While at BlogHer, I had the opportunity to meet with Michelle Stern, author of The Whole Family Cookbook. It was great to hear her story of how her small business is leveraging Social to grow into a Social Business on many fronts!
If we look at our Social Business Agenda, she has really focused on doing this right!
So how did she leverage Social? Let me try to frame it as the A-G-E-N-D-A!
She Aligned her corporate goals to the social business vision. The soul of the recipes are from social networking sites!
Her focused on Gaining friends by targeting those who have common interests with her company What’s Cooking for Kids. Her target of course are those who love to cook, and involve their kids.
She engaged her Fans through a number of ways. For example, she involved them in her process of writing her book. Once the book was finished, she put together a pdf sample of the book and put it on facebook – as a bonus for people who join the community. In a matter of days, she grew by several hundred people and has great engagement and excitement of cooking with kids! And now that the book is actually for sale, she has an amazing group of bloggers doing reviews and giveaways — they are her brand advocates! Village Harvest Rice also sponsored an incredible movie trailer for her new book. It helps people to get to know me better and understand where the book is coming from. Check it out here! http://whatscookingwithkids.com/landing/the-whole-family-cookbook/
(Social) Networking her processes, even as a small business, she decided that her “product development” process would be social. What’s her product development? Developing recipes of course! All of the recipes in her book were tested by members of her facebook community (www.facebook.com/whatscookingkids).
Analyze the data! Traffic to her site has gone up by 40% and the Facebook community has grown 50-100 people a day for the past few weeks. All of these in process metrics are helping her grow her book sales, and cooking classes!
I get lots of questions on can this work for a Small Business…..Michelle is a great example of how a small business can leverage the power of Social Business. Michelle certainly has! (Also, check out the new book she has .. I bought it and my daughters have been engaged in learning how to cook! I love the keys to which recipe steps are for which age children!)
Thanks Sandy – it is fun to see my business from this perspective! I am grateful for your support – of my book, my business, and just as a friend. xoxox Michelle