Need a Digital or Social Media Case Study? Here's 5 from Future Midwest

How many times are you working on a digital or social media strategy for a client and you wished you had a case study or two to prove your points? I'm sure it happens all the time, especially when your clients haven't fully embraced the mediums yet. Well, the presenters at Future Midwest shared a whole bunch of great case studies. I'd like to share a few of them with you here.

Case Study #1: Chicago Domino's Franchise. During the panel discussion, Blagica Bottigliero, Manager at Emerging Media and Measurement talked about a local Domino's Pizza franchisee who is located near the college campus in Chicago. He has become very good at social media for his store. He is engaged and involved with the local social media community, often supplying free pizzas for events on campus. He does the same with Blagica's Gal's Guide Summits (which grew out of her highly successful Gal's Guide blog). He has an ROI formula for every piece of pizza he gives away and knows how much to give away and what the return of investment is for each time he donates. Through his involvement and being helpful to the digital/social community, he has become much bigger than a local franchisee and now goes and speaks on the subject all over the world. But, most importantly, his business is very successful because of what he's doing.

Case Study #2: Florida Aquarium. This one also came out of the panel discussion. I believe it was GM's Chris Barger who brought it up. The aquarium used a social media promotion to drive ticket sales. They went to a few local tweetups and passed out a code for a percentage off admission tickets. You could only get this code at the tweetups. That way they could track it. They got 128 redemptions from those few tweetups. That was 128 people and their friends who would not have come otherwise. Plus, they went on to talk about their experience to their friends and community, generating positive word of mouth about the venue.

Case Study #3: Ford Fiesta. Scott Monty shared some facts and figures about their Fiesta Movement campaign. They gave Ford Fiestas to 100 people across the country to try out before the car was available in the U.S. These people created all kinds of content about the car from simple tweets and blog posts to web videos. The campaign created over 300 million media impressions, 7 million video views, 4 million twitter impressions, 29 thousand original photos online and more – all for a car that wasn't even available in this country until this week. It was so successful, they're rolling out chapter 2 of the Fiesta Movement now.

Case Study #4: Michigan Tourism. Tim Schaden of Fluency Media talked about the phenomenal success of their Pure Michigan campaign. It was so successful, that even during the winter there was only one week where Florida tourism rated higher. One thing they did was to find out what key words showed up in web searches. For instance, they found that "spring festivals" was getting a lot of clicks for Pure Michigan, so they worked more of those words into other marketing initiatives, like in the subject lines of email marketing. They made sure their digital and social media efforts synced with the traditional advertising, PR and events they were doing. Schaden said they believe that digital marketing is starting to introduce the traditional marketing. As a result, the Pure Michigan site is the number one visited tourism website, the number one state social media program and has seen a 300% growth in email addresses.

Case Study #5: Toyota. This is a quick but surprising one. In his presentation, Shiv Singh of Razorfish talked about how Toyota has done a good job of creating a loyal community around their brand. When all Toyota's recall problems hit the press there was a huge amount of chatter online and most of it was actually positive – as loyal and rabid fans defended the company in their social media channels. In fact, Toyota got better SIM scores in the months the recall crisis broke. This can be attributed to a combination of fans standing up for the brand and people who were expecting Toyota to break out some big offers (which they did), giving them an opportunity to save a lot more on a desired Toyota than they normally would be able to.