It's Paula Deen, Y'all!

As I began to search for this week's topic, I wanted to find some tips we could all apply to our group Shenanigans projects. I found an article about Philadelphia Cream Cheese's successful campaign involving Paula Deen. As of August, the Real Women of Philadelphia branded social network helped raise sales by 5%.

According to the following Mashable article, there are 4 steps to take in creating a successful social media campaign:

1. Leverage an existing community
By aligning themselves with Paula Deen, on her website and in their commercials, Philadelphia Cream Cheese was able to reach an already established audience.

2. Create a reason for users to create content
"Greg Goodfried, the co-founder and COO of EQAL, says that it’s important to have some motive for people to create content on a branded social network. This motive doesn’t necessarily need to be a competition, but it needs to be strong enough to spark the community."  In this competition, women submitted instructional videos about their cream cheese recipe, 16 were chosen to fly to Savannah and four finalists were chosen. These four finalists daily choose one recipe and the author earns $500.

3. Focus on community content, not your content

Always make the community feel like the stars and they will remain engaged. Philadelphia posted authors recipes on their Twitter and Facebook page as well as picked several to display on their website.

4.Step aside and play a supportive role

Very quickly, the women of this competition began talking about their personal lives. Philadelphia stepped aside and allowed this to occur because they were aware it was only strengthening the community. They even began to feature interesting members on an open forum. Some women had more friends on this community than on Facebook.