Over the past 18 months, Southwire has been utilizing social media promotions to promote various products and raise awareness of new product lines. Typically, our audience for these promotions is electrical contractors that fall between the ages of 18 and 35. Although it was a bit of a struggle trying to market to this target audience through social media at first, we found ways to reach this group. One of our current social media promotions, for example, has received over 1 million entries. Not too bad for a wire and cable company!
For this project, however, I have decided to try something new. Instead of marketing our products to middle age contractors, I want to leverage our employees, their families, and our surrounding communities in order to generate photo content to use for our new internal branding campaigns.
With over 7,500 employees at 35 different locations in the United States, Southwire has a large presence in the cities and towns where our manufacturing facilities and distribution warehouses are located. Because many of these locations are in small rural areas, the majority of people in the towns either work at Southwire or have friends and family members who do. In most of these areas, Southwire plays a very active role in the community. From disaster relief drives, to Habitat for Humanity , to sponsoring charity events, Southwire’s volunteer organization, Project GIFT, is well known through the company. The employees are (for the most part) very proud of the Southwire culture.
On Southwire’s Facebook page, you will often find new posts about the most recent Project GIFT events. In fact, we see huge traffic and engagement spikes when we post this type of content. Our employees share these photos and love to see them because they are proud to share the Southwire culture with their friends and family.
Meanwhile on the digital marketing team, we had a few challenges that needed to be addressed.
1. We just created an Instagram account and need to gain a few hundred followers prior to promoting to electrical contractors. Who wants to be one of the first people to follow a brand’s Instagram account? I wouldn’t think it was the legitimate account if there were only 35 followers.
2. We need to make employees aware that Southwire is on social media. Although our employees that are involved in Project GIFT know that we have social media channels, a good bit of our employees don’t know that we are actually active on social media. We have never promoted our social media channels internally nor are our employees being targeted through social media promotions. Per our legal terms and conditions for our prior promotions, employees and their immediate family members were actually not allowed to participate in the contests.
3. We don’t have a full time photographer and are running out of photos to use on both internal and external branding campaigns. My team of three can only be at so many places at a time.
Guess what? Our employees are all over the country. They have smart phones. They are on social media (trust me; I see what they are saying about Southwire every day through my reputation management software). They are very competitive. They really like being recognized. They like free Southwire Swag and winning prizes. They also just happen to be proud of the Southwire culture. I decided to create a social media promotion that focuses on Southwire employees and the communities that they work and live in. Through this promotion, we aim to meet our objectives: to grow Southwire’s Instagram account, to create awareness of our social media accounts, and generate photos from all over the company.
Using a third party contest platform, WooBox, we are able to create a promotion that reaches multiple social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The contest will be fan-gated (meaning that participants must like the Southwire Facebook page) and will be housed on Facebook. Participants will be able to take a photo anything related to “We are Southwire”. This can include photos of people, facilities, events, or any other photo that captures the theme. We want our employees to be creative and think outside the box. Once the photo is taken, they can post it to Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter using #wearesouthwire. All of the photos that contain this hashtag will be aggregated and displayed on our Facebook contest page. Users can then vote for their favorite photos. Each month for three months, the person who entered the photo that received the highest number of votes will win a customized Southwire Big Blue Live wireless speaker. I will also work with our legal team to create the Terms and Conditions for this promotion.
Along with the social media posts promoting this, we have several internal communications sources to help spread the word. During the first week of the promotion, we will dedicate a section of the weekly employee newsletter to the contest. Announcements will also be displayed on our Southwire News Network and message boards.
Here is a sketch of how the contest page will be laid out. Note: I focus on content, not design. The designer on my team will take this sketch and make it look perfect!
Although we planned to launch the contest on April 1st, due to certain circumstances, we will need to delay the launch of this promotion until at least June. Our company acquired one of our large competitors and several employees were laid off due to an overabundance of manufacturing capacity. What did those employees do? Take it out on social media. The layoff was announced on March 25th, so this whole week has been absolutely crazy. I don’t think it would be appropriate and in good taste to launch a “We are Southwire” promotion the week after this occurred. I would really hate to see what kind of photos we would get from employees and family members that were affected by this decision. And like everything in social media, it is so important to be flexible and listen to what your audience is saying.
The Social Potter 