How to Capture the Excitement That’s Already There

Kevin Hunt, Corporate Social Media Manager at General Mills, joins the Social Pros Podcast this week to discuss bringing social power back in-house, managing multiple brand stories at once, and figuring out how to capture the excitement that already surrounds a brand and its products.
Read on for some of the highlights and tweetable moments, or listen to the full podcast.

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• From ExactTarget, a free set of case studies called The Power of Digital Marketing.
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• And from Expion, a free report on the top 50 retail brands’ social media use in 2013.

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Tweetable Moments

“It’s just fun to see something resonate with people.” -Kevin Hunt (tweet this)

Bringing it In-House

Last week, we focused on one of the largest American-based international alcohol companies: Beam Global. This week, Kevin Hunt brings us the behind-the-scenes for one of the largest American-based international food companies: General Mills.

Kevin is a part of the Global Communications External Group, which is in charge of corporate public relations. His role is to manage the company story and to tell that story through the various channels they use.
With more than 100 brands in 100 different countries, General Mills uses community managers to take care of brands on an individual basis. That way the big brands can take advantage of their unique brand void. Kevin makes sure, then, that their story fits with the General Mills story – and helps them tell that story.
“It’s on me to really understand what [the individual brand] goals are and how they’re talking to consumers.” How, in other words, can they capture the brand-specific excitement people already have?
In the past year and a half, General Mills has brought back a lot of their social muscle in-house. Previously, there were in-house people managing various agencies, who were really doing the day-to-day work.

Now, however, 15 to 20 of their biggest brands have full-time community managers, and there are also digital strategists in-house. They meet with Kevin as a group to make sure everyone is on the same page, but each has their own individual goals, as well.
“It’s been incredibly helpful to watch, from my perspective,” Kevin says, “to see how they’re responding to really having folks in-house to be able to listen better and to be able to engage better when it comes to the content.”

The Big Two

What’s your one tip for becoming a social pro?
Create content and share it. “We’ve all got a smartphone in our pockets; learn how to use these things because it’s never been easier.”
If you could do a Google Hangout with any living person, who would it be and why?
Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad.

Social Pros Number of the Week: $24,000

A college student made $24,000 in bitcoins (about 22 of them) this week when he held up this sign on ESPN’s College Gameday:

The technology associated with this is really interesting. A live television broadcast had to get paused with DVR technology, photographed with a phone camera, then enhanced and posted to Reddit, where people could use their own QR code readers to donate virtual currency to an anonymous wallet. The plea first appeared on traditional media but was then fueled by social media.

The non-governmental, non-centralized currency will, not surprisingly, be something to keep an eye on.

Holy Social!

Starting last month, Loews Hotels are accepting tweets to reserve rooms at 16 of its 19 properties. This was supposed to be this week’s Holy Social!
But as Social Pros was getting recorded this week, the news that Apple had bought social analytics firm Topsy for $200 million hit the wire.
Topsy recently announced that they had the search capability to go all the way back to the beginning of Twitter. People can use it to search more than 4 billion tweets – a possibility Twitter doesn’t even have yet.
Many of these acquisitions can fade into obscurity after the initial breaking news. Jeff says, “My instinct here is that Apple knows it’s got a rather sizable social hole that it has not been able to organically fill. And this could be the first wading into the water.”
See you next week!