One last post to sum up my experience this semester...

Through this class I have learned a lot about a variety of social media platforms, and many more intricate details about how they work and how you can make the most of them than I knew before.  I had a strategic sense of a few of the big tools and how they work, but now I have more of a working and operational knowledge of them.  Constant Contact is a good example.  I’ve provided content for newsletters before, but until this class I had never used all the different gadgets in Constant Contact to put a whole newsletter together.  Knowing how to do that and what you can do with Constant Contact gives me a better sense of how to best contribute to newsletters in the future and how I can take on building my own newsletter from scratch.  The same is true for Facebook.  I’ve created content for others to put on Facebook, but I had never built a company page before or used Facebook analytics or created posts that were not timed to go out immediately.  Now that I am more familiar with some of the details of how facebook can work, I can devise better Facebook strategies. 

Overall this class has given me confidence in my own abilities and a sense that if I do take on leadership of social media for a company, I know the basics of how to do it.  It also helped me to see that there is a lot that goes into it.  Just writing one blog can take a long time if you are trying to write something thoughtful that helps your audience and shows that you are a leader or expert in your field.  Also, images are so important.  Investing in collecting powerful images is an important part of a social media strategy that cuts across all of the tools we have been using. 

I have also learned a bit more about social media as a listening strategy and I am beginning to understand how to learn from social media. 

I am glad that I have our texts and lectures to look back on some day if I ever do move forward with a company or take on a greater leadership role in social media for a job in the future.  But I will remember to think about what has changed between this class and whenever I implement these ideas, and I will remember to keep my eye out for what’s next.  I will watch out for where my target audience is engaging and I will go to them there, listen to them there, and create value for them there. I look forward to it!!

Week 14: Tools

I outlined the platforms we would use in the first post of the week.  Those were a blog, Facebook page, YouTube channel, and Twitter feed.  As far as other tools go, I would also want to use an editorial calendar to plan out the content we would develop and post over time, with some wiggle room for responsiveness to whatever is popular or new on the web.  Because our man-power will be initially limited, I would expect to spend an average of about 1-2 hours myself each day (or at least work day) on this stuff and expect about the same from my husband. Whenever we are setting up multiple Facebook posts we might spend more time than on other days.  We each come to the table with different skills.  He has the expertise in our content area, and I have the stronger communications and writing skills.  So I would be the one mostly managing everything and editing and doing a lot of writing, while Chris looked out for important engineering trends and wrote the more complex technical stuff.

I would want to use something like Google Drive, but I don’t really like Google’s actual tools all that much.  For example, I have had a lot of problems with the functionality of their spreadsheets and a lot of times the documents don’t want to open or look different when you “view” compared to download.  If we are doing a lot of things remotely and it doesn’t make sense to just have one computer be our “home base,” I might want to look into something like a sharepoint site or basecamp.  Or we could set up a gmail account and store documents in different archived folders until we grow out of that kind of simplistic system. 

I would definitely want to use some form of scheduling.  At this point I think we’d be ok with just Facebook’s built-in scheduling tools, but we may decide to upgrade to something like a Hootsuite if that plus our editorial calendar are not enough to keep us organized.

I’d definitely use all the analytics I could.  I’d use analytic data on our web site traffic, facebook page, and twitter posts.  I’d see what types of content were most popular on each platform and which types were popular on all the platforms.  I’d test out different things and see what works.  First though, I’d focus on getting our name out there to the right people and building a small cadre of followers whose opinion I felt really represented the opinion of the types of people we are targeting.

The first month would look something like this:

Week 1
M: Post a launch blog, share through FB and Twitter, Set up FB posts for the week
T: FB post goes, comment on a tweet
W: FB post goes, retweet something
Th: FB post goes, comment on a tweet
F: FB post goes, send out an original tweet

Week 2
M: Post a video on Youtube channel, share through blog, FB and Twitter, Set up FB posts for the week
T: FB post goes, comment on a tweet
W: FB post goes, retweet something
Th: FB post goes, comment on a tweet
F: FB post goes, send out an original tweet

Week 3
M: Post a blog, share through FB and Twitter, Set up FB posts for the week
T: FB post goes, comment on a tweet
W: FB post goes, retweet something
Th: FB post goes, comment on a tweet
F: FB post goes, send out an original tweet

Week 4
M: Post something to FB and Twitter, Set up FB posts for the week
T: FB post goes, comment on a tweet
W: FB post goes, retweet something
Th: FB post goes, comment on a tweet
F: FB post goes, send out an original tweet

Week 14: Comments

I posted comments on the blogs of Hillenbrand, Mac;  Jeon, Hyo Yoo; Kalinin, Karl; and Martin, Brittany. 

