blogThis article is a postmortem examination of my social media experiment. Just to add some context to what follows, I used the Ning platform to create a social portal for my company’s year-long customer travel incentive program – complete with a blog, forum, and individual member profiles.
Meatball Sundae Explained
photo courtesy of worth1000 
If you’re familiar with Seth Godin’s Meatball Sundae concept, then you understand by the title that this part of the project did not work out. I’ll delve into the why momentarily. First, let me explain the idea for those not familiar with it. Meatballs are your traditional businesses (in my case, plumbing wholesaler). Whereas your ice cream, hot fudge, and sprinkles are all the gooey, web 2.0 stuff, like Myspace, blogs, widgets, etc. Separately both are two great tasting ideas, however when you mix them without forethought you unfortunately end up with a Meatball Sundae.
While it’s easy to get enamored with the sweet whipped cream and cherries, they should only be used to enhance the products and services underneath. If hype is the driving motivator to use these tools then you’re doomed to failure. Like other mediums, social media should only be used to accomplish a clear goal.
Answering The Why
These are my ideas for why this experiment failed to meet my expectations.
- The platform I used is more suited for building member-centric communities, where the people in the community are the content creators. I set an unrealistic expectation that an older audience of construction contractors, who are busy running their businesses would have the time to generate content for a peripheral event in their lives.
- Being a year long promotion with an eventual end, there was no motivation for people to contribute. A network aimed at bringing together these professionals for trading ideas to improve their businesses would have faired better.
What To Do
What do I want to accomplish for the 2008 promotion? I need to keep our guests informed about the trip, and all the options available to them while being able to gather feedback from them over the course of the year. Since I’ve already established that the particular event combined with the lifestyles of my customers makes a member-centric community unsuitable, I will choose a content driven strategy for the social media part of the promotion.
The analytics data from the prior program supports my intent. It’s apparent that those people using the old site relied more so on the forum and blog posts. They crave topical information to help them prepare for the trip, and learn about the activities available in the places they will be visiting.
The VP Supply Mayan Riviera blog is already putting the content driven strategy into practice.
Do you have any meatball sundae’s to share?
