The Grand Social Media Experiment - Final Report on Facebook Contest

For full transparency, I must admit there will be an epilogue to this report. I and my client began the Social Media Campaign in November. We did not know what it would do for ticket sales of the event. Our purpose was just to get the event word out, to connect with our volunteers and guests, and to help the public understand why a hot air balloon can't fly in hot windy air.

My company promotes the Temecula Valley Balloon and Wine Festival. (http://www.tvbwf.com/)  In its 27th year, this event is truly, if you know how to count people, cars and tickets, the biggest event in the Valley. 38,000 to 40,000 annually attend the event.

November 2009 I and the staff met to discuss the Social Media campaign and what we hoped to accomplish. First we wanted a nice Facebook Fan Page that we managed. There were several different fan pages out there, done by friends, volunteers and even bands that played at the Festival  previously.

So we deactivated them and began the Social Media Experiment with the sole goal of having all social media up and running by March 1, 2010. March 29 we would start a Facebook contest, teased by Twitter and our radio media partners. We started with zero fans and followers. By March 25 by working it part time on my part and the office staff we had 950 total fans, 270 visits in a week, and 3 wall posts in a week.

The contest ended May 9th and here are the results of the six week campaign:
We added an average of 200 fans a week, one weekend 650 fans.
We ended with 2,471 total fans. (net of 1521)
Wall posts ended at 301 for the final week of the contest (compared to 3)
Visits to the page were 1,649 for the final week, 1,090 the previous week. (six times more visits than when the contest started)

The Festival's fan page is still adding fans at the rate of 150 a week. Total fans 2,732.
There were 995 visits last week to the fan page so we are maintaining the momentum as we lead to the Festival next weekend.

We have also added Twitter followers at a steady rate (from 0 to 173) Twitter was not a priority. Within our community and demographics of the Festival Twitter is a misused and understood microblog. What the campaign did include, however, was following all of the wineries and performers at the 2010 event. This provided us additional audience of the Festival message that we may not have reached otherwise. Frequent Tweet backs to those we followed helped us find new friends.

Our Social Mention (http://www.socialmention.com/) quotient at this point (there is debate on its accuracy as it does pull up irrelevant sites) has a strength of 2, sentiment of 22 and passion of 27. While I understand what it all means, in the manner of social media, I don't know how it will translate to ticket sales. After all, that is what a marketing campaign, be it traditional, social or mixed, is all about. Sell the product. Cute and clever doesn't always sell. Just ask Joe Izusu and the Lizards of Bud. Then again, there is the Aflac Duck.

For the Festival, our goal was to have 10% of our normal audience as Fans on Facebook. Oh wait - Facebook changed that to "Like." (Gees - sometimes you geeks need to get a life.) It was also to reach more people with the complete Festival message. Remember when I mentioned Hot Air Balloons. Well, it never fails, in the 15 years of doing this event, and no matter what we write in a press release, put in the news, say on television, there will always be a handful of guests who walk into the Festival at 1 p.m. and complain that there are no hot air balloons.

Science 101 - HOT AIR RISES guys ... that is what we have been able to say to all of our Fans and followers, who have actually answered the critics on blogs other social media. They have reminded our guests that a Hot Air Balloon must have cool air to fly. And, if that is ALL we accomplish, it will be something that couldn't be done in 27 years of the event.

As for attendance and ticket sales, we will know on June 6th about 1 p.m. when the trickle into the Festival slows. I can say this much, on May 15 & 16, I was promoting another event in town, Western Days & Chili Cookoff. The budget for these Old Town events continues to shrink. It has been hacked and hacked again. Every time it gets hacked in down economies - it doesn't get blessed in good. While costs of promoting go up, the budget doesn't. I say this so you understand the limits of growing an event without money to promote it.  The attendances is always between 2,500 to 4,000 a day depending on the weather. 

Not this year. Whether it was the extremely clever radio commercial we produced on KFrog, the Westways article or the intense web promotion, with email blasts and social media, I truly can't say. But the event clearly doubled in size. Chili was sold out in an hour. The high noon gunfight crowd looked a bit like the Rod Run crowd. (http://www.temeculacalifornia.com/)

As the marketer and promoter, I'll say it was all of the above. If, however, we see an increase in attendance at the Festival where we can actually count tickets and attendance, I'll know social media marketing had a major impact.  Expect an epilogue.

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Social Media Scorecards and the Grand Social Media Experiment

Let me just say this. DON'T DO A CONTEST on Facebook for six weeks unless you have 4 people monitoring the contest pages at all times.  Of course that also depends on if you have 5 people playing, and a fan base of 80.  My client started with 1,100 fans. Our goal is 4,000 by the time of the event.  We're at 2,390 fans on Facebook today and we're about 30 days out from the Event. We are averaging an addition of 120 per week, with one weekend adding over 600 fans as part of the contest.

But how does this help us? Somewhere in my spare time I have found time to read yet another book on this new media that changes faster than the speed of sound. But it is Brian Solis' latest "Engage" and the last 20 pages of the book are on measuring your return on investment, knowing your "Social Influence" score or value and how different gurus are measuring the results.

We will measure results at the gate and cash register. But for now, we are seing and hearing the buzz of the event. Last week 102 links were made to our fan page -- they were all SPONSOR LINKS...giving our sponsors tremendous interactivity and exposure to our 2,390 loyal fans. There is a great free measurement site that has us with pretty high scores for posts and sentiment. The site also measures passion, although I don't know how. (Something else to read.)

And what I really found of great value, was the numerous categories of measurements, from links to news, to blogs and microblogs. Bottom line, I was able to find some news coverage on our event that hasn't popped up in any of my usual media audit services.

The site is socialmention.com. But while you dig through all this with me, you might want to tap into another little gem on the web ... an article "10 Social Media Monitoring Tools..." http://tiny.cc/mrt88.

And 4 people? Well we have one monitoring comments, another the points and me the entire game. All part time ... which means to pull it all together ... someone has to work it. That would be me. 7 a.m. to midnight and I'm anxious for this contest to be over. What I thought would take a few hours a day divided up between three people, became eight hours.  And that is the biggest lesson of learned from all of  this. Get lots of help, have someone write you an app to keep better track of things and make it easier.

There are lots of tools out there to use, but all are partial in the general scheme of a BIG CONTEST totally conducted on social media. Praying my nephew can figure out the app by next year.

Sorry for any typos -- I'm a bit brain dead.