A Tale of Two Clients

Social media consultants are, at the moment, taking pretty much whatever jobs come their way. I do not think that will last. We are starting to see a distillation of the niches that consultants/strategists are falling into. Soon, I expect you will see political social media strategists, food service social media consultants, among others, giving us a wide range of specialities. For now though, we are still taking the clients as they come and writing our case studies. I want to briefly go over a couple of clients that I have been working with.

Client: Julia Hurley, Tennessee State House Representative, District 32

Problem: Julia was considered an unknown in her district. Her opponent was a nine election incumbent. District 32 in Tennessee is an area not inclined to many of the popular social media platforms.

Solution: I went with the standard Facebook/Twitter combination, but soon found out that Twitter was not going to be that much of a player, at least not for the campaign. Facebook soon became our focus. We grew her fan base to over 1000 fans and Julia, from the start, was very interactive. She made sure to update on a very regular basis and carried on conversations with her fans.

We also had a website. Hurleyforhouse.com. Hits were moderate but steady and with our focus being a population of only 53,000, that was acceptable.

We made some nominal headway with Twitter and did very well with the website and Facebook campaign. Combined with Julia’s constant physical contact with the public, Julia was able to win her bid for State House Rep.

I did have a moment of instant validation when this message appeared on the Facebook fan page; “Congratulations! I first heard of you on election day, about an hour before I went to vote, but knew from your website that you would be the right one for the job. I am glad to hear of your victory.”

Client: Salon Moxie

Problem: New business in a area that already has very established, similar businesses.

Solution: Again this is an area that is not very big on social media. Facebook and YouTube, however, are widely used. We are building a fan base for Facebook and will be offering a variety of specials and discounts that can only be found on it. In addition to the fan page we are going to be running a YouTube campaign that will have some hair and makeup tutorials. These we will be using to target the area high schools. The idea is that when prom season rolls around, we will be able to bring in the girls from those high schools to get, not just their hair done, but makeup and nails as well. There is a website, moxietn.com, that will have regular blog posts, featured products, clients, and stylists. We are also looking at other campaigns for FB and YouTube, in the near future.

There you have it. Two very different clients, with very similar solutions. Continuing to discuss what, we in the social media community, are doing to market our various clients will help to further distil our jobs into their respective niches.