For 95 years, the “Wildest, Fastest Show on Earth” has taken place during the third week of July in Nampa, Idaho. The Snake River Stampede is now one of the top 10 regular professional rodeos out of the approximately 800 rodeos in the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association.

Team Villageous was tapped to provide social media coverage of the rodeo leading up to and during the event. Our mission was to connect with potential and current fans of the Stampede through Facebook.com/SnakeRiverStampede and Twitter @SnakeRiverStmpd, build excitement for the event, drive ticket sales, raise awareness about community events surrounding the rodeo, and keep people updated during rodeo week. The ultimate goal of our effort was to develop a forward-thinking, long-term approach to communicating with rodeo fans through social media, positioning the Stampede to build on that supporter base for years to come and ultimately translating that support into ticket sales.

Building the Audience
Four months before the event, we officially launched the social media sites and began the process of finding and recruiting our audience. Since the ultimate goal was to drive attendance at the rodeo, we developed a very focused process for finding fans on Facebook and Twitter who live within 50 miles of Nampa. We also conducted ticket contests in the weeks leading up to the rodeo to encourage people to connect with us. In addition to encouraging fans to spread the news to their friends and family by asking them to “like” and “follow” us, we also ran a very successful Facebook advertising campaign to find fans in the 4 weeks leading up to the rodeo. Through our efforts, we were able to recruit over 3,000 fans during this time. The Snake River Stampede has a very loyal fan base – our mission was just to find and connect with them in a new way.

Live Event Coverage
During Rodeo Week, we were onsite at all 6 of the rodeo performances, as well as several of the surrounding community events over a 10 day period, to share the excitement of the rodeo with fans through status updates, blogs, videos and photos. Examples of such content included providing instant video footage of the children’s mutton bustin’ competition, photos of all parade participants, video of local riding club performances, results from each night’s rodeo performance and video of the winning rides, a behind-the-chutes tour of the venue, recognition of sponsors, historical photos, and much more. As a result, we had a strong level of fan engagement on Facebook and Twitter – particularly because a lot of our content focused on local rodeo participants and contestants – which played a critical role in helping us to increase our fan recruitment rate during the event.

One month prior to the rodeo, we also partnered with the local newspaper to conduct a contest to identify 3 local bloggers who could help us cover the rodeo and reach out to a wider and more diverse audience. The “blogaroos” contributed frequent content in the weeks leading up to the Snake River Stampede, and they were also onsite during the rodeo to share their own points of view about the event via Facebook and Twitter.

After the Show
Just as important as providing frequent updates during the event is knowing when to dial back coverage after the event. With all the work that went into building our audience, we don’t want to annoy them and lose their attention with too many updates before it’s time to begin promoting the 2011 Snake River Stampede. We will provide occasional updates if something relevant comes up, but will respect people’s time with less frequent updates for the next few months.

Over the last several months, we’ve been partnering with Local First Arizona to conduct social media training sessions for business owners around the state. The purpose of the classes is to orient small businesses with social media and to discuss with them the importance of getting involved in social media and how it can benefit their business.

However, these sessions aren’t just an opportunity for us to talk for an hour about how great it is to engage in social media – most business owners who attend the sessions already understand on some level how important it is for them to engage with customers online. So our approach with these sessions is to do a quick orientation, and then dive right into helping the business owners set up a Facebook Page and Twitter account.  Attendees come to the class with a laptop, the venue where we host the event provides an Internet connection, and everyone walks away with a new Facebook Page and/or Twitter account, or if they already had one, they leave with a few new ideas and tips for more effectively engaging their audience.

Our team member, Nina Simmons, has led most of these training sessions. Here’s what she has to say about the experience: “Something we really wanted to promote, being a Local First sponsored class, was how these business owners could not only use social media to promote their own businesses, but how they could promote each other and their community. Something I noticed right away when the business owners showed up to class was that they all knew each other. They talked about business, how their kids were doing and what was going on that week in town. These business owners had an overwhelming sense of community and this was something that could be translated to their use of social media, because that’s what social media is all about after all, community.”

Team member, Carole Braithwaite, has also helped with developing our training program. Her observations: “I recently had the pleasure of participating in Local First Arizona social media training sessions. Since social media is such a large part of outreach efforts for businesses in this tough economy, it was great to be able to show local businesses how to use a few of the available tools at their fingertips. I saw it more as a collaborative experience because the owners and merchants at local businesses brought their knowledge and experience of working in the community. They brought their own unique perspectives and ideas to the discussion. My role was to show them how they could implement some of those ideas with the tools at hand. Overall, it was fun to learn about local businesses and help them see that social media isn’t something to dread or avoid, but that it can be a great tool to enjoy and embrace once you understand the mechanics behind the medium.”

If you’re interested in having us conduct a social media training session for your organization, click here to contact us.

