Getting the Community Involved
A while back, I read an article about the Dayton Art Institute — they needed some help with funding and generating positive PR. Since I’m from Dayton and I’m passionate about the arts, I wanted to get Saforian involved in spreading this message and getting activists to help.
Like most projects, we had to start from the ground and work our way up. We knew we needed to find out how the Dayton Art Institute’s brand was being perceived and then come up with ideas that would help the Institute better communicate with its audiences and even influence the course of conversation going on about the museum. To do this, Saforian’s social media experts defined a social media optimization plan and communication strategy to better position the Dayton Art Institute in any and all relevant discourse.
Saforian worked with the Institute to define clear objectives for social media activities, as well as benchmarks for evaluating the success of these efforts. From there, we began with Social Media Mapping (SMM) to gain an in-depth understanding of the ever evolving social media landscape and the conversations happening online related to the Institute. We collected and analyzed all relevant and available consumer generated media (CGM) content and generated a set of data and visualizations to provide a clear analysis of the discussion surrounding the Institute. We mapped brand, topic and keyword mentions in communities, message boards, consumer review sites, forums, blogs and social networks. From there we were able to identify “peaks of passion” in online conversations which gave us a better understanding.
With the findings of the SMM and the Institute’s communications goals in mind, Saforian worked with the Dayton Art Institute’s team to define a social media strategy that would:
- Create a consistent voice across channels
- Leverage new and existing technologies
- Plan content dissemination
- Reach influencers and relevant decision makers
Once the plan was approved, we started engagement and reputation management activities for Dayton Art Institute that included:
- Community building
- Blogger outreach and relations
- Conversation targeting
- Social media mining for key influencers and brand sentiment
- Leveraging existing networks (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, flickr, and niche communities and forums)
- Social ads on Facebook
With engagement activities underway, we consistently measured and analyzed the effectiveness of ongoing efforts based on the objectives set forth at the beginning of the process. We then tweaked social media activities as necessary to optimize all of the school’s communication efforts as a whole. Tools for measurement included:
- ROI Analysis
- Data Aggregation
- Effort Optimization
In addition, Saforian listened – that is, monitored— Dayton Art Institute in any conversations going on about the brand. Our brand monitoring efforts gave the Institute key information that better prepared them for future communications planning. Via a monthly report, Saforian provided Dayton Art Institute with information on:
- The passions of students, customers, prospects and key stakeholders to reveal new areas of opportunity for the Institute’s brand
- Emerging themes and trends
- Competitor strengths and weaknesses
- Attributes, emotions and motivations that drive word of mouth conversation surrounding the school