E169 – Taking Social Media Offline

This episode digs into the idea of creating or doing things offline and then bringing it back to your online channels. In the past we talked about some online product marketing examples but that isnt quite the same, that really is more link bait type items.

The examples today really focus on doing things IRL and offline and then filming or documenting it to some degree.

Offline Social Media Marketing Examples

Below are the examples that we referenced during the episode but also for past episodes we mentioned that you should revisit or listen to if you havent:

On Twitter is https://twitter.com/griner/status/963540295832014848 this great example from Arby’s but it could be any outreach to those fans that you find on Twitter or Facebook or even on a forum.


And the example found in a Facebook Group was this great one about a florist that created content yes but really gave back and helped many people on a day that they might have been down.

So if nothing else just remember that you can create content offline or in other non traditional ways and share it online and in your social media accounts. You don’t just have to create some animated gif or some static image but think about going beyond that and really reaching out to people when you can.

Full Transcript

Matt Siltala: [00:00:00] Welcome to another exciting episode of the business of digital podcast, featuring your host, Matt  and Dave roar. Hey guys, excited to have everyone join us for another one of these business of digital podcast episodes. As always. We’ve got Dave a re ready to go. How’s it going, bud

Dave Rohrer: [00:00:20] is going in, is going in, is going

Matt Siltala: [00:00:22] awesome.

So today we’re just going to jump right into it guys. We are talking. We’re gonna start talking about taking social media offline and we may or may not, uh, massage that title a little bit. I don’t know Dave, but, uh, just jump in and, and sheriffs your thoughts on this one. I know that this is one that’s been brewing for a while and there’s some tweets or some Facebook posts that have sparked this, but, uh,

Dave Rohrer: [00:00:46] On this one only for two years is only two years.

I guess that’s part of the, I guess, good or bad that we’ve been podcasting that long, then we can have ideas that we just don’t get to for two years. Um,

Matt Siltala: [00:00:58] very true. It,

Dave Rohrer: [00:00:59] yeah, [00:01:00] it’s like, um, But, yeah, I know we actually just double check, check to make sure we hadn’t covered this before. So episode 41, we did link bait, product marketing, product marketing, where we talked about, um, like the Australian tourism ad that they did a long time ago.

Yeah. Um, Adidas when they were selling the October Fest, um, O’Reilly auto center when they did the, they still have it, the flux capacitor, is it on their site? Like that kind of stuff, but that’s

Matt Siltala: [00:01:28] all on,

Dave Rohrer: [00:01:30] you know, that’s all online stuff. And then more recently we talked about the maybe digital marketing isn’t the answer.

Yeah. Um, which of course, you know, we talked digital marketing. That was how I think we kicked off this year. I’m with Volvo and a couple of other places, basically talking about how they do their KPIs. The focus for this one though, is a couple of examples I found a while ago. And there was some other stuff that happened more recently that I saw, but one of the examples is a [00:02:00] florist for weddings or for like, I think it was for Valentine’s day, he had leftover flowers.

So she took all of that leftover flowers. Created, I think it was like 10 or 15 additional bouquets and then went through drive-throughs at 10 or 15 different places ordered like a water or something. Um, and just gave a card and handed those flowers to whoever was in drive through.

Matt Siltala: [00:02:29] Oh, that’s so nice.

Dave Rohrer: [00:02:31] And that was like her story and that’s what she did. And she does it for,

Matt Siltala: [00:02:34] and that’s great content too, for them.

Dave Rohrer: [00:02:36] Well, yeah, it’s great content. And this is what from February of 2018, this had six and a half million

Matt Siltala: [00:02:41] views. Wow.

Dave Rohrer: [00:02:45] Sorry. I didn’t get to mute in time. Um, and that’s just one example where, you know, they have product, they have something that is leftover, you know, they, they can’t sell, they can’t use it [00:03:00] and they’re giving out.

And if you’re a restaurant you could create, you know, Food or something like that. Um, you could then make sure that you, you know, take photos and video, but there’s so much content you could do there, but really it’s social media and marketing itself and digital marketing does not have to be just online.

Yeah. Um, and that’s kind of the, the whole thinking for this is just to, you know, if nothing else just think about how you can do stuff offline, capture it and show it online. Um, Another one was Arby’s and there Twitter accounts from a while ago. I don’t know if I actually get this reference. I want to say it’s from a video game or something, but, um, and again, we’ll include the tweet, but it’s, uh, he tweeted out.

