On Sunday, October 10, 2011 at the National Beer Wholesalers Association convention in Las Vegas, NV members from each of Beer's Three-Tier distribution system joined me on stage to share their experiences and perspectives on Social Media with a Mobile and Local lens: SoLoMo. Speakers include Kathy Benning, EVP Global Marketing and Brand Development of Buffalo Wild Wings; Kim Jordan, CEO of New Belgium Brewing Company; Bob Mack, Digital and Social Media, Monarch Distributing and World Class Beers; Brian Mullaly, VP Technology and Development, Elixyr Distributing; and Stephen Surman, VP, Digital Strategy for Anheuser-Busch/InBev. The introductory slides were presented by @MarkSilva
15. Geo-Local: Checking Out Benefits of Checking In
• Simple place to start
for Brands
• Increase consumer
connection and
relevance
• Motivates customers
16. Foursquare &
American
Express: Linking
the Last Mile
• Austin, TX test during
SXSW
• Spend $5 get $5
• Option to donate $1
for $5 of spend
• Redemption
notification arrives
before the Latte
20. HOW TO LOOK AT
Search-Reference
SOCIAL-MOBILE ROI
• Search Engines and Social
Rankers favor super-fresh
content
• In the past 5-years social
signals and sharing have
eclipsed traditional web
content Consumer
• The Mobile web is
consuming and creating
these signals faster and
better than before Social Graph-Discovery
• Your ROI is relevance:
getting found
30. Beer Experience
Goal: Reinforce BWW as ultimate destination for beer.
Jun – Aug 2010 Sep – Oct 2010 Nov – Jan 2011 Feb – Mar 2011 April - May 2011 Jun – Aug 2011
31. WHAT YOU CAN DO
1. Work with your national account managers.
2. Support the national plan at the local level
3. Restaurant level promotions
4. Activation of national promotion at the local level.
5. Advertising opportunities.
6. Pricing strategy
31
32. #NBWAVEGAS
#SoLoMo
Stephen Surman
VP Digital Strategy
Anheuser-Busch/InBev
72. And some good advice:
After one-and-a-half beers, put the phone
(or the keyboard) down!
(our customers want us to be clever and kind)
72
73. PANEL DISCUSSION
• Tweet questions using #SoLoMo and/or @marksilva
• Our Speakers:
Kathy Benning Kim Jordan Bob Mack Brian Mullaly Stephen Surman
Buffalo Wild Wings New Belgium Brewing Monarch Beverages Elyxer Distributing Anheuser-Busch/InBev
Company and World Class Beers
73
74. THANK YOU! http://bit.ly/SoLoMo4Beer
Mark Silva
SVP Emerging Platforms
Anthem Worldwide
mark.silva@anthemww.com
@marksilva on Twitter, Facebook, Slideshare, LinkedIn
+realmarksilva on Google and Skype
http://about.me/marksilva
74
Hinweis der Redaktion
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
Don’t mistake the platform or provider for the value. The larger implications of micro-content around location means greater relevance to content.\n\nSearch example: Content coming from 5-miles of a major natural event can be more relevant than anything else around the subject. In Haiti, a tweet from ground zero would tell us more than the millions of well-wishing tweets about what was happening on the ground.\n\nSocial Graph example: 5-star restaurant reviews get trumped by a friend’s recommendation when choosing where to go in a different city.\n
Don’t mistake the platform or provider for the value. The larger implications of micro-content around location means greater relevance to content.\n\nSearch example: Content coming from 5-miles of a major natural event can be more relevant than anything else around the subject. In Haiti, a tweet from ground zero would tell us more than the millions of well-wishing tweets about what was happening on the ground.\n\nSocial Graph example: 5-star restaurant reviews get trumped by a friend’s recommendation when choosing where to go in a different city.\n
Don’t mistake the platform or provider for the value. The larger implications of micro-content around location means greater relevance to content.\n\nSearch example: Content coming from 5-miles of a major natural event can be more relevant than anything else around the subject. In Haiti, a tweet from ground zero would tell us more than the millions of well-wishing tweets about what was happening on the ground.\n\nSocial Graph example: 5-star restaurant reviews get trumped by a friend’s recommendation when choosing where to go in a different city.\n
Don’t mistake the platform or provider for the value. The larger implications of micro-content around location means greater relevance to content.\n\nSearch example: Content coming from 5-miles of a major natural event can be more relevant than anything else around the subject. In Haiti, a tweet from ground zero would tell us more than the millions of well-wishing tweets about what was happening on the ground.\n\nSocial Graph example: 5-star restaurant reviews get trumped by a friend’s recommendation when choosing where to go in a different city.\n