Week 14: Strategy

My overall aims for social media would be to spread interest in and awareness of the opportunity to increase resource-use efficiency in beer brewing to positively impact the planet and breweries’ long-term bottom lines while positioning my company as the ideal partner for breweries to contract with to achieve that double bottom line outcome.  With that in mind, I would probably want to approach my social media framework as follows…

Host a blog on our home page.  This would be the place where we show our expertise and contribute our own voice to the online conversation.  We would also invite guest bloggers with complementary perspectives, highlight relevant events, share videos (from our youtube channel), and more.  The blog would be our sort of home base.  Anything that we want to push through other channels could have its longer-version in the blog so people could go there for more information and it would be integrated into our company’s main site. We’d probably blog about once every two weeks to start.

We’d also use Facebook and Twitter in order to be where most of the people are.  Facebook would be used as a place to push out blogs as well as other content like photos, videos, posters, and other engaging media.  We would probably use time management strategies (like scheduling posts in Facebook) to set up about one Facebook post a day and then just let it ride unless we see something viral that we could share or comment on.  We’d probably use twitter as another place for pushing out content from our blog, but have that mostly as a place where we see what’s up and make comments or share most of the time.  Also we’d use Facebook and Twitter as ways to listen to the community.  I’d want to do something on Twitter about every day – at least every work day.  This we’d probably do real time since it would mostly be responding, retweeting and the like rather than set up a bunch on Monday to run through Friday, for example.

I would probably not start out with a newsletter, but I would definitely want to have a subscription feature for our blog so that people could get emails whenever we posted a new one.  If we have time for a newsletter, that is something I would consider adding in the future.

I mentioned a YouTube channel.  That seems like a good thing to have that we could just use whenever we have video.  I wouldn’t invest as much in creating videos as in some of the other efforts, but I would want to do some videos and those videos need to be hosted somewhere so they can be embedded in the web and easily shared.  Our YouTube channel would be that location.

Each of these tools I feel comfortable with and I feel like they can suit our company well.  Right now the company doesn’t exist.  At the start, if we start it, it will likely only be me and my husband.  For that reason I think we need to keep our social media efforts lean and targeted, but we should not skip them.  Social media is a marker of a serious business these days.  It is a way for us to prove engineering expertise, which is what we are selling.  That makes social media a pretty valuable strategy for us.  I would expect to spend about 8 hours a week on social media and I would expect my husband to spend about eight hours every two weeks working on the more in-depth blogs.  I can edit them and do most of the other stuff.  I’d need to also build up some engineering knowledge to spot good things to talk about online, and I’d need him to track what’s happening in social media and make sure we focus on the best content to share and respond to.  He loves social media, so hopefully it wouldn’t be too much of a burden to him as he works to get the actual engineering done.  J

Week 13 Facebook Insights

Now that I can see all the Insights, I have access to a lot more Facebook analytics.  Neat!  I can see movement in how many people are liking my page, as well as the total number.  I can see my overall post reach, post clicks, and the popularity of each post separately.  I can see post reach by organic vs. paid reach, how many people are liking, commenting and sharing on any given day, as well as how many people are hiding or unliking my page.  I can see total likes and net likes on a graph by the day, which is pretty cool.  I can’t yet see where my page likes came from.  Demographic data is currently unavailable.  I’m not sure if that’s a facebook error or if I need more likes to see that.  Overall very cool information!!

Week 13 - Analytics

In the advertising and campaign performance category I think I might use advertising reports when I do any ad campaigns and I would plan to use the SEO feature in order to get a better sense of where people are getting to my site from.  I would like to use the mobile ads measurement once I had the mobile integration up and running just to see if anything looked different among mobile users and I could catch any issues with the mobile functionality and correct or capitalize on them.

I would probably not track by campaign at first because I do not foresee running multiple campaigns at once, and I would not initially do cost data import because my campaign expenditure would be small enough to where I probably don’t need to have my spending tracked for me in the system at first.

Annotations seems really nice.  It is annoying to have to just remember why you’ve seen spikes at different times, whether it was because a campaign you did or a news story that you were featured in or an event you held.  Annotating allows you to note the perceived reasons for trends so you don’t forget when reviewing data long after the causes of spikes are done.

I might use custom reports if the company grows and we need to share data in that format.  While it’s just me and my husband I don’t need to be able to create a special report for anyone yet.  Dashboards on the other hand will let me look at my most important things every time I go into analytics quickly and easily.  I’d definitely use a dashboard.

I probably won’t have enough initial traffic to justify real-time data, even when I do campaigns, so I’d probably skip that unless I got really obsessed with what’s going on or really needed to figure out some problem or something.

