Social Media Experiment

From Vegas - Social Media Experiment

I’m having special T-shirts made-up for JCK.  It will invite smart-phone users to “scan-me” and have a QR-code (you know those square “Tetris-gone-wrong” looking bar-code thingies) on my back, and sleeves.  The QR code will lead them to my website, which will offer them the options of connecting with me via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, email or via the Toddwaz Blog page.

I expect to gain a few subscribers, but it will be fascinating to see exactly how many.  Before hitting the show-floor with my new T-shirts, I’m going to jot-down how many followers and how many views I’ve had on all of my social media venues, and then count the increase after three days.  I’ll let you know the results.

Marketing often comes down to making a plan, working the plan and then counting the results.  If you have to wait until the end of the year to assess the results of your marketing plan, you’ll never know what worked and what didn’t.  If you run “bursts” of advertising in conjunction with an event or an offer, you’ll be able to count the results more immediately; giving you a better handle on which media are giving you the best bang for your buck.

Direct marketers are so surgical in their approach, they often take a distribution list and divide it in half and send two different scripts or offers to each group to see which one works better.  If I was so organized, at JCK, I could try different T-shirts each day with different wording to see which generates the most hits.

Marketing is not a well-defined path through the woods because nobody has a store like yours in a market like yours.  It’s more like bush-whacking.  You set a general bearing like a mountain or the setting sun, and you forge your own path.  Sometimes you’ll run into obstacles and have to double-back, and other times the landscape will divert you from your target.

In this case, I’m spending $75 to see just how receptive a captive audience is to using smart-phones to connect with us.  If it works well, I’ll do it again at another jewellery show.  Results to follow in a few days…