Don’t mistake the platform or provider for the value. The larger implications of micro-content around location means greater relevance to content.\n\nSearch example: Content coming from 5-miles of a major natural event can be more relevant than anything else around the subject. In Haiti, a tweet from ground zero would tell us more than the millions of well-wishing tweets about what was happening on the ground.\n\nSocial Graph example: 5-star restaurant reviews get trumped by a friend’s recommendation when choosing where to go in a different city.\n
Don’t mistake the platform or provider for the value. The larger implications of micro-content around location means greater relevance to content.\n\nSearch example: Content coming from 5-miles of a major natural event can be more relevant than anything else around the subject. In Haiti, a tweet from ground zero would tell us more than the millions of well-wishing tweets about what was happening on the ground.\n\nSocial Graph example: 5-star restaurant reviews get trumped by a friend’s recommendation when choosing where to go in a different city.\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
Support draft quality\nDomestic:\n Value to Guests\n Programs align to calendar\nCraft/Import:\n Showcase variety\n Trial new beers\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
Technology functions by enhancing one’s current perception of reality. \n
Technology functions by enhancing one’s current perception of reality. \n
I’m Bob Mack and I’m the Web and Social Media Developer for the World Class Beer division of Monarch Beverage Company. We’re a craft/specialty division of a major Miller/Coors wholesaler and also the founding member of the World Class Beer national network of wholesalers.\n\nMy job is to create, maintain and train our members on the use of tools that we utilize to be more focused on Local, Social and Mobile. This in One Distributor’s Opinion on how and why these tools are important to all of us. \n
Monarch Beverage Company is a 15 million case distributor in Indiana. Much of the case sales are Miller/Coors products but Monarch also handles Heineken, Corona, Diageo and many other brands including craft brands.\n\nIn 2002 Jim Schembre, the General Manager of World Class Beer, proposed the concept to Monarch of a separate, beer passionate sales division that would focus solely on the craft/specialty category to help Monarch better capture sales in that area. Then known as World Class Beverages, Jim started with a small, segregated sales force that could lead their sales presentations with smaller brands.\n\nOne of the key elements of Jim’s approach was that World Class would be consumer focused, giving information on brands and beer directly to consumers to drive them to purchase those brands at the retail level. The earliest version of our website was created then to provide consumers with information about brands and beers available to them locally.\n\nOur more specialized focus intended to bring incremental sales to Monarch, adding more cases and dollars to the Monarch bottom line while doing the least possible to cannibalize existing case sales.\n
The core concepts of World Class Beverages were these –\n\nA smaller, segregated sales force would have a much greater share of mind for local, craft and specialty brands than the larger Monarch sales force that was focused on bigger, national brands.\n\nWe believed that we could create and inspire beer passion in the relatively small but rapidly growing craft/specialty beer category. \n\nProviding information and education to consumers and retailers would help to create and inspire beer passion, bringing new drinkers to local, craft and specialty beers.\n\nWorld Class was also very social, communicating openly and transparently to consumers, retailers and suppliers. \n\nWorld Class focused first on local and regional brands, believing that they provided the best opportunity to bring new drinkers into the craft/specialty beer category. \n\nAt World Class, we live and participate in the beer culture. We’re beer geeks. Many of us are Cicerone or BJCP Certified. We engage others as part of the culture, not from outside the culture.\n
We believe that Monarch benefits in several ways from the presence of the World Class division. \n\nFirst, we believe that most of our sales are incremental and do the least possible harm to our existing brands. \n\nSecond, our craft/specialty case sales are normally much higher dollar margin sales – which brings additional profitability to Monarch. \n\nThird, we believed it was important to establish credibility for Monarch Beverage in the emerging craft/specialty category as we saw a lot of long term value in it for distributors. \n\nFourth, the World Class sales people began to be perceived as Monarch’s beer experts and provided a knowledge and experience base for Monarch that could translate to other Monarch products. \n\nI also believe that our understanding of the category and culture has helped us to attract suppliers like Boulevard and retain suppliers like Bells. We also work hard to develop and maintain relationships with local brewers even before they are ready to be in distribution, because we believe that the local beer scene is critical to the overall success of the category. \n