Audience data reporting could be useful to help me correct any misperceptions I have about who my audience is, or help me attract certain segments that I should be attracting that I’m missing.

Map overlay sounds awesome.  I would definitely want to see that to see where some of my potential markets are.

I would want to filter out my own company and my family as much as possible from the analytics data, so I would want to use the filter app to only look at certain types of traffic.

We don’t need user permissions until the company grows and we have people who we don’t want to mess things up.  J

We don’t have any apps yet, so we’ll wait on application analytics until we do.

Alerts and intelligence events sounds cool.  It would be nice to have running in case anything causes a spike when we are not watching for it.  Then we could do some research to figure out why and possibly prepare for any consequences of the spike.

Site search sounds cool.  We could use that to see what our site visitors wish we had or are happy to discover that we have or what they had trouble noticing on our site.

Site speed analysis seems really useful not only for customer satisfaction but also for SEO.  I’d want to use that.

Week 12 - Coupon

We could do a special on preliminary audits.  My feeling is that initial consultations should be basically free –talking with an engineer or other representative to learn about the possibilities is basically a sales pitch.  But an initial audit where someone comes to your brewery and analyzes a part of your system and highlights some of the strategies you could put into place might be something we could give a discount on.  I wouldn’t do a groupon or a living social since ours is a business-to-business model. It would have to be in a trade magazine or through a google group or on facebook or something.  But it is definitely something to think about.  This is especially true if we can create a process by which we offer value in the initial audit alone but make it clear what the impact would be if the client were to decide to invest in a more significant assessment and potential adjustments.

Week 12 - Additional Tools

Google Maps – It could be cool to make our own map of different breweries around the country or the world that are implementing cool sustainable strategies.  We could use different color pins for different things like blue for water strategies, green for energy, brown for ingredients or something.  We could also show the breweries we have worked on.  We could embed the map on our web site.

LinkedIn – This can be especially useful for the endorsements feature.  When we work with people we can connect with them on LinkedIn and they will have an opportunity to give us relevant endorsements.  Similarly, we can reach out to specific professionals using LinkedIn and they can see the skills we have already been endorsed for an even any recommendations we’ve received.

Meetup – this could be cool to do sustainable brewery tours with people who are interested, kind of build momentum for the idea.

Google + - I haven’t really used Google + much, but I like the idea of joining communities instead of just individual following.  It seems a lot like Facebook in many ways except for that one and for the on-screen hangouts.  It seems like if there was ever a need to interact with a business that was not geographically close, this hangout feature might be something to try.  I’ve used skype for business before, and this seems similar but with more features.

All of these should be related to everything else I do.  Everything should connect to everything else, Meetups should be highlighted on our web site, in our newsletter, blog, facebook and twitter.  Updates to our map should be highlighted in the same way.  The same posts we put on Facebook and Twitter will often be appropriate to also post on LinkedIn.  Google +, since it seems like Facebook, we would use in a similar way and always cross-post everything to the max so that whoever is on one platform is not missed because we only posted to a different platform.  The main considerations would be whether or not content was appropriate to that platform and then the format in which we package the content in order to make it work for that platform. 

Week 11 Monday post

Everything you do on social media, as a business, will be marketing in some way or another.  When you share an event or post tips, you market yourself as a helpful, in-the-know resource.  When you post photos, you are creating a brand identity that you hope will draw people to your product or service.  Etc.  It seems like the best way to draw people to your other platforms from social media is to provide a hint at content that they want to see more of.  If you post a headline for a blog with an awesome image and people want to read the blog, you don’t have to say, “check out my web site to learn more.”  People know that they just click on the blog and they’ll be taken to a space that you own – your blog home or your web site – where that content lives. 

Another approach is to give them an opportunity to get something they want.  These are the campaigns like “first 100 people to like our page get a free back massage.”  If someone wants your giveaway and doesn’t hate your company, there’s a good chance they’ll like your page or retweet your post or whatever you want them to do.

I don't want to actually post these on Facebook because I don't know the top 5 ways to save water in brewing or how to save $ on your brewery's electrical bill, and I don't want to buy people beers, but here are a few headlines I could post on Facebook and/or twitter to generate interest.   The first two, I would link back to my blog, which automatically gets people into my company's territory.  I could post those on facebook and twitter.  I'd use pictures like the ones inserted below as well.

Top 5 Ways to Save Water in Brewing

Save $ on Your Brewery’s Electrical Bill with this 1 Simple Trick

The first five people to like our Facebook page get a $10 gift card for a beer at Taproom!

Week 11 Commenting on Other Blogs

I posted on the blogs of Devon Pinto, Cindy Rojas, and Brittany Martin.

