The Business of BlogHer Business Part I

Each year women and some men flock to BlogHer’s Business Conference.  Contrary to the BlogHer Conference immediately following BlogHer Business, the Business conference focuses on best practices for reaching the most influential and powerful consumers—women online—in the quickly evolving social media world.

Five case studies were shared with the audience, all of which leveraged social media to build successful campaigns.  Each case study proved to have its lesson learned as well as key takeaways for future initiatives.  I enjoyed attending the influential conference and I am excited to share my favorite case studies and what I learned from them. I will be posting my favorite case studies in a 3-part blog post, beginning with the Allstate case study.

The Allstate case study touched on building the internal case for social media in a heavily regulated environment. Lizzie Schreier, the woman responsible for Internet Marketing at Allstate, worked with legal to build a social media program that was innovative, achieved measurable and desirable results, all within the unique regulatory environment that Allstate, as an insurance company, is beholden to.  In order to get her program up and running, Lizzie shared her 5 step process:

• Fact finding: find as many statistics as you can on the relevance of social media and why it is important for your company to leverage it

• Educate: keep your company educated on what your initiatives are and how social media can help the company as a whole

• Guidelines: set realistic guidelines around your social media goals

• Take baby steps: don’t try and jump into social media headfirst; take baby steps to learn what works for your company

• Prove/communicate/enhance/repeat: share metrics and analytics that prove your social media initiatives were successful, communicate throughout the process, enhance your initiatives and repeat.

Check back soon for my analysis of more relevant case studies.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 30th, 2009 at 10:29 am. It is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.