Monarch and World Class are the same company, but we operate and live in somewhat different spaces within the beer distribution world. The graph presented here highlights some of those differences and similarities.\n\nIn the red you see World Class and the extremes of red toward the outer part of the circle indicate a relatively higher degree of focus in several key areas including being social or speaking directly to consumers, a focus on craft and specialty brands, an emphasis on mobile technologies to reach consumers, focus on local and regional brands and an overall consumer orientation.\n\nAt World Class we are focused on social and mobile technologies to impact our local market and we do not usually utilize more traditional local media like radio or out-of-home media like billboards, etc.\n\nMonarch, represented by the blue regions on the chart, have historically been more focused on traditional media, national brands and while they are also social, it is not usually as large a percentage of Monarch’s media efforts as it is for World Class.\n\nI should note, however, that both Monarch and World Class continue to evolve in all of these areas and in some ways, we are growing closer on many of these points as social media and craft brands become more important to Monarch as well as to World Class. \n
World Class utilizes a variety of tools to fulfill it’s mission. \n\nFirst started in 2002, our website continues to be a central focus of our social efforts, although it has changed dramatically over the past 9 years. \n\nBeer Spy is a tool that we use to present all of our sales information to the consumer, searchable by zip code, to make it easy for consumers to locate even hard to find beers in their areas. Beer Spy began in 2002 as Beer Finder and has grown to encompass approximately 500,000 searchable distribution points on any given day. \n\nBeer U is a newer education effort for World Class and provides a customizable, interactive platform to deliver beer education through a series of online modules available to consumers and retailers free of charge. Although we are really just starting out with Beer U, we anticipate having 75 different Beer U modules online by the 4th quarter of 2012 on various beer topics. \n\nWe also continue to use and refine our efforts on Twitter, Facebook and with blogs and encourage and educate our partner wholesalers on the use of those systems. \n\nIn all, I personally spend about 20 hours a week on simply maintaining the website and the underlying database which would be a lot for one wholesaler to consume, but with 25 distributors in our network currently, this amounts to less than 1 hour per distributor, on average, to maintain these tools. \n\nMuch of the remainder of my time is spent developing the Beer U educational modules and in training wholesalers, retailers and consumers on the use of Beer U. I also spend about 5 hours a week on social media including Twitter, Facebook and blogs. \n
Here’s a screen shot of the World Class website Indiana home page. All brand and product information is specific to the geographic region or distributor that the user chooses, but you will also notice that our social media content as well as Beer U content is consumed by the website and available to users in this one location – making it our “one-stop-shop” to reach all of those channels. \n
World Class has evolved since 2002. Back then, we only represented ourselves in Indiana through our website but since 2006, we have started to partner with other distributors who have an interest in using these tools. The idea of partnering was based on the idea that we could gain many efficiencies and economies by sharing these types of resources and building them together, while still maintaining a focus on our local markets within those tools. Today, our website hosts information for the brands of 25 different distributors and is capable of handling hundreds of distributors in the long term. \n\nIn the last several years, we have also come to embrace social media tools like Twitter, Facebook and blogs as an ideal way to reach out to our existing consumers as well as to bring new consumers into the craft/specialty category. Social media provides us with the opportunity to speak directly to an audience that is interested in our message and in a way that is convenient for them.\n\nLast year, our website underwent a dramatic re-design that was intended to make it a mobile friendly platform. It now displays quite nicely on smart phone and tablet devices, giving access to tools like Beer Spy to people on the go. Consumers can now easily use Beer Spy even while they are away from home or travelling without the need to be close to a desktop or laptop computer. \n