Yeah. Again, this is like February of 2018 sitting on this for two years. If more than 1% of people caught Arby’s references, they would be winning every marketing [00:04:00] award on earth. And Arby’s still two years later, um, is still often doing really cool. And so it Wendy’s, and there’s a couple other companies on Twitter that post just crazy, awesome stuff.

But a lot of it’s like pop culture reference or offline reference. Um, and then this guy was like, I commented, RV’s tweet the other day. And they actually mailed him the actual work. The thing that they created for that tweet with a thank you note. Yeah. So, not only did they get a tweet out of it, but now they’ve got this guy with, you know, additionally sharing it.

Matt Siltala: [00:04:36] Well, I, I thought something that, and this kind of goes along these lines. Um, something that happened recently too. Do you remember Luke alley? Um, he used to work for us at avalanche now on our board. Um, but, uh, he, he went on to a against, you know, social media, LinkedIn. Um, he went on LinkedIn and said something about nest and clicked on a [00:05:00] link.

And, and it was interesting because he said in the mail a couple, a days later he had like a 24 dozen or something crazy amount of like cookie dough. And he like posted a picture of it. And, uh, it just, it was interesting that they picked him that they sent him all that free cookie. And I’m like, please give me the link.

I want to, like, I want to sign up for that and get all that free cookie dough too. But. Um, but it got me thinking like, you know, if they do that every once in a while and they do it to people, they think our influences are that can get them a good, like, like I looked at that and it was like, Holly, we’ve got to go buy some freaking chocolate chip cookies tonight.

And like, like what that does for them. Um, also another thought that I had Dave was, um, the, uh, the place that I talk about often the, uh, the restaurant that I help out time again, the scone place. Uh, one of the things that they do. Every once in a while in the evenings is they’ll have like groups of, of, uh, I dunno, like if you want to Tom scout groups or church groups, or [00:06:00] just, you know, uh, boys and girls club type thing, come over, come on at the end of the day.

And basically he teaches him about being an entrepreneur, teaches them about, um, you know, the restaurant business, things like that. And they go, they get to. Partake of all the extra, uh, scones or whatever that they, you know, that they didn’t get to, that they didn’t sell for that day. And they all like take pictures and love it and need it, but he’s taking that offline, but then they’re taking pictures and all those people are going and doing whatever they’re doing with it.

And so again, you know, it’s something that is benefiting him online too, but he’s taking an area of it offline and working with these kids. And so I don’t know if that kind of fits into what we’re talking about here, but those were a couple of thoughts that I have with this.

Dave Rohrer: [00:06:44] No, it does. And there is an example of a pro project almost 10 years ago.

Now that I worked on and we were working with an outdoor retailer and we were trying to figure out [00:07:00] ways to tie in the products and fun and outdoors and like all this other stuff. And we had. A host of different ideas. Like, you know, the usual, like, especially 10 years ago, it was like some sort of interactive widget or an info graphic, or, you know, what else can we do at the time?

It was maybe a video and we ended up coming up with something around, um, geocashing and making it like a scavenger hunt offline. This is like, yeah, here’s this 10, 12. I don’t even know, like probably almost 10 years ago. And no one had done anything. I don’t think anything like that at the time. And we were just trying to figure out a way to get, you know, like what REI does now on, on black Friday, it’s like get outside.

Matt Siltala: [00:07:49] Yeah.

Dave Rohrer: [00:07:50] Like we were trying to do something like that. Cause of 10 years ago, Nana, um, trailblazers followers. And they [00:08:00] still are idea. No, the, but that was the goal was like, how can we do this? So that. You know, the whole idea was PR, but also just to get people outside too, to combine their brand with, with what people look, think about out or do, and, you know, it was an exercise for link building and PR and branding and just, you know, fun.

And we just looked at so many different things and then we looked at, okay, now how do we, I don’t wanna say monetize it, but how do we. Get some sort of social value out of it. How do we, you get some link-building value out of how we get some organic traffic out of it? You know, like we first started with the idea or the goal and looked at the idea and then we just started filling in the pieces and there was like three or four ideas.

I think that we internally came up with and that the client had, we’ve tried to flush them out as best we could. And then from there we were like, okay, which one has the best. [00:09:00] Opportunity to succeed with as many things as we’re trying to do, you know, we’re trying to take this digital thing offline and tie it into so many different things.

What what’s gonna work, what, you know, what’s going to fail. What are the opportunities? Where do we have people? Where do we have budget revenue, skills, assets? Like what makes the most sense? And that one made sense. It just. We ran out of time and there was a bunch of other, I think, legal or other things, you know, you know how it goes last minute we were almost there and we had to kind of pull the plug on it, but there’s other things that people can do to, um, like, uh, Dennis G over when he was at, uh, uh, uh, what’s the clothing.