Week 11 Advertising

You can follow the design acronym that a good ad is well C.R.A.P.H.T.E.D.

C. Make sure the design has a clear driving concept, that it’s obvious what you’re trying to accomplish.  Also incorporate contrasting colors and fonts to emphasize the most important things in the ad. 

R. Make sure there is some consistency between your ad campaign and your product marketing on your social media sites and your web site, otherwise people may wonder if they were taken to the wrong place.

A. Align the content of the ad in a way that makes sense and is not too crowded.

P. Group content and images appropriately in the ad.

H. Make sure that the item that’s most important stands out the most.

T. Use a font that’s easy to read on a computer and make your headline stand out.

E. Make it easy for people to understand how to get more content or purchase your services from the ad.  Don’t stray so far from regular ad format that they are confused.

D. Don’t get too incredibly detailed.  Keep the depth of content appropriate to the format.

Foursquare/Facebook Places – This could be a cool tool if we can develop a physical space that sounds interesting.  Like the “green brewing eco-sustainability lab,” or something like that.  People who came to our office could check in that they are there, which would both spread the word about our company and give them a chance to show their followers that they are thinking about sustainability.

Banner Ads – We could do banner ads on the side of the page on Facebook.  We’d need to target them to a very small and specific group of people since our service is very limited in audience, but it is so specific that targeting might not be that difficult.  That’s especially true if we limited it by location and title.

The format of advertising within a blog post will work for us.  Our blog posts can easily tag a line on somewhere saying something like, “if you want to incorporate eco-friendly ideas into your brewery systems, shoot us an email or visit or sustainability lab.”

I also really like the option to let people promote our posts. That seems like it could work really well for our service and our audience.

Twitter advertising may be useful.  I’d want to try that out and see what kind of impact it has before investing too much in it.  Linked In I might skip at first, just because I don’t feel like those ads are as powerful.  Once I get facebook ads down, I’d look at Linked In ads as something to test out at that point.

I’d want to start out having an ad every month and see what that gets me. My feeling there is that I don’t want to be annoying to people by hounding them, but I also don’t think it would be too expensive so we could afford to do it fairly often.  I think it would also really depend on the capacity.  With blogs newsletters and all the other social media, we’d need to make sure all the work was balanced.  I think more organic posts can be more effective than the ads, so I’d want to focus more there and add in ads rather than prioritize ads.  I’d test out the $10 daily pay per click thing and see how often I actually spent that money to figure out my next move.

I think the ads below would be effective because they are targeted to a very specific audience.  They are vibrant, and they get our message across quickly.  I would want to see what one looks like put together, and then make edits though.  It’s a little hard to picture it without actually going all the way through to posting.

 

 

Week 10 comments

I posted on the blogs of Sonja Kodimer, Matthew Bergmann, and Andrew Beltran.

Week 10: Email Marketing

I would imagine sending a newsletter out about once a month.  It depends on how frequent we can keep up the blogs.  To stay more relevant with industry news I would prefer to send emails out twice a month, but I don’t know if that’s feasible given the initially small size of the company.

I like the idea of the welcome email.  I would plan on creating a standard welcome email that goes to new subscribers.  I haven’t actually received many of these, but I think it’s a nice touch.

A portion of every blog I post would have the potential to be included as content in my email newsletters.   A picture and a headline at least would be nice to include with a little bit of content to hook them into the full blog.  I like seeing this in a newsletter because it makes me feel like I can catch up on anything I’ve missed if I want to.  If someone has taken the initiative to sign up for our emails, I want to give them that same sense that I will honor that by catching them up on what they’ve missed as much as is reasonable.

It might also be good to have a section of relevant news in green brewery engineering, which I don’t really generate the content for but I pull in a few important headlines for each newsletter.   This gives our customers a central hub from which to find the most relevant news to their interest in green brewing.  This provides users with a specific filter for news from a lot of different sources sifted for nuggets that are useful in the context of green brewing engineering.  It also lets them off the hook for following lots of different news sources, which can be time-consuming and overwhelming.

I could imagine that our company might develop tools or materials for implementing greening practices that don’t require engineering.  Those kinds of resources would be good to highlight in the newsletter somehow.  That gives our subscribers some things they can use for free to meet their overall goals and then we can be the company that fills in the gaps when the work is not so easy without expertise.

A schedule of upcoming events could be good if there are enough that are relevant.  It might also work to just bring in advertisements for relevant events, like widgets for upcoming conferences and such.  That way subscribers know that they will be clued into the most important events in this field and won’t miss a major opportunity.

