Wizard of Wonderments and Digital Delights

Right out of the gate Mike Hayes of Magic Hat encourages businesses to get to know their customers and call them to action with contests. It is important to know your customers. He reiterates Todd Defren's point to use social networks to educate customers and to bring information to them.

What's cool in social media? Right now, Facebook and Twitter are on top while Myspace has fallen behind. Nobody knows what the next cool, or shiny, online tool is. During his presentation, Mike displayed a chart of Facebook, Twitter and Myspace users, Facebook and Twitter show the most immediate growth and more overall users than Myspace, whose aquisition of new users has leveled off and is growing at a comparatively slow rate.

In terms of tracking activity, Twitter has link and re-tweet quotients which allows us to see how and where the information is being shared. We can also track in terms of the number followers, fans and friends we have and the rate at which these numbers are growing. Facebook's new back end also provides better feed back. As users give ads a thumbs up or thumbs down, provide feedback on ad relevancy, change their profile information, click through the fan page, share information through news feeds, invitations, notifications etc. we are clued into their preferences and gain a better understanding on how to reach them in that medium.

Magic hat has used twitter in very creative ways to connect with their customer. At the release of their latest beer, they held a virtual tasting via twitter. They had a video stream from brewery and enabled followers to "tweet" about their new beer which generated a hashtag. This allowed them to gain feedback from customers on their new beer enabling them to use the information in the development of future beers.

Way to go Magic Hat, awesome implementation of social media!

-Amanda

Now onto a breakout session for a social media brain storm for Grounds for health!