Corn Farmer Part 5: The Aftermath

How S.E.O. Killed the Corn Farmer launched five days ago. And it’s been a whirlwind campaign that has people talking all across the nation.

How do I know? Easy — we’ve been tracking it.

To really understand the kind of results you can expect from social media marketing, you need to not only establish clear goals and measurements for success — you have to be able to track every interaction. From hits to and comments on the microsite, to the number of retweets and links followed on Facebook, all of these elements need to be tracked and analyzed every step of the way. That way you know what’s working, what’s not, what you need to tweak and how this social media campaign has effected your overall marketing plan.

Think of it this way. Greater awareness of a website created by a paid ad can lead to more natural search engine traffic. In similar fashion, people are logically more likely to click on a paid promotional ad of marketers they recognize, such as those they’ve encountered during a natural search or a company they recognize from a banner ad. And the same holds true for social media. So every interaction, every click, every view of that video on YouTube, it is impacting your brand. And you need to be able to measure it, because what gets measured gets improved. This type of in-depth analytics is something we do for all of our clients at Oneupweb (and we can do for you, too).

So after just five days of the corn farmer social media campaign, what are the results? Well I can’t give away everything, but I can tell you this. We’ve seen tens of thousands of hits to the microsite, hundreds of video views, re-tweets in the double-digits, sizeable traffic coming from Facebook and a response to the banner advertising campaign that is off the charts. And I’m positive that each element positively impacted the other — proving that a social media campaign can work. And if you stop and think about it, this proves that a social media campaign can not only work for b2c companies, but for b2b companies as well (Oneupweb is, afterall, a b2b company).

In closing, I’d just like to say how sad we are to hear of the death of Oscar Mayer. He and his work were an inspiration to many (including this writer). You’ll be missed.