BRAND BUILDING AND SOCIAL MEDIA

My friend and great keynote speaker Randy Gage turned me on to this article the other day:

“University of Georgia football fans are taking their fandom to the next level ahead of a game between the Bulldogs and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish.

Dill’s Food City, a grocery store chain whose owners are known locally as die-hard Bulldogs fans, removed traces of the Irish before the big game day, starting with Irish Spring soaps.

Three days later, Irish Spring joined Twitter to react to the store’s post.

The soap company tweeted a photo of an Irish Soap shipment with Bulldog signs, saying, “Hey University of Georgia – Heard you were out of stock in Athens, GA. We’re sending a little luck your way. Hoping for a good, clean game tomorrow!

‘The fact that Irish Spring created an account just to get in on the #NDvsUGA pregame banter is one of the many reasons I absolutely love #CollegeFootball Twitter,’ a University of Georgia graduate tweeted.’”

The story is cute. Dill’s Food City used the Georgia/Notre Dame game for fun and brand building. And Irish Spring also used the situation to show a bit of their brand’s personality and build some online awareness. But that’s not what’s most noteworthy about this little marketing stunt.

Instead, go back and read the article excerpt again. Maybe you’ll notice the lines 1) “Irish Spring joined Twitter to react…” and 2) “The fact that Irish Spring created an account just to…”

WTF? Irish Spring didn’t have a Twitter account before this happened? In 2019?

To bring this into perspective, I did a little fact checking for you. Twitter was launched in August of 2006 and has grown to over 330 million users. Thanks to its 13-year late engagement with the social media site, Irish Spring reaches less than 0.000001% of Twitter’s users.

As their famous jingle says, having “a bar of Irish Spring in your hand (might) be like taking a shower in Ireland,” but certainly not in 2019 when Internet penetration in the country is well over 84%.

What does all this mean for your brand?

Quite simply, if a brand as established and successful as Irish Spring barely got around to creating their own Twitter page, what have you been you waiting for? Are you registered with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube or whatever other social media sites are important to your business and your audiences?

Don’t be so quick to pat yourself on the back simply because you registered with the sites, by the way. Are you up to date with your information? Are you consistent with your posts? Are you growing your readership and viewership on a regular basis? Are you engaging with others on your sites?

If you’ve been considering writing a blog, are you doing it?

If you’ve been thinking about creating a video blog, have you been shooting it?

Have you updated your website recently?

Building your brand with social media

Before you think I’m simply pointing fingers, I’ll tell you that I was way behind in being sure that this blog was readable on phones and mobile devices. Thanks to observant and persistent readers and friends like Steven Laff and Alan Berg, I finally pushed my IT people to update my blog – and it’s the most powerful and successful new business tool I have for generating keynote speaker opportunities for me.

Sure, we all have too many things to do every day. But that doesn’t give any of us the excuse for not making sure our simple fundamentals are under control. This goes for big brands like Irish Spring, and smaller brands like yours and mine.

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BRUCE TURKEL

• Sought-after international keynote speakers on branding, creativity, and innovation
• Member, Speaker Hall of Fame
• Best-selling author of "All About Them," one of Forbes Magazine's top ten business books of the year
• Brand builder for Discovery Channel, Bacardi, Miami and many other successful brands

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