How to Do Social Media

This is the life cycle of technology: 1) this is amazing!; 2) man, this really makes my life easier; 3) I can't remember a time before this tech; 4) it's something I have to do; 5) this is nothing but a burden but I can't quit now. Social media was sill somewhere around a 2 before Donald Trump discovered Twitter, and now it's a 4.3. And because my streams are dominated by breweries and cideries, I see a ton of what now largely amount to ads on social media.

But amid that torrent a few companies stand out. My very favorite is Rack and Cloth, a tiny little farm-cidery in Mosier, just east of Hood River. It is a two-person operation, and I'm pretty sure Kristina Nance mans the Instagram account (Silas Bleakley, Kristina's other half, is the principal cider-maker). I wrote about Rack and Cloth here if you want the backstory (it's a good one).

Social media is informal and gives companies the opportunity to do a few things they can't do in other mediums. They can speak with the voice of a human. They can exhibit individual, idiosyncratic personalities. They can connect directly and intimately with followers and build more meaningful connections. They can tell little pieces of their stories in that informal way friends do--which when done well is enormously compelling. Finally, they can communicate important information in an engaging way.

It's not easy, though. As someone who half-asses his own social media about half the time, I know how easy it is to miss the opportunity to really communicate. As a public service announcement, I'd like to direct your attention to Rack and Cloth's work, which is among the best I've seen (click to enlarge them).

The cidery's mascot is a sheep called Pomme Pomme, and it's a real creature. (Dunno if this is her.) This message reminds us that Rack and Cloth is a working farm and connects us to the real, sometimes snowy, activity that happens there.

The little retail outlet in Mosier is a charming building where you can find a pint of house cider and a meal made with farm-grown ingredients. Hanging giant Christmas lights and calling them out with caps is the kind of whimsy you feel when you visit. Everything about this is spot on for the vibe of the place.

Cider-making is mostly not a dynamic process, but there's always a vessel to clean! Kristina's use of the first person creates that intimate connection one loves to see. (And which is really hard to pull off with authenticity.)

This last one was the inspiration for the post; it does everything right--and is delightful writing to boot. Let's go down the list: speaks with the voice of a real human--check. Exhibits a idiosyncratic personality--check (times two, with the #killermike hashtag). Tells a piece of the company's story--check. And communicates important information--check. Telling people "we're closed" is a great opportunity to irritate them. This turns that bad news into something charming and kind.

If there's a lesson here for breweries/cideries who want to maximize their social media's impact, it's finding someone who really knows and loves the company. If you cycle through people who just post basic info, impersonally, like an ad, you're going to reap the meager rewards of such an approach. I suppose it's better than nothing, but look at how much more you can accomplish with the right message and messenger.

New Belgium's Social Media Strategy Was Wise After All

Since I assume most of you (sanely) don't read the Facebook page to this blog, you may have missed the stiff rejoinders I received in response to yesterday's post. (Thumbnail: New Belgium's spending real money on a social media campaign, and I questioned its value.) Dave Selden, whom you know as the media titan behind 33 Beers wrote this:

I work in advertising and have for about 15 years. I have specialized expertise in digital marketing, so I feel pretty well-qualified to comment on this. I can tell you this is a perfectly reasonable and well-advised spend. A one-day shoot for a big beverage company (including beer) television commercial could easily cost $250K, and wouldn't include any actual media buy - just the cost of having cameras, crew, lights, permits, actors, a team of Clydesdales, writers, directors, etc. And then you've got post-production ... If you don't have that kind of money, TV is out, out, out (unless you're Old Milwaukee, but I digress ...).

Interactive as a medium is far more targeted (less wasteful) and in general, a cheaper buy. So if I didn't have a 7, 8 or 9 figure budget, I would definitely focus on the interactive medium, and Facebook as a channel would be at the top of my list. On a much more direct level, my beer-tasting books have been linked to from New Belgium's Facebook feed and I saw an immediate and very large spike in orders that I could quantify in dollars (but I won't for modesty's sake). It wasn't $250K but it wasn't 1K, either. That was from them linking to me from one post to ~70,000 fans. Imagine what the value of that hyper-targeted audience is over a week, or a month, or years. They don't sell beer online (which would allow them to directly tie spend to return), but $250K seems like a great investment from where I'm sitting.

Kari Chisholm, who has for a decade made a living trying to influence people on the internet (he was into social media before we had a term for it) agreed:

Yeah, I'm with Dave here. $250k should translate to roughly 250,000 fans on Facebook. Over the long term, that's much more valuable than $250k on TV ads, which could disappear in a whiff over a weekend. The advantage of Facebook is that once acquired, you can communicate long-term with those fans. And for beer specifically, it's such a whim-of-the-moment product, you really need to be top-of-mind every single day. If you can't advertise like Budweiser, then other tactics must be brought to bear.

After a bit of back-and-forth, Dave expanded his thesis

Well, a "like" is valuable to a marketer in a purely tactical sense, the consumer has agreed to be marketed to. Brands that I like start to appear in my news feed, just as yours do. So that $1 spend to get the customer is more like an investment. It allows me the marketer to talk to (and uniquely with Facebook, WITH) my current and prospective customers at will. I'm not bound to a magazine's publishing schedule or a TV budget.

I can literally talk as much as I want. As with a friendship, you generally want it to be two way, and make sure you're adding value to the relationship. Many brands use Facebook to invite people to exclusive events, give away schwag, etc. How does that all translate to dollars? We tend to spend more time (and money) with the people and businesses we have relationships with. Seeing a brand's messages mixed in with my friends helps humanize and strengthen those messages, and does so in a place I generally consider to be a safe place, in a way that TV or radio just aren't.

A day later, I'm more or less convinced: New Belgium has spent its money wisely. Perhaps a better lesson is for small brewers to whom ten grand is a king's ransom, but useless in traditional ad markets. By Dave and Kari's logic, it would be a good use of limited funds.

The Limits of Facebook

All of this just seems wrong:

According to Ad Age, Colorado's New Belgium Brewing recently commissioned a survey of its Facebook followers in which it determined the average New Belgium Facebook fan spends $260 per year on the brand. That translates to $50.7 million annually — or roughly half the brewery's sales each year.

Not a bad return on what New Belgium tells Ad Age was a $235,000 investment it made on its social-media presence last year "mostly dedicated to Facebook, including both app development and advertising."

Really? Over two hundred grand on Facebook--just to get a story in the USA Today confusing correlation with causality? It gets worse: New Belgium is planning on dumping another $200k into promoting a new beer launch on Facebook. And this is just sad:

New Belgium ... has managed to best the larger craft brewers with 211,000 fans. Not bad for a brew that is available only in 28 states and Washington, D.C.... Its fan base compares with 138,000 for Boston Beer's Sam Adams, and 134,000 for Sierra Nevada, both of which have national distribution.

Here's a real statement of causality: New Belgium has apparently spent over a dollar for every "like" on their Facebook page. No wonder they're leading the pack. But will any of this translate into actual beer sales--or even a big enough sales bump to justify the expense? Let's just say I find it implausible. (Even this morning I encountered yet another in a long line of studies showing the real-world limits of social media.) While it seems to make good sense to have an active social media presence for the small minority for whom that's important, "liking" a brewery on Facebook is not the same as selling beer. Just saying.