Oh

Matt Siltala: [00:09:55] for the addicts.

Dave Rohrer: [00:09:55] Oh, fanatics. Yeah. Like they would always set up. It’s been, you know, your local [00:10:00] sports teams, if you go and they have the mascot running around, you know, that was always before Instagram was a thing. And before social media was a thing, those mascots were there running around before games, taking pictures with kids so that kids would get their picture with their favorite mascot from their sports team.

Yeah, like that was a branding longterm branding kind of, you know, outreach social media before it was ever social media type thing. And I think people just get hung up on just doing it for social media or posting on social media, you know, going back to our, you know, digital marketing. Isn’t the only thing think about offline.

Think about traditional. Think about marketing and just in general, where your audiences. Take take your projects offline, make sure that it’s not just online, take them offline, but then record it. I mean like the woman, she does this a couple of times, she has a ton of, you know, a couple of videos out of it with tons of press and tons of [00:11:00] links and tons of social shares.

Matt Siltala: [00:11:05] Yeah. That’s, you know, I’m thinking about this and you know, some of the things that come to my mind are. You know, those things that, uh, that we’ve done over over the years. Um, I know one of the, you know, we, it ended up working out really well for, you know, people posting on, on online, but it, we were trying to do just that we were trying to take it offline, but we, you know, we had that very successful.

Well, we have that very successful, uh, infographic on the social media that the cats of course explaining social media and we ended up. Doing an update version, updated version of it many years later. And we, we turned it into a poster and people went crazy for it. They loved that poster and they put it up.

And I got a funny story for you, Dave. This is interesting. Um, so my partner, he was, I can’t even remember he was [00:12:00] back East somewhere just on a, I think it was like Georgia or maybe it was Tennessee even. We were talking about Tennessee earlier, but, um, you’re just somewhere over there. And, uh, he was visiting this agency and he walks by this cubicle and he sees that poster from avalanche media, the social media, just on someone’s cubicle wall.

And he walks over there and he’s like, Oh, that’s interesting. He’s like, that’s our company that did that. And he’s like, Oh yeah, well, I moved into this cubicle. I don’t know whose it was, but like I loved it. And so I just left it. And so it’s like, We created that, that, uh, and we were there talking to them.

I don’t know why, if it was for that, if they saw or whatever, it might’ve been, you know, other reasons, but, but, uh, we had so many people post about it on social. We had so many people write about it or talk about it or share pictures where they had put it. And, you know, that’s just the idea. Just get inspired, doing stuff like that, thinking outside the box.

Whereas if. All I was going to do is just create the simple graphic and post [00:13:00] online, trying to get likes and tweets and whatnot. You know, you’re missing out on that whole other area of opportunity of things that you can do, you know, in this specific example, does that mean, you know what I’m saying?

Dave Rohrer: [00:13:13] Well, and sometimes it’s just accidental to the, the other example from when we’d talked about product link baiting was that Nadia cakes down in Phoenix, I think.

Yeah, where are they located? I’m looking at their website and it doesn’t say where they’re located, the ship they ship nationwide. Doesn’t tell me anything. Where’s their phone number? Where are you at located in the U S it doesn’t help me, but they had a, uh, a geo take that everyone thought looked like a, uh, um, some of them just thought dirty

Matt Siltala: [00:13:47] female.

Dave Rohrer: [00:13:48] What’s

Matt Siltala: [00:13:48] that? Was it a female anatomy?

Dave Rohrer: [00:13:50] Yes, it was. That was that one. Um, so here it is two years plus later, and that social picture, that picture that they posted [00:14:00] 23,000 comments, 33,000 shares. Um, they talk about how, you know, there’s a tee shirt and like all this other stuff, and then they actually just in the comments, they list it off, you know, thanks.

And then they listed off like, A long list of places, um, size, you know, we won cupcake Wars once a baking championship, dah, dah, dah, dah. But they listed off like a whole bunch of places that had like talked about it before. I’m like just a list of TV shows and channels and stuff. And it’s all from just, you know, this one offline thing that they did that they posted.

And that’s more product, more along the lines of that product marketing, but there’s a lot of other stuff you can do offline. Um, in one place you do see it often. I think the most is those HR videos. Like either on LinkedIn, like when companies and you know, I think you guys even do it too, [00:15:00] when you go off site and either fundraise or.