Blog Categories

On my blog I might use the following categories to start off with, and then I would probably refine this list as I developed more and more content:

-Green Breweries and Beers
-Planning to Green a Brewery
-Heating, air conditioning, and plumbing
-Brewing, bottling, and canning
-Distribution
-Ingredients
-Events
-Odds and Ends

Organizing in this way will help me remember to touch on a variety of issues that are likely to be of interest to our target audience.  Each issue relates to green brewing in a different way.  Some of the issues are specifically relevant to certain individuals within a brewing operation and will help us focus energies toward all the different players who are important in the grand scheme of green brewing.  Hopefully we can attract readers from different parts of a brewing company and gain advocates for green brewing practices across company leadership.  By gaining more informed advocates for green brewing, we increase the likelihood that a company will ultimately decide to invest in green brewing engineering.

I posted comments on Sonja Begonia’s blog, Craig Stevens’ blog, and Devon Pinto’s blog.

Week 9: How personal can I be on my business blog?

For Green Brew Engineering, I think I can be very personal in the blog.  This is due to the fact that it is a small company based largely on expertise.  We are selling a specialized service provided by a person who has particular knowledge about that service.  Hosting a blog under the name of the head of the company – the expert – seems very appropriate and will be a way to demonstrate that knowledge and expertise.  I also think it can be appropriate to have guest blogs from other people in the company on relevant issues in which they are experts, and to host guest blogs by experts in related topics.  For instance, while Chris might be the brewery systems engineering expert, we may have guest bloggers talk about environmentally friendly distribution practices, or sustainable hops farming, etc.  These guests would also typically have an individual attached rather than just a company.

It makes sense to add personality to a post when there is a person or there are multiple people in the company who you want users to be acquainted with or who users might be interested in.  These don’t even necessarily have to be real people – you could create blogging personas as well, like a cartoon for a kids blog or a puppy for a pets blog.  For me, things have gotten tricky in previous jobs when certain people within a company have an established blog voice and some content comes along which doesn’t fit well into their established voice or they don’t want to have to review everything going out or they only want their personality applied to a certain level of content.  In those cases instead of posting material from someone like “Jake the intern,” and “Sarah the communications director,” they’d put it out just under the name of the company.  It has the quality of a news release when it comes from a company rather than an engaging or particularly social quality.  Sometimes that’s ok.  Working for the government, there can also be sensitivities or even policies regarding who says what that can make things difficult. 

I have noticed though that on facebook in particular, often the blogs will be posted with just a photo and a headline, and you don’t know who wrote it until you check out the actual blog post.  That fact highlights that you don’t necessarily need to force your blogger’s personality into every social media piece you put out there, but a blog seems like a particularly relevant avenue to showcase that personality since the form is a little more robust than other social media avenues.

Week 8: What are comparable companies doing with visual media?

None of the companies I’ve found that are comparable are using visual media platforms. However, I did see a video made by a trade media company in which an engineer was interviewed.  The quality was not very good, but it’s an example of one type of video we could use. 

First Key Consulting does not currently use visual media platforms, as far as I can tell. However, they do use images on their web site.   http://firstkey.com/index.htm

Brewer Engineering Consultants PLC also does not use visual media platforms.  http://www.brewer-engr.com/

Energy Center of Wisconsin doesn’t use a visual media platform either.  http://www.ecw.org/

Here’s a link to the video though.  http://www.csemag.com/single-article/brewery-ensures-its-facility-is-energy-efficient/05ab3e15f9070996c2b99c9ece997005.html

Breweries do a better job of using visual media.  Sierra Nevada has a youtube channel and an instagram feed.  Sierra Nevada and other breweries provide better examples for us when it comes to utilizing visual media with our audiences.  http://www.sierranevada.com/. 

Week 8: Visual Networks

I think that some sort of visual network, used wisely, can be important and “right” for any brand.  Even though the company I’m working on is a service-related company, there’s definitely a story underlying the business, and that story is inspiring and engaging and can be told, at least in part, through images.  It’s not just about engineering – sitting in front of a computer messing around with numbers – although shown in a compelling way that can be an engaging story in itself to the right way.  It’s also about people who love beer, who care about the environment, who love natural places, who love science, who work hard and are conscientious.  There’s a lot for people to connect with when you combine an enjoyable solo or social past-time with some of our higher moral desires to be good people and make a difference.  There’s also the angle of enabling companies to take even greater pride in the products they make while realizing long-term financial benefits that enable their company, their employees, and their investors to thrive. 

So, for Green Brew Engineering, I would start out using Instagram to tell some of those stories, especially since the images from Instagram can be used to populate other social media posts.  And I would get to work on some videos.  Especially given the research that shows men are more attracted to videos, in a male-dominated industry like brewing it seems like a bad idea not to take that to heart.  Also, videos can show the progress from engineering to beer to saving the environment to saving money and creating fun and good times and a beautiful world in a way that individual images can’t.

