Blue Helm

The Jonas Brothers performed in 2009's Stadium of Fire.

Blue Helm is proud to work with America’s Freedom Festival at Provo, a nonprofit group that dedicates itself to promoting family, freedom, God and country. One of the Freedom Festival’s great annual events is the Stadium of Fire, an awesome celebration every 4th of July featuring past performers like the Jonas Brothers, Miley Cyrus, the Beach Boys, Blue Man Group and the Osmonds. This year, Blue Helm has sponsored the festival’s successful Vote the Voice campaign—an opportunity for Facebook and Twitter fans to recommend who they would like to see perform in a future Stadium of Fire event. Here’s the most recent press release we sent out to Utah’s media about the campaign:

Provo, Utah – November 17, 2009 - America’s Freedom Festival at Provo, in partnership with Blue Helm Communications, officially released today the final online poll for the Stadium of Fire’s Vote the Voice event. After aggressive grassroots and viral lobbying among thousands of fans, the community may now choose between David Archuleta, Taylor Swift, Carrie Underwood, Bon Jovi and Eric Dodge to become a potential performer in a future Stadium of Fire celebration.

Fans must visit the Freedom Festival’s Facebook page to access a link to the new online ballot. Over 15,000 votes have been cast since October 15 to narrow the list of favorite contenders to five. The new online poll of five names is comprised of leading nominees from the last two phases of the Freedom Festival’s Vote the Voice campaign—an energetic and ongoing vote held since September on the festival’s Twitter and Facebook pages.

A unique example of how Vote the Voice has influenced the Freedom Festival’s consideration of future performers is the inclusion of southern Utah country singer Eric Dodge in the final five. The Freedom Festival was unaware of his enormous popularity among many Utah residents before Vote the Voice began. Through Facebook, Twitter and Eric Dodge’s website, fans have coordinated and lobbied to vote in strong numbers, thus securing his name among other, better-known contenders in the final five.

In another distinctive use of social media campaigning, David Archuleta’s fans dominated Twitter discussions about Vote the Voice. Their lobbying for the American Idol runner-up was so relentless, one of the largest David Archuleta fan pages on Twitter took notice and encouraged its thousands of followers to get involved.

Members of the community are encouraged to visit the Freedom Festival’s Facebook page at www.facebook.com/freedomfestival to learn more about how to vote for their favorite performers. Fans can also stay up to date with Vote the Voice on Twitter at www.twitter.com/freedmfestprovo.

When the Freedom Festival tallies all the votes at the end of the year, it will do its very best to book its fans’ favorite performer for a future Stadium of Fire event. No guarantee of any future performer, despite the outcome of the vote, can be made.

Thanksgiving is just around the corner. I’ve always loved Thanksgiving, a holiday that combines the four essential F groups: family, friends, food and football.

So what’s the best way to use social media this upcoming Thanksgiving week? Here are a few ideas:

1. Tell your family and friends (employees and clients if you’re a business) why you’re thankful for them. Write on their Facebook wall or tweet something nice about them. Expressing your gratitude for them will not only brighten this person’s day, it will make you feel great too.
2. Share your favorite recipes. We all love the delicious foods that accompany Thanksgiving dinner. Stop hoarding your favorite dish and share it with the world! Maybe someone else will love your stuffing, cranberry sauce or homemade apple pie. When you’ve posted the recipe, ask for other people’s favorite recipes and try one of them this year. If you’re a business, start a conversation about great recipes on your Facebook page, blog or on Twitter.
3. Make a list of things you’re thankful for and share it with everyone. It could be a list of the weirdest things you’re thankful for or even the top YouTube videos you’re thankful for. Just be thankful. That’s the idea of this holiday, right?
4. Share the best Black Friday deals! Not only is Thanksgiving Day awesome, but the day after is awesome too. Let people know where the best deals are. If you’re a business, let your followers know you’re having a killer deal. But don’t just share your own deals. Share deals for products from other businesses that will complement the items you sell. Karma pays dividends.

These are just a few of my ideas. How are you using social media to brighten your Thanksgiving?

Okay, this is a pretty generalized topic to be blogging about. But Blue Helm is in the middle of its first annual Social Media Library Series, and I know an all-purpose post like this will be helpful to some of our class members. So let’s jump right into this—the following are a few basic, general tips on how to grow your business using social media:

1. Educate yourself: Before jumping onto the social media bandwagon, search around online and find out how other professional leaders in your industries have used social media to enhance their business opportunities. You’ll find stories of shopkeepers using Twitter to advertise specials and driving customers to their stores, financial advisors using LinkedIn to network with prospective clients and construction firms sharing home improvement tips on blogs and Facebook pages. Take the time to learn more about social media and how it works, even if it’s just a few minutes each day. Like we tell our class participants, you don’t have to use all the social networks at once. Learn about the tools, start small, develop a simple marketing plan and go from there.

