles of usability that Krug advocates can appear to be in conflict with best practices in SEO.

If you’ve read Krug’s book along with a few guides to SEO, you probably know what I mean.

The current maxim for SEO is “content is king” with textual content sitting high atop the searchability throne. If you want search engines to find your site, you need good copy. A picture may say a thousand words to most of us, but to bat-blind Web crawlers, a picture only whispers whatever you can squeeze into its alt tag.

In contrast, to make sites more user-friendly, Krug suggests you “Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.” (Cue hearty shouts of approval from graphic designers everywhere.) Read the rest of this entry »

I’m going to ask you to humor me for a moment. If I say the word “writer,” what picture pops into your head? My bet is that your imagination immediately conjured up an image of a bespectacled man or woman sitting in the lone corner of a coffee shop with a Moleskine and a pen. Of course, your imagined writer is not conversing with the other customers or being engaged with the world because the best writing comes from the inner-depths of a writer’s mind and soul … right? Well, yes and no.

Poetry and fiction may be more personal works, thus requiring seclusion from the distraction of others. But agency copywriting is a different ball game altogether.

Marketing writing is a form of communication that is constantly evolving, and to be successful copywriters need to be actively involved with others. I have learned a few things from my experience in writing copy for Hile: Read the rest of this entry »

I am approaching 30 years of running my own business and although I’ve made plenty of mistakes I’ve learned a few things too. I know this because my wife keeps telling me how much I’ve changed as a businessman (I assume she meant this as a compliment). Also, in almost 3 decades I’ve only ever had one employee quit because they didn’t like working for me (after only 3 days on the job).

To make a point, I’ve turned my subject matter on its head. So instead of entitling this post “10 Tips Toward Business Success” (I know I wouldn’t read an article with that tired cliché of a title), I’ve written one with a more engaging name (and hopefully more meaty content as well).

So here are my tips in no particular order:

1. Be passionless. Look at your business as just a way to make a living and nothing more. That will assure you take the easiest path to any challenge, and will expedite your company’s demise.
2. Nurture your ego. Make sure you view yourself as the supreme expert in every situation. And while you’re at it, make sure everybody else knows it too. If you look to surround yourself with people more talented than you in their areas of expertise, and give them the freedom to exercise their gifts, you run the risk of losing power even if you end up ultimately being more successful. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I’ve noticed a lot of what I consider braggadocio in the marketing world. Of course this is nothing new, but according to the rules of today’s branding etiquette, it seems out of place. I’m not talking about companies throwing out empty advertising claims like, “We’re the Best” or “Our Quality Is Unsurpassed” (all statements that can’t be quantified). No, what I’m addressing lies within the marketing community itself.

As I peruse LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+ as well as other professional social sites I see marketing people describing themselves as Visionaries, Gurus, Luminaries and Pioneers. There are enough people out there labeling themselves as such that I can’t help but think, “C’mon, all these people can’t be Visionaries!” Besides, “Visionary” and “Guru” are such subjective titles—especially when ascribed to oneself. And for whatever reason, most of the people describing themselves with these monikers seem to be involved in the social media arena, which seems ironic.

As far as I know Albert Einstein never described himself as a genius. He left that to others. Read the rest of this entry »