I’m frequently challenged by our management team to come up with definitive numbers to demonstrate specifically how successful our time and energy spent on these tools impacts our bottom line and I will admit that I struggle to provide exact sales figures. But I don’t think our numbers are any less deserving of merit than trying to determine how many case sales a particular billboard advertisement or radio spot generated. \n\nWhat I do know is that we have immediate access to over 3,000 people who follow us on Twitter and Facebook. And these are people who have demonstrated an interest in our products by following us and many of those people can be very influential over others who are not already following our feeds, making our potential reach exponentially greater than the 3,000 number would indicate. \n\nWe also spend very few dollars these days on traditional media like print ads, radio or television spots as Twitter and Facebook are at least as effective as those media at getting people to our events or in launching new brands and products. \n\nWe also get immediate results from Twitter and Facebook. Although it might not be ideal, I could decide to host an event tonight and still get people to the event through promotion in social media. Sometimes spontaneity works and social media can accommodate that. If I’ve got a week or two to properly spread the word, getting a good event packed with people is not typically a problem even without print ad or other forms of advertising. \n\nMost importantly, we are positioning ourselves where the consumer lives. We’ve all seen the numbers on how many Twitter users there are or how many people log in to Facebook every day, so we know the consumer is already there. It’s important for us to get comfortable and effective in that space at least as quickly as our competitors do. \n
I’m Bob Mack and I’m the Web and Social Media Developer for the World Class Beer division of Monarch Beverage Company. We’re a craft/specialty division of a major Miller/Coors wholesaler and also the founding member of the World Class Beer national network of wholesalers.\n\nMy job is to create, maintain and train our members on the use of tools that we utilize to be more focused on Local, Social and Mobile. This in One Distributor’s Opinion on how and why these tools are important to all of us. \n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
New Belgium had the typical trajectory of most craft brewers when it came to developing a marketing plan. We inadvertently developed great pull by attending festivals and talking with beer drinkers one bar stool at a time. Over time we’ve developed a multi pronged approach; here’s one thing we know for sure: we will integrate many medias into a comprehensive strategy. Social media is great and will perhaps lead the way and we have a print media strategy and are looking at other fairly traditional mediums, like out of home, done with New Belgium’s signature style.\n\nWe’ve found that Social media does a fabulius job of supporting, through integration of message, all of our marketing efforts.\n
\nNew Belgium became active in Social Media in 2008. This started as an internal effort , we had a few co-workers who were really into the medium and they developed a lot of skill and insight. We’ve focused mainly on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. It became apparent pretty quickly that we’d need to tighten our efforts and because of its conversational and visual nature, heavy content based platform and sheer number of active users we chose Facebook as our primary tool. \n\nWe’ve been able to uniquely engage fans with content and conversations that support our overarching branding priorities, campaigns, beers and culture. In addition, find ways to tell our brand story on the social web while connecting with fans locally through regional pages, direct ranger involvement, company wide interaction and custom applications that leverage existing fan engagement and continue to put our fans at the focus or our brand. The brand story begins to live with the customer which is a really interesting dynamic.\n
Facebook is the most visited website on the Internet. \n\nPeople on Facebook\nMore than 750 million active users\n50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day\nAverage user has 130 friends\nPeople spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook\n\nActivity on Facebook \nThere are over 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages) \nAverage user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events \nAverage user creates 90 pieces of content each month\nMore than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month. \n