I would want to have a blog, so it might make sense to start off with Tumblr as my blog site at the same time as everything else.  However, I’d want to weight my blog options before jumping in.  It seems like the blogs have to be short, so that might not be the right tactic for engineering, which could require some longer and more complicated blogs sometimes.  Tumblr might be something I would do later instead of right away.

Pinterest has a smaller audience than the others.  Since we don’t really have products for sale, it doesn’t seem like a great avenue for our company, especially when the photo element can be covered elsewhere.  Pinterest I think has a reputation for being more crafty and maybe more for women.  I don’t think a lot of our audience is going to be hanging out on Pinterest much.

Week 7: Twitter lists, etc.

To find people to follow on Twitter, I searched terms like:  environmental, green, sustainable, eco-friendly, brewery, brewing, beer, brew, San Diego, and engineering in different combinations.  I also found that twitter came up with a lot of great suggestions for me as I followed more people, and I was able to follow them too.  I also searched particular organizations that I thought we should follow, and I searched for news organizations like West Coaster and Beer Advocate and Grist.   I found a lot of great breweries, twitter feeds for beer magazines that Chris reads, brew pubs and craft beer bars, environmental organizations, engineering associations and organizations, and more.

I created a list for San Diego breweries because those would be our most likely initial customers, so it is good to keep track of what they are up to and get a sense of each brewery’s unique character.  I also created an engineering list to keep up to date on trends in engineering, especially related to environmentally sustainable engineering.

The lists seem really awesome for keeping pools of information separate so you can focus on big ideas separately.  I also think it helps to keep more high-priority organizations together so if you can’t look at everything, you are able to skip to whichever group is the most important for what you want to accomplish at a given time.

Week 6 Scheduling Posts

I posted content that I think could be helpful and interesting to my audience as well as content that I thought could be a platform for engagement.  The post about events at Ciro’s lets people know that we are a member of a local beer community and we support community events.  We also are providing a service to members by telling them about cool events they didn't know about or might not have remembered, or needed a bit of extra encouragement to attend.   By supporting Ciro’s we build a rapport that can encourage Ciro’s to support us in return.  Since they serve a lot of craft beers and are on the craft beer tour circuit in PB, maybe that can be helpful in the long run.  The post about a brewery in Canada introduces people to an interesting brewery they may not have heard of and at the same time gives some insights into a few different ways to think about green brewing.  I put a question out there about if anyone had had that beer or could pick it up for us just as an open-ended conversation starter to see if we could engage anyone with that.  Then the question about bottles I put out there because I did a little research on recycled bottles and I've heard that it’s more environmentally-friendly to use bottles than cans because of the way each product is recycled, however, I haven’t found any wholesale bulk recycled bottle distributors.  If anyone in the community has, that would help me out.  Also, I think putting the question out there could engage people who do have answers or even have the same question while at the same time just putting the thought about recycled bottles in peoples’ minds.

Week 6, "Likes"

I chose the companies I did to like on Facebook because they are breweries that are already implementing some green strategies into their processes.  I think it makes sense for our company to show that it knows who is out there doing this kind of stuff already and that we are into beer.  We are a friendly member of the beer community.  I also chose a couple of big local companies that are leaders in green brewing and/or we have friends there.  I do not expect that our list of likes should end anywhere near where it is now.  I think there are a lot more breweries we should add as we move forward and also a lot more people in other roles in the space – beer bloggers and other engineers and green restaurants and anyone who touches the kind of work that we do.  

Week 5 Post Reach vs. Post Engagement

Post reach is the breadth of the audience a post is potentially seen by.  In more traditional media terms, they call this type of reach “impressions.”   The reach is influenced by the number of followers the poster has because each of those followers will get the post in their news feed.  It’s also influenced by the sharing action that happens with the post.  If it’s shared, then the post has the potential to be seen by all the friends of the sharers in addition to the poster.

Post engagement is the discussion and interaction that goes along with a post, including comments and likes and click-throughs.  This is an important element of measurement because the more people engage with the post, the more likely it is to show up higher in Facebook users’ news feeds.  This is true on a global level – like if a post is trending generally it will show up higher in news feeds – and it’s also true on an individual level.  The more an individual engages with an organization’s or a person’s posts, the more that organization or person will show up prominently in their news feed.  As Facebook becomes more ubiquitous and the market becomes crowded with voices, getting to the top of peoples’ news feeds will be the only way to be seen on Facebook.

Insights is a great analytics tool available in Facebook because it allows you to see how people are reacting to your posts.  You can determine what types of posts seem to get the most engagement, what times of day your audience seems to be paying most attention, and more.  Combining this data with demographics information can also help you understand who in your audience is more excited about which types of content.  You can also gauge the potency of any significant communications efforts you undertake.

