Facebook Drives Chapter Event to New Levels: Case Study

Listservs aren’t dead and they are sources of great ideas and stories like this one from Friday, Oct 17’s ASAE & The Center’s Membership Listserv: “Using Facebook Groups to create buzz for an Association Meeting.”Shelly Good-Cook, Sr. Dir. Membership Marketing & Chapter Relations for CTAM: Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing shared a success story on how she used Facebook to create buzz for a chapter meeting.

“I had an idea to create a Facebook Group for an event called the CTAM New York Blue Ribbon Breakfast 1) to help spread the word about the event virally to boost registration by reaching people who are not in CTAM’s database that I had seen in other Facebook Cable Industry Groups, and 2) to do a case study of viral marketing and the behavior of CTAM’s Millenial members who are on Facebook.”

She when on to describe how she named the Group “CTAM New York Secret Gift” hoping to intrigue people enough to check it out. She sent invitations to 100 CTAM people on her Friend List. From there, the message spread virally through Facebook.

As a bonus those who joined the Facebook group and attended the breakfast got a gift donated by a CTAM member. She added a drawing for additional secret gifts for group members since not everyone could attend the event.

Finding the donor was probably easier that you might think, since she found a donor whose demographic and marketing strategy included the viral marketing space and this fit perfectly.

The Group was launched on Tuesday 9/09 at 6pm with 100 invitations. Within 10 minutes 2 people joined; by 10pm, the group had 14 members and the invite list had grown virally to 134. By Day 9, the numbers reached 116 members and 271 total invites. One month after, it’s still growing.

For this chapter – and many others – this translates to added excitement, a new channel which lives on past the event, a new revenue opportunity (sponsorship), opportunity to build your mailing list (20% of CTAM’s friends were not on their list) and a great way to draw in Millenials. For the national, there are added benefits too including two that Shelly noted:

1 – Data mining: the Millenials are more likely to have their alumni info posted under “Networks” than their company information – useful info! And there is other info that can be helpful in getting to know your members better. Same goes for Boomers and Xers.

2 – National exposure: Shelly reports a 22% growth rate for their original CTAM FaceBook group – largely because of the side bar on the group page called Related Groups.

Check out the full posting and all the ASAE Listserv’s. Mining can dig up diamonds!