Here are our Facebook stats. We chose Facebook as the social tool of choice to tell our brand story because of the conversational, heavy content based platform. A wise choice considering the exponential growth in traffic noted on the previous slide.\nWe are able to speak with the 25-34 year old audience which is extremely hard to reach and we are engaging them with real time conversations and custom content.\n
Our homegrown approach to social media was a perfect fit. We were able to approach developing our voice in an organic and authentic way. We believe that given the high levels of trust that are developed in social media this was prescient. As our creative director Mel Glassman says, “we never want to take for granted or compromise our customer’s faith.”\n\n \n
New Belgium definitely has a brand voice and look and because of our approach, we were able to convey that in a way in which our fans could believe.  \n\n\nIn April of 2010, we launched a brand called Ranger, which is an IPA. Our field sales people are called Rangers and this beer was named for them because they had been asking us to make an IPA for quite a while. This was a fabulous vehicle for us to begin to localize our approach to talking with our customers; Rangers have their own pages and we have regional pages. \n\nRangers want their pages to reflect their personality and that of their region or city. That said, they also want content support from the Mothership. We identified a unique way to fulfill the need by developing a tool for syndicating some of our Mothership content out to the Regional pages, providing tools for the Rangers to make their pages stronger without having to develop 26 different apps and content pieces. Each Ranger page has a syndicated tab with a back end tool that the Rangers can control themselves. They have a standard module, that draws content from the mothership page, and then an event box where Rangers can feature local events and happenings. Typically the only place that events are communicated is via facebook. We’re now using Facebook Places as a foursquare type medium.\n
 \nThese Facebook ads increased awareness of the regional pages with people who already love New Belgium. So we targeted the ads at New Belgium fans and served them on a local basis featuring the appropriate regional page. The campaign gave all regional pages a bump in fan base, at an avg of $.16 per fan and doubled the likes respectively.\n
QR code\nWe put the QR code in print ads and on the 12 packs. When people scanned the QR code, the mobile app would detect their location and suggest for them the closest regional Facebook page, as well as a couple of other options – our Rangers video, and some Ranger-suggested “beer pairings.” \n
Apps drive increased volume of likes, its that simple. People want to share an experience. Utilizing an app allows consumers to share an experience with your brand more readily in addition to providing a legal way to reinforce that engagement with a cruiser.\n\nWith Share Your Joy Ride, we incorporated some elements that have worked well for us before, and added a few things that are new. In this app, users can upload their picture and put it on a Fat Tire label, add a comment about their joy ride, place it in a gallery of Joy Rides and share it with their friends. This easy and social way of sharing has worked well for us before so we’re doing it again. \n\nSomething we added this time is an accompanying mobile app. One of the things we learned in previous apps is that, especially if we put a callout on the beer bottle, fans often want to engage with us right where they are – maybe at the bar – by using their mobile phone. So we added and iphone and Adroid version of the app, which uploads the picture to the same gallery on Facebook, and lets people engage from anywhere. \n\nWe also wanted to do something creative with our packaging. Since we’re asking people to put their own joy ride on the label, we decided to take our bike off the label for the summer, leaving space for our fan’s joy rides. \n
Mighty Arrow Social Collaboration. Integration across packaging, media partner and philanthropic cause. Over 10,000 fans uploaded images to our main page on Facebook.\n"The success of our recent Mighty Arrow social campaign perfectly illustrates how New Belgium continues to lead Craft Beer in engagement, creative utilization, integration, content and most importantly: collaboration. Our team, comprised of both internal and external players, will continue to innovate and experiment with custom social media applications, campaigns and contests that are compelling thousands to comment, upload, like, share and put themselves at the center of our Brand Story.”   -Adrian M Glasenapp | Director of Advertising and Social Media\n
So that’s a basic overview of New Belgium’s Social Media history and strategy. I’ll leave you with this last bit of wisdom from one of our Rangers who tweets and blogs a lot..\n