Week 4: Target Market Analysis

Green Brew Engineering

I decided to focus on a company that my husband dreams of starting.  If he ever decides to do it, I will be helping him as much as I can and he wants, so it will be good to start thinking about all of this now!  My husband is a mechanical engineer, home brewer, beer enthusiast, and environmentalist.  He wants to start an engineering firm that helps breweries become sustainable operations, especially in terms of energy efficiency and water use.  He already designs heating and cooling systems for buildings, he has previously designed commercial refrigeration systems, and he is LEED certified- which basically means that he can assess a building and assign it an energy efficiency rating.  He has also done reports for companies that outline what they would need to do to reach higher levels of LEED ratings than they already have.   

There are already some companies that have invested a lot into the environmental sustainability and energy efficiency of their own operations, but I don’t know if there are already engineering firms or consultants out there that specialize in helping breweries achieve greater efficiency and environmental sustainability.    This company would help breweries engineer or re-engineer their brewing spaces and systems for maximum environmental sustainability and maximum efficiency of resource use.

This requires a business-to-business communications model.  The initial target market would be people who are somewhat high up within craft breweries in California, especially San Diego.  We would target breweries that are not too large - a brewery of the scale of Stone would be the largest initially as the company would not have the expertise or bandwidth to take on larger projects.  The expectation would be that smaller commercial breweries would make up the majority of the initial clients, and that the company’s services would be focused specifically on the brewing side and would not initially extend to engineering for restaurants associated with breweries.

Even though there are only something like 80 craft breweries in San Diego (which is a lot!), we could still segment further.  Also, in thinking about craft breweries outside of San Diego it is good to have a sense of which breweries are most likely to go for this sort of service.  Here are some thoughts…

1)      Any company that is already trying to do something environmentally friendly is a good audience.  This could mean that they are using local ingredients, are already implementing some energy or water-saving practices, have environmentally-friendly packaging, or in some other way have shown that they care about their environmental impact. 

2)      Any company that is a leader in their local brewing community might be more interested in championing this kind of effort so as not to be behind the times, and they might have more money to make it happen.

3)      There are some brewing companies for whom their brand identity might be bolstered by something like this, either because they’ve had problems with environmental or other issues in the past, they live in a community that places a high value on the environment, or they could generally get some marketing boost from becoming a green brewery.

4)      I think it’s important to remember that breweries are run by people, and people have their own interests.  Getting to know the interests of the people behind the breweries might reveal that they have personally been involved in environmentally-friendly types of work before or might want to get involved in something like that.  Those people can become champions of this type of effort within their companies.

5)      It might be good to look at who different breweries distribute to.  If there are some breweries whose beers are served at bars and restaurants that are either more upscale or more environmentally forward-thinking, they might be more willing to invest in greening their business as a point of promotion among their upscale or enviro-friendly business-level customers.

6)      It might be worthwhile to determine where there could tax credits available for businesses that invest in this type of effort.  If they can get a discount on the service, it might be more appealing.

7)      Determining locations where electricity and water are especially expensive or volatile commodities might help us figure out good locations were people will be more open to the upfront cost of greening a brewery based on the long-term savings and stability.

8)      Breweries that have close relationships or collaborations with other breweries that have done some greening efforts already might have a greater openness to going green themselves. 

9)      New breweries might be more open to starting out green rather than converting to more sustainable processes later.  If we can catch them before they are built, we can help them build in an environmentally friendly way.

So, those are my initial thoughts on audience.  This is exciting!!

Week 3: Two sites I use a lot and why I like them...

www.kayak.com

1)      Kayak is effective in my opinion because it allows you to do so much, but it is really easy to get started. You can make it as easy or as complicated as you want to, do as much or as little analysis as you are interested in.  Also, it is focused on helping you get what you want for as cheap as possible if that’s what you’re interested in. 

2)      Its design follows its concept really well.  They don’t clutter the page with too much random info or exciting tools, they just stick to making it easy for you to see your options in the way you want.  It also repeats things nicely throughout. There’s a header that stays on each page that identifies that you can go back to the home page, or check out their other options, like hotels or car rentals in addition to flights.  Their depth of content also seems appropriate.  You don’t get much until you put in your parameters, but then you get as much as you want, you can dig as deep as you want.  And yet, you’re not plunged into an abyss immediately either.

3)      It provides a service that is very helpful to me.  It gives me entre into a wide variety of airline web sites and also shows me which flights are the cheapest and best options for what I want.  I like that it gives me the option to create a price alert, which reminds me about selecting a flight every day and draws me back to their site every so often.