2. Use Twitter: Go here to learn more about the basics of how to set up and understand your first Twitter account. I think what I want to stress most to our readers is that Twitter can be a powerful listening tool for your business. You can easily search for what tweeters are saying about your business, product or industry in the site’s search box. Then you can respond and engage. For example, let’s pretend you manufacture juice makers. You get to work each morning and type “juice maker” into Twitter’s search box to see what people are saying that day. You happen to see a lot of complaints about complicated or expensive juice makers. You can respond personally to these people on Twitter, explaining to them that your company’s juice makers are neither complicated nor expensive, and that you’d love to send them a generous e-coupon for your product if they’d like. Maybe one or two will respond and purchase your product that day. And the whole ordeal took ten minutes.

3. Blog: Read that as a verb—BLOG! Your business must have a specialty or area of expertise and it doesn’t matter if it’s plumbing, accounting, rock climbing, electrical engineering or chimpanzee grooming. You should blog about it. You should share valuable, genuine, consistent content with readers about your area of expertise. You should communicate and enhance relationships with your readers and other bloggers. This will generate buzz and excitement about your product and augment your status as an opinion leader in your field. Find out how to start blogging here.

This should get you started. Remember: educate yourself, try Twitter and blogging, and don’t give up! Social media can be overwhelming at first but the more you use it, the more you’ll come to understand it and discover your special niche.

I’m in Phoenix this week for a U2 concert and I couldn’t be happier. U2 is my most beloved band and I pretty much consider Bono my personal life guru. But what do Bono’s many mysterious philosophies have to do with social media? Probably nothing, but I still took some of his great quotes and reinterpreted them for a social media lesson. So pay attention. This may be the greatest blog post you ever read.

“Celebrity is currency, so I [want] to use mine effectively.”

Social media can be a powerful marketing tool for any business, but only if it’s used effectively. Do you have a Facebook page or Twitter account? They must be sources of good content. Do you have a blog? It must be genuine. Are you incorporating social media into your traditional PR or marketing strategies? You must engage, converse and monitor. Do you measure social media ROI? You must set intelligent goals beforehand. Effectiveness, effectiveness, effectiveness!

“I’d be in big trouble if Karma was going to finally be my judge. I’d be in deep s***. It doesn’t excuse my mistakes, but I’m holding out for Grace.”

But Bono won’t find grace in social media, and neither will you. Karma is everything here! If you aren’t retweeting, commenting on other blog posts, answering LinkedIn questions or engaging with your fans/followers, you will hardly attract new converts to your business through social media. Reach out to others online and they will reach out to you.

“We’ve got to follow through on our ideals or we betray something at the heart of who we are….The culture of idealism is under siege, beset by materialism and narcissism and all the other ‘isms’ of indifference.”

I often see this with other bloggers and tweeters, and I hope I’m not too guilty of it myself. When we use social media, it’s so easy to think about our own needs and wants and forget about the necessities or even the reality of others. When you post a tweet, for instance, are you doing it for you? Or do you really believe it contains beneficial information for your customers and followers? The same goes for a blog post, a YouTube video or a bookmark. Don’t use social media as a display case for your personal brand or business. It’s meant to be a conversation, not just a money-making monologue.

“There are many side roads and back streets to rock ‘n’ roll, and most of us get lost down them at times.”

I believe Bono is referring to MySpace here, but I could be wrong.

In conclusion, U2 is awesome. Maybe one day there will be social media theory classes in college. But for now, we have to rely on the wisdom and acumen of The Great Bono.

This is an important question not only for my business, but for any business looking to make it big in the online world. It’s a difficult question and it’s taken me four or five attempts to put my answer in writing.

So what’s the answer? Well, it depends. I think the reason it’s been so hard to write this post is because there are so many factors in play when deciding what kind of content your company should release. The content you release depends on whether you’re selling a service or a product. It depends on the size of the company and the existing market share you possess. It depends on the goals you’ve set and the direction you want to take your company. There really is no easy answer that applies to everyone.

So instead of trying to write the one-stop-post on why you should or shouldn’t publicize free content, I’m going to focus on a few reasons why releasing valuable and free content is advantageous.

It establishes credibility

People will read your material if it’s useful for them. If a first-time visitor to your website, blog, Twitter page or Facebook page finds something of value, they’re more likely to return at a later time. If they get something valuable most of the time they interact with your company or website, they will accept you as a trusted and credible source. For example, Darren Rowse (author of problogger.com) received this email from a reader in response to his latest ebook:

“I’ve never bought an ebook before, partly because I don’t trust people with my credit card information and partly because I’ve always suspected most ebooks are just fluff…. But after reading your blog for 12 months and being on the receiving end of useful information every day over that time I decided you were probably a credible source of information”.

The credibility gained from your content will set your company apart as a go-to source in your industry.

It strengthens your brand equity

As your credibility increases so does your brand equity. Brand equity is when people are willing to pay a higher premium for your product just for the name. As you become an opinion leader in your industry, clients will see your company name as a premium brand and will be willing to pay more for your product.

It produces referrals

Now that people trust you and see you as a credible source, chances are good they’ll tell their friends and colleagues all about you. This is the essence of social media. Your business increases as customers and readers refer people to you.

Seth Godin posted this on his blog: “If you really want to make a lot of money then you need to tactically use free content to sell your own premium content/product/service.”

What do you think? If you disagree, I want to know. If you have any more ideas, please impart of your wisdom.