MCG’s First Social Media Project

We’ve posted a few times on the blog about how much we love where we work. For those who are unfamiliar, MCG’s office is in the heart of the Art District on Santa Fe, a network of over 60 art galleries, studios, theatres, restaurants, and other creative industries. All of the energy flowing around the district from these creatives inspires us everyday because they’ve been doing some major things since we’ve moved here. Since the District’s inception in 2003, they’ve turned the area from a notably “rough” neighborhood into a thriving district with hundreds of members.

As you probably expected, these creative types are overflowing with awesome ideas. They just need some direction. Their primary goals are to turn the district into not only a sustainable environment for artists, to become a cultural center of Denver, and to advance fine art studies throughout our humble “cow town.” Now you’re probably asking, where do we come in?

As many of you know, MCG recently upgraded its capabilities to include social media services. It seems like the entire B2B industry is enamored with the idea of social media, writing at great length about best practices, and we have developed our own ideas that coincide with MCG’s vision of making B2B sexy.

In order to put our strategies to the test, we decided to try them out on MCG’s own internal approach, and furthermore we offered to do some social media work for our creative community in the Art District on Santa Fe. We believe that creating a strong social media presence would not only help further promote the district externally, but it would help create an online forum for community discussions that used to only take place in once a month, formal board meetings.

The Art District already had a strong website, but to augment that, MCG created a Facebook page, Twitter, Blog, and YouTube channel. There are artists active on each of these social media platforms, so we believed it would take a multi-modal approach to reach all of the Art District’s target audience.

MCG started the full-on social media campaign for the district about a month ago, and we’ve seen amazing results. Not only has the membership from the Facebook page exceeded expectations by reaching over 750 people in such a short time, but they are enthusiastic and involved as well. The Facebook page has not only become a platform for people to post their events or promote their stuff, but it has become a community hub to facilitate discussions that relate to both artists and fans. Also, many members have started their own Twitter accounts and gotten involved in the different conversations occurring there.

My best moment of this campaign came the other day in the district’s monthly meeting when some of the more senior members; uneducated about and potentially overwhelmed by social media, not only volunteered, but recommended that they be taught a class about the power of social media. This meant a lot to me, not because MCG had convinced people to jump on a new, hot trend, but because we had successfully shown the power of social media.

 I remember a few years ago, my parents bought my grandparents their first computer, and it was up to me to teach them how to use it. Of course, being a member of Generation Y, or whatever you want to call it, I knew how awesome computers were, but I was unable to convey that to my technologically “primitive” grandparents, which is why you will now see this same computer acting as an expensive paperweight.

The response to our social media program has been so overwhelming because we were able to get some equally non-tech savvy people to fully embrace the use of social media. Learning all the nooks and crannies of Facebook and Twitter is definitely a daunting task for someone who has never been on these sites before, but everyone is definitely excited to see where social media can take the district.

Being able to convince everyone in an organization to buy in to the use of social media is critical to the success of a program. One can have an agency simply going in and updating your Facebook and Twitter a few times a day, but it takes the collaboration of people in the organization to make sure the program really takes off. You can hire an agency to do their thing, but everyone needs to assure the social goals align with the company’s corporate goals. Also, you need different voices asking questions, answering them, facilitating discussion, and simply becoming the foundation for the active community you are trying to nurture with your social media program.

MCG has successfully created an environment where everyone in the Art District is getting involved, allowing MCG to not only meet, but already exceed our goals for the social campaign. We will keep you updated about developments with the social media programs for the Art District and MCG’s own internal program.