Social Media Done Right: Mountain Hardware's "Expedition Republic"

Did I mention that I am afraid of heights?

MarketingSherpa just published a free mini-case study that looks at how Mountain Hardware was able to successfully launch a social network as a supplement to their website.  The article can be found at When a Blog Isn’t Enough: Expanding Customer Interaction with a Branded Social Network.

Although the article is light on details and doesn’t contain any numbers regarding ROI, it does highlight some key practices that are in line with my personal experiences in building social networks:

Find a good partner: Mountain Hardware teamed up with White Horse, a digital marketing agency out of Portland.  Judging by their methodology, creative samples (located at the tail of the article and worth reviewing), and reported outcomes, this firm clearly understands how social media works and was able to translate the culture of the Mountain Hardware brand to an extended online audience.

Don’t reinvent the wheel: Mountain Hardware used Ning as their main social networking platform (See the actual site here).  They also leveraged an existing blog, Facebook page, YouTube Channel, Twitter account, and Flickr stream to promote and reinforce the Ning-based social network.  There was no reason for Mountain Hardware, to develop, host, and maintain a codebase that drives a social networking platform.  With Ning, Mountain Hardware has an out-of-the-box solution that is easy to customize, popluate with content, promote, and leverage all of their exisiting online resources.

Spend a few bucks promoting the network: “If you build it, they will come” is not a viable social media strategy.  However, building a highly-targeted PPC keyword campaign to topics and sites that you know your core visitors follow is a cheap and easy way to seed your network.  I like how the article implies that Mountain Hardware used keyword marketing to promote properties outside of their own web site – more organizations should do this!

Content development is more about process than anything else: I’m sure Mountain Hardware generates a lot of content from their product managers, internal bloggers, marketing/PR people, and all of their other external communicators.  Combine this with content that they generated as part of the social network launch and the question becomes one of organization, timing, and flow.  Making sure that content gets placed on appropriate venues and cross-promoted is something that takes a bit of project management.

Email: Mountain Hardware recognized that their email was key component of establishing its online community.

So read the article, check out their properties and creative samples, and get a feel for the mechanics of launching a social network.  Now if only they would publish some statistics that illustrate the impact of this intiative…