Swimming in the social media waters: C’mon in, the temperature’s fine!

Sally Saville Hodge

We just found out that we won an award for an integrated communications program we created and executed over the course of about a year for one of our clients. Woo-hoo!

I can’t give specifics on the award as it hasn’t yet been formally announced. But it occurs to me that the work itself is a case in point for all those PR and marketing folks who remain mired in traditional strategies because they’re too fearful and risk averse or just plain too lazy to bring themselves up to speed by reading up on who’s doing what and how that translates into best practices.

Says the Friday Traffic Report: Successful marketing practices are born of experimentation, testing and boundary tweaking. It’s time to quit complaining and start learning.

That’s what we decided to do last year, thanks to complete buy-in from a client that hired us for our expertise and trusted us to employ it in the firm’s best interests.

Alternative Reproductive Resources (ARR) initially hired us to do “traditional” PR, but it quickly became apparent that the way ARR does business (matching intended parents with egg donors and gestational surrogates in a highly principled way) and the demographics of some of its critical audiences (young women between 21 and 38) lent themselves to more.

At its heart, ARR is dedicated to building a community of families and the women who enable their creation. Moreover, while traditional media coverage is helpful for image building and credibility, by itself, that’s not sufficient to convince young women that the physical and psychological “testing” required to donate their eggs or carry another’s child is worth it – whether in hard cash or psychic income. This is a play where the peer experience is invaluable.

We believed a community blog would not only reinforce ARR’s positioning as a caring, ethical leader among egg donation/surrogacy agencies, but also allow women to share their personal experiences in their own words. The viral effect would boost traffic to both the blog, Conception Connections, and from there, to ARR’s Web site. Ultimately, with its own egg donors, surrogates and parents as implied endorsers, the strategy would respond to ARR’s ultimate business need to bring in more qualified donors and surrogates.

We proposed the idea to ARR and were told: “Go for it.” (Even though we had to explain what a blog was first!)

Here’s the point, though. We’d never done a blog before, from start (underlying strategy) to finish (content management). And there was a risk. Screw up and it could well cost us money, not just in time to fix, but in the potential loss of a valued client.

Gulp.

Luckily, it’s not like we haven’t been staying on top of developments in the social media world. We consult regularly with partners who’ve been blogging for years and others who specialize in search engine optimization. Plus, we have talent in-house with personal experience in this realm who helped guide the strategy and execution. So, I was comfortable in making this bet.

And it’s paying off. Media relations tactics, like a release sent to targeted bloggers and Web sites and a feature mentioning the blog on Reuters, combined with some SEO strategies, have caused traffic to steadily rise (about 2,500 total visitors since the official launch), and created a steady stream of comments and direct positive feedback to the client. On its role in meeting the ultimate business need? Time will have to tell.

More important to me than awards and succeeding at risk-taking, though, has been the client’s response. At our most recent meeting, mere hours after I sent ARR its monthly invoice, the company’s president handed me the check. “This is one I don’t mind paying because we feel so well cared for by your team,” she said.