In July 2008, T. Boone Pickens launched the Pickens Plan, a campaign to reduce American dependence on foreign oil. The goal of the campaign was to introduce energy issues into the national dialogue and to build a supporter base – the New Energy Army – that could be spurred to action in support of public policy initiatives related to the Plan. From the beginning, the Internet was seen as central to the creation and mobilization of the Army. Heather Lauer of Villageous LLC was tapped to lead the online efforts of the campaign.

Social Action Network
The online campaign consists of four main components:

• The main website, www.PickensPlan.com, is where visitors are introduced to the Plan, asked to join the movement and encouraged to take action. The main site is video-centric with clips of Boone communicating directly to supporters, along with behind-the-scene footage of his travels. The site also features extensive background information about components of the Pickens Plan and has a blog that is updated with energy news on a daily basis.
• Connected to the main website is an Action Center that hosts “email Congress” campaigns, petition drives, and other ways for the Army to take action at any given point based on current organizational priorities. All of our action programs are connected to social networking tools that make it easy for Army members to quickly spread the word about an initiative.
• Push.PickensPlan.com is the Plan’s Ning-based social action network; it provides a venue for the most committed activists to organize and collaborate by City, State and Congressional District in support of the Plan. Members of Push are the Special Forces of the New Energy Army and drive the off-line aspects of the campaign (in-person Congressional contacts, letters to the editor, local events, etc.). Push is the hub of the virtual grassroots organization the Pickens Plan has become.
• The Pickens Plan maintains outposts on social networks including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and MySpace. Conversations about energy reform and calls to action are facilitated by campaign staff on these sites on a daily basis so that supporters can connect with the Pickens Plan in the venue in which they are most comfortable.

Results
1.5 million members of the New Energy Army were recruited during the first 9 months of the campaign. To date, members of the Army have sent nearly 1.5 million emails in support of the Pickens Plan to their elected officials, and almost 50% of supporters have taken action at least once on behalf of the Pickens Plan. 91% of the Congressional District Groups have a volunteer District Leader, and 2/3rds of those groups have established personal contact with their Member of Congress since the beginning of 2009.

Through regular updates and constant engagement, we have been able to maintain a high level of interest from supporters for nearly two years, and as legislation makes its way through Congress, the Army is always ready to take action at a moment’s notice. Many Members of Congress have indicated that the efforts of the New Energy Army have been highly influential in the push for energy reform and their decision to support key legislation.

In 2005, Heather Lauer of Villageous LLC conceived and launched CenPho.com, a hub for information about local businesses, organizations and events in a very specific geographic area – Central Phoenix.

As a resident of CenPho herself, Heather wanted to do her part to get the word out about all of the amazing things that were happening in this urban center. At the time, Central Phoenix was going through a “rebirth” of sorts and more businesses and residents were moving to areas of CenPho that were going through major revitalization efforts.

The initial format of the website was a blog that listed hundreds of businesses in Central Phoenix and included an informational profile for many of those businesses. Visitors could also leave comments about their experiences at those venues and read what other people had to say.

Five years later, CenPho.com still serves as one of the strongest community outlets for educating people about life in Central Phoenix. It has since evolved from the blog format into a multi-faceted social media initiative with a focus on Facebook, Twitter and Ning. We communicate with an online audience of over 7,500 fans and residents on a daily basis, over 75% of our followers/fans are people who live in the Phoenix metropolitan area, and local business owners regularly tell us how our social media activities are directly responsible for sending customers their way.

Six weeks prior to the Miss America 2010 pageant, the Miss America Organization decided a robust social media effort was necessary to connect with their audience and build buzz for the world’s largest scholarship program for women. So they turned to Villageous.

Within days, we created and launched a comprehensive online campaign that in the ensuing 6 weeks recruited over 15,000 fans solely through word of mouth efforts, resulted in nearly 100,000 multimedia views, generated earned media reaching hundreds of thousands of viewers in the days leading up to the pageant, supported conversations around 4 of the top 10 worldwide trends on Twitter the night of the pageant, and helped build the audience of 4.5 million who tuned in for the television broadcast – an increase of 1 million over the previous year’s audience.

The Mission

• Promote the world’s largest scholarship program for women
• Build excitement for the Miss America 2010 pageant
• Connect with a new and younger audience
• A virtual pageant experience for contestants, volunteers and fans

Result

• Facebook
  • 11,000+ fans added between launch and pageant (and it is continuing to rapidly grow)
  • Total pageant day impressions: 90,085
• Twitter
  • @MAOTravels + @MissAmericaLIVE = 2000+ followers in just 6 weeks
  • 60,000 Tweets referencing Miss America related topics on pageant night – we were part of those conversations
• Flickr/YouTube/Facebook
  • 90,000+ photo views in first 6 weeks
  • 22,000+ video views in first 6 weeks