First, let me say this, we do not claim in any way to be Social Media experts.  The very term causes confusion and a lot of questions in an area where there are not many answers (as you will see below).  We are three guys who like our beer and other alcoholic beverages and really enjoy talking to people about it.  We also like to evaluate what makes us react to brands and blog about it to see how others feel.  Are we more right than we are wrong?  are we way out of whack? Tell us.

Now, the real post:

I was doing some reading this morning and came across two articles that gave a very interesting juxtaposition and related to a third article I read the other day, but had been meaning to blog about.

The first article comes from eMarketer and is titled, “Are Twitter Followers Better Than Facebook Fans?”  After some of the feedback on our quick study, I decided that there is no right or wrong, but it is more what the end goal is that should determine the strategy.  The article had two key points:

• Twitter followers are more passionate about the brands they follow than people who press the “Like” button on Facebook and are more likely to buy from them as a result.
• 3% of US internet users are using Twitter

The suggestion is, if you are a company looking for brand advocates, better get on Twitter and build a following.  But, if you are a company that is looking for more numbers to market to and plays on the self-image your fans get from your brand, Facebook is the way to go.

I liked the article because it reminded me of a lesson that was reinforced last week: Before you start down a path in anything you need to ask yourself, and the people going with you, “what do you REALLY want to get out of this?”

After I got done reading the eMarketer article, I saw a tweet about the CEO of Groupon giving Four Startup Lessons.  When I got to lesson four, I had to read it a few times. I thought, “How could a web-based company say, ‘Social media is overrated’?”  The most interesting point I saw though is that instead of reaching out to businesses virtually, Groupon puts people physically on location. 

So now we get to the “Who the hell knows??”  There are many articles out there that talk about the importance of engaging and responding via social media to both compliments and complaints.  Then you have the counter-example of a company that sells experiences on the web, but focuses on handling customer relationships by putting people physically in the business.  For me these two articles opened the Pandora’s box of questions.

The only clear answer to all of the questions that I have are the articles that I have read lately that talk about treating social media like a bar or a social gathering.  Nobody likes the guy that runs in yells something, and then runs out.  with the instant gratification world that we live in, everyone wants to feel important and heard no matter how silly some of the things they have to say appear to others.  The thought pattern on building a solid following or brand was furthered by the blog post “It’s About the Relationships Stupid” posted on Social Media Today on Sunday. Although the author talks about building relationships in a conference, I think that the concept applies to any setting we experience on a daily basis.  I personally don’t want to date the deadbeat product or business that shows up once a quarter announces the inventory sale and then leaves like a bum into the night looking for a quarter and I would bet most of you don’t either.

So where does this post go from here:

1) Remember to always ask “what do you REALLY want to get out of this?”

2) There is no easy answer to building a following or a brand.  Share your thoughts on what gets you to engage and disengage in the comments.

3) If you do want to create a following for personal or professional reasons, make sure that you view it as a relationship and not a 2-for-1 shot during a football game at a bar.

-Jake

Disclaimer:
The plan was to take the data from this study and use it for business development purposes internally, but we think that the results exemplify what is going on in the industry, so we have decided to release them.  These results are from an informal counting from August 28th – September 9th.  In no way do they represent the annual engagement of the companies that were followed nor have we been officially engaged to perform a study of this nature.  All results are proprietary of Goodman & Co., LLC.

Background:
On August 27, Mashable/Business posted an article titled “4 Beer Companies with Social Media On Tap” (http://mash.to/2vOS0).  After reading the article, it got us thinking and wondering where some of our favorite craft breweries would stack up in the ratings.  We quickly came up with a list of breweries that we thought mixed the spectrum of twitter engagement and decided to track them for a two-week period to see how they were really doing. 

Process:
On August 28th, Jake set up filters on Hootsuite for the different breweries and started manually counting the number of mentions/references by users and the number of posts /responses from the breweries.  It was a primitive way of grabbing a snapshot to help us with business development and we learned a lot about the type of information that would really make a study beneficial to companies.  Each morning the results from the previous day were counted and stored in a workbook.

Results:
Here are the results in table form:

Brewery                           Mentions   Posts     Percentage
Bell’s Brewery                     186             0              0.00%

Bluegrass Brewing Co.        12              15         125.00%

Flat12 Bierwerks                240            171          71.25%

Founders Brewing              336             44          13.10%

Narragansett Brewery        111             52           46.85%

Great Lakes Brewing Co.    88               20           22.73%

Half Acre Beer Co.              81              16           19.75%

Moerlein Brewing Co.         19               6            31.58%

Mt. Carmel Brewing Co       5                 7          140.00%

New Belgium Brewing       288               3            10.40%

New Glarus Brewing Co.   113               4               3.54%

Terrapin Beer Co.               90              12            13.33%

NOTES:
-    The period of study includes Labor Day weekend.  More opportunity for mentions, people taking time off from responses.
-    Great Lakes was mourning the loss of a staff member and was closed for at least one day
-    Flat12 was heavily promoting their Hopstar program and released information on head brewer Rob Caputo during the study.
-    Half Acre released Sticky Fat during the study.

Enhancements:
In the first week, Jake just counted the results blindly.  After noticing the trends, Jake and Rich started to actively engage the selected breweries to see if they would respond.  We asked questions about new releases, tweeted about drinking their beers, and waited for responses.  The number of responses overall was very predictive of which breweries actually responded.  Flat12, Half Acre, Founders, and BBC each responded to our tweets where New Belgium New Glarus, and Bell’s did not.

Conclusions:
The biggest surprise was that New Belgium was mentioned in the Mashable article as having a great social media program, but they were not responding to most tweets that mentioned attending an event or drinking one of their beers.  Similarly, Bell’s and New Glarus are pretty absent in their engagement.  We did search for other accounts tied to the breweries, but did not find one that seemed to be more “Official”.   We were also surprised to see the lack of responses from New Glarus.  New Glarus is in the niche of only distributing in Wisconsin and there is definite room to further engage the base there and in the Midwest.  Overall, it was clear from about the third day who was “getting it” and who “needs help” when it comes to engaging with their drinkers and the community.

Lessons Learned and Next Steps:
We will definitely continue to expand the study for different breweries and the scope of evaluating each mention.  Yes, it will take a bit more time each morning, but the results will be much better than a straight count.  The goal is to measure the engagement on twitter and brand awareness that people have for the different breweries to see where there are potential clients for us to help. 

Ultimately, we plan to provide a service menu that iBrewToo Marketing can help breweries to improve their market share.  Whether it is performing studies and providing metrics across Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, and LinkedIn or even ghost writing, we are here to help.