4)      They give me pop-up windows from these other search sites.  It’s kind of annoying.  I wish they didn’t have that and that more airlines were included in the search function.

www.bankofamerica.com

1)      Bank of America’s site is effective because it allows me to see information I want to see about my finances easily.  It also lets me do things I want to do, like transfer money between accounts and pay bills electronically.

2)      They use contrast well, with a lot of white but then red to make things pop.  Their alignment is good.  It makes it easy to follow what’s going on despite the fact that they have a lot on their pages.  The proximity also helps with that—it enables me to skip over whole sections of content because I know that’s not what I’m looking for.  Nothing’s “hidden” in the wrong group.  They also handle navigation well, especially considering how much there is to navigate within the site.  It manages not to be too overwhelming.

3)      Just like Kayak, I come back again and again because the site provides a service that I need and find valuable.  It’s available in real time, the information is trustworthy, and it’s very personal to my life.  I also go back often to check in on pay day.  They also remind me of their web site every time I get an email saying my statement is ready and I can check it online.

4)      I tried to use a function recently that I hadn’t used in a while and it wasn’t really working.  They really need to have everything working all the time.  I’ve also tried to log in and the web site has been down.  These days your site needs to be fully operational all the time in order to be considered fully successful.  Having the site or a portion of the site down makes your company look unprofessional.

Week 3, Web site reviews

http://www.toyota.com/

Problem #1:  There’s a lot of content on the home page and it is sort of overwhelming.  It’s difficult to gauge what’s important because everything (below the giant header) seems to have about the same space and image power, and because there are so many things you have to scroll for a while, which is kind of annoying. 

Problem #2: For some reason there is a feature that guesses my location; it guessed incorrectly and I don’t know why.  Now I’m worried that it’s going to give me information not relevant to my area.

Problem #3: There are too many navigation options.  There are two rows of navigation at the top of the page, navigation in the feature well, navigation beneath the feature well, all those featured items under the “What’s Happening at Toyota,” a bunch of options at the bottom of the page, plus a footer.  It’s a little overwhelming to pick where you want to go.

What could be improved:  Instead of highlighting every possible cool thing about Toyotas, I think it would be more effective if they focused on highlighting the most relevant cool things for one or two particular audiences.  Then those audience would really feel like Toyotas are indeed the cars for them.  This might mean de-emphasizing the neat tools that are more geared toward techy or car nerd audiences than parent audiences, for example.

http://tectorch.com/

Problem #1: Waaaaayyy too much text on the home page.

Problem #2: The flag waving in the tope left corner is super distracting.  Plus the tagline just makes you think about things made in America and not the actual product itself.

Problem #3: The alignment on the page is off quite a bit and the left hand navigation is too narrow.

What could be improved: I would want them to have a lot more focused of a home page that is more engaging.  Instead of so much all over, they could create a feature well with engaging elements like an image of someone using their product, a customer review, and a patriotic statement about their products being made in the US if their market is into that.  That way their main messages aren’t scattered all over so much.  They could also link to the shopping page instead of packing so many products onto the home page.  I think by streamlining their site they would come off as more professional and would create a more focused perception of why their product is the best to purchase.

http://www.apple.com/

This web site feels clean, simple, and upbeat or positive.  It makes me feel like owning products made by this company will simplify my life in a positive way.  There aren’t too many options off the home page for me to sift through, and I don’t have to scroll at all.  I can choose easily where to go based on what I’m interested in.  Of course, this brand benefits from significant product awareness.  If I had never heard of iPods or iPhones I would not really know what I was looking at.  But because I do know these products and because the web site is so clean and simple, I trust the company to be clear with me and I believe their products will be straightforward to use.  This makes me feel more confident with technological products since these types of products can be intimidating for consumers like me who don’t know about technology.

http://www.ford.com/

This web site’s branding is not what I’d expect.  I’m more familiar with Ford branding like “Built Ford Tough.”  I expected to see more trucks.  This web site impresses upon me that Ford is more about intelligent efficiency, especially in terms of MPGs.  This messaging flows nicely into their highlighted vehicles, which are all vehicles that fit well into that message.  It gives me the feeling that purchasing any one of those cars is a smart choice because the engineers have been very forward-thinking about the technology and have been aggressive in their pursuit of fuel economy.  It’s especially interesting that the trucks are not highlighted at all on the home page.  This signals to me that the company is really shifting their emphasis toward fuel efficiency and that they are striving to be a leader in this area at the expense of other aspects of their business.  Even the image behind the cars looks like San Francisco, which has a very tech-oriented reputation, and so I think more about the fuel-saving technology than something like the towing capacity or off-roading capability, etc.