Work do some charity or, you know, some sort of volunteering work you’ll often see that type of stuff, but that’s really, it. That’s the only type of offline social stuff. I tend to see. You’re either at a conference and someone’s posting pictures from there, you know, come to our booth or something. Or if your company is doing volunteer work, that’s the only time I really see examples.

And I think there’s just more out there. It just depends on your company.

Matt Siltala: [00:15:37] Yeah. I mean, I there’s, there’s lots of restaurants that, uh, I follow obviously, and I know that you probably have examples too, but I think a lot of them that do it right. Are the ones that, um, that do certain things like, Hey, take a picture of something.

Or if you see, you know, a particular, you know, if you see this post or [00:16:00] whatever, Just do a snapshot of it and bring it in and show it to us and you’ll get 20% off your mill or whatever, but there’s always opportunities that you could do with stuff like that. And it’s also great because you’re able to kind of see, Hey, is like, is there any kind of reach, is this reaching to like, what kind of demographics kind of people are coming in and who’s sharing this and who’s doing it.

And so it’s just, again, it’s, it’s a, it’s thinking outside that box of just. All I can do as a business owner is just take a picture of this mill and post it on social media and hope that people come in. That’s it’s, there’s so much more you can do. And I think that’s the goal here, uh, correct me if I’m wrong, Dave.

Dave Rohrer: [00:16:43] That’s what I saw. It was just, you know, any way you can reach out to people. Um, and these were just the two examples and there was another one that I saw recently, but of course I’m. Completely forgetting if I think of it, I’ll drop it in the show notes. But, um, now that it’s the morning and [00:17:00] we’re recording, I’m totally brain farting.

And I didn’t write it down somewhere. That’s what I do.

Matt Siltala: [00:17:04] Write it down and forget about it. Hey,

Dave Rohrer: [00:17:06] yeah, I wrote it down somewhere maybe, but I don’t think I did. I think I saw it and I was like, Oh, and then I went and dug up this show and then I didn’t put it in the notes.

Matt Siltala: [00:17:16] You know that, uh, another one, one final example that I just thought of.

Cause it’s something that I’m, it’s a picture I have. On the wall that I stare at all the time of the, uh, or on my, not on the wall, but in my cubbies, in my little desk. But, um, so I go to Alaska every year, um, almost every year and do a lot of halibut fishing. And one year I caught a 330 pound one. Um, the lodge is like one of their records and, uh, anyway, we got a picture of it and there’s a picture of it, of it that is taken.

And it’s in the lodge. And there’s also like a mold then of the tail. And that this thing is like, gargantuous like most people can only catch [00:18:00] like 60 to 90 pound halibuts or whatever. And even those are good. Like a lot of, I think probably average lower than that, like 40 to 50 pounds. But, um, talk about a picture that’s like posted everywhere and shared it’s something that is offline and people just cannot believe that there’s this fish that’s literally Dade the size of me.

And, uh, I’m not a small person and, and, uh, I was able to catch this fish several years ago and it’s something that they’ve posted offline that ends up doing a lot of online stuff and it’s kind of fun. So again, think of stuff like that, you know, like if you’re, if you have anything that’s somewhat related to that, think of how it would work for you.

Dave Rohrer: [00:18:43] Well, and like the Arby’s, you know what they did, they, they, someone tweeted about it and they literally just sent them that little. Picture and note yeah, like that is taking social media offline that is taking your, your know, your stuff [00:19:00] offline. Now they didn’t specifically create content from doing that, but someone else did for them,

Matt Siltala: [00:19:06] like the Wendy’s dude saying, Hey, if I can get a million retreats or whatever, get free nuggets for life and, uh, and just doing it.

That’s another perfect.

Dave Rohrer: [00:19:16] Yeah. I mean, when people are creating content for you, look for ways to work with them.

Matt Siltala: [00:19:20] Engage them. Yeah, don’t shut them. That’s like, that’s free press, especially if it’s doing as good as those ones were

Dave Rohrer: [00:19:27] got. It was just trying to not really product marketing, not linked, baiting, not social media, but it’s kind of like taking a bunch of outreach and influencer marketing and like five different things and trying to figure out a way to make it work.

Matt Siltala: [00:19:42] All right guys. Well, hopefully you’ve gained something from this and, uh, Got a nugget from it as always love. If you love what you have heard here, um, please go to iTunes and give us a five star rating. Um, you don’t even have to like waste time writing unless you [00:20:00] want to, but let’s go give us a five star rating and we would appreciate that.

And we will continue to do this for you, but for Dave roar, with Northside metrics and met with avalanche media and the thanks guys for joining us, we’ll talk to you later.

Dave Rohrer: [00:20:12] Thanks.