A Tweet Treat: Sauce Magazine’s Saucy Soiree
Let’s face it. Social media can be gimmicky. There are a lot of people out there doing social media just to do it. There’s no direction. There’s no strategy. A lot of organizations jumping on the social media bandwagon aren’t thinking about how it will integrate with their overall business goals. They’re just in that space because they think they should be.
But Sauce Magazine’s Saucy Soiree proved that you can talk about Twitter without looking like you’re trying to be trendy.
- When you arrived at the Four Seasons 6th floor check-in, you were handed a card thanking you for attending and reminding you to tweet with the hashtag #SaucySoiree.
- When you walked into the main tasting room, they had a projector showing all the recent #SaucySoiree tweets (something I’ve come to expect at any social media or marketing event I go to).
- When you walked around to each table, there was a sign with the name of the restaurant, what they were serving and… their Twitter handle.
How easy is that?
I love social media. I love tweeting. I probably would have figured out the hashtag all on my own and I probably would have read the tweets associated with the event, but even I’ll admit that I would not have taken the time to look up all these restaurants on Twitter. Especially not as I stood there that night (I was too busy shoving food in my mouth).
They made it so easy. They made the Twitter integration with the event seem so natural.
On top of that, there was a heavy push on social media to promote Saucy Soiree ticket sales beforehand (I happened to get my tickets on Eventbrite with a discount code from Girls Guide to the Galaxy) and Sauce was already sharing pictures from the event and their favorite tweets from the night the next morning.
Any one of those components alone would have seemed gimmicky to me. It would have been mentioning Twitter just to mention it. Just to look or sound cool and modern and ahead of the curve. But with it all going on, it truly was integrated.
It wasn’t an afterthought. It wasn’t an ‘add on’ to prove that they ‘get’ social media.
I don’t have any stats on how much tweeting there was going on. I don’t know how attendance at this event compares to last year. But I know I was following #SaucySoiree tweets that night. I know that I looked through their pictures on Facebook the next morning. And, I know that I’ll reserve a spot on my calendar for the event next year.
Danielle Hohmeier writes about marketing and design in the digital world for Atomicdust, with a focus on marketing convergence and social media.
