Smart Social Media Marketing: Caleb Elston and Toluu
Interacting with bloggers called vital for businessBrice Wallace, Deseret News, June 7, 2008
Toluu released several new features on Wednesday. The features are cool, and are covered in another post on this blog. Which leads to the point of this post…
Caleb Elston did a masterful job of getting coverage for his fledging company Toluu. By himself, with no PR firm. How?
Caleb is a participant in social media. He’s established relationships and credibility with bloggers, and with others on FriendFeed and Twitter.
In a recent post, I asked Will Brands Figure Out FriendFeed? The idea is that rather than rely only on standard press releases and marketing campaigns, companies should look at engaging customers out in various social media, with a focus on FriendFeed. Establishing these deeper relationships pays dividends:
- Reliable audience for updates
- Viral distribution of company information
- Customer advocates
- Feedback from the market, with the ability to follow-up on questions/comments
Caleb has all of these advantages through his efforts in social media. How involved is he? On FriendFeed, he subscribes to 278 people, has 248 Comments and 244 Likes. On Twitter, he’s following 479 people and has 734 updates. In other words, he’s involved. Which is actually pretty amazing considering he has a day job on top of building out Toluu.
Yesterday, his involvement paid dividends. He reached out to bloggers the day before to let them know of an upcoming release for Toluu, and asked us if we wanted to cover it. Well, since I know him already, saying ‘yes’ was easy. He got eight different bloggers to write about the new release:
The combined Technorati Authority of those eight blogs is 872, which is like getting a top 5,000 blog to write about you. Many of the bloggers are active on FriendFeed, which combined with their existing subscribers, meant that a lot of people saw the news about the new features.
Caleb describes the payoff:
All I can say is wow. Yesterday was an amazing day for Toluu, you helped us shatter every metric we track. We had a record number of pageviews, visitors, signups, new feeds, connections made, invites requested, and time spent on the site. All I can say is thank you.
He even picked up technology celebrity Leo Laporte as a user. Said Leo, “I’m in dire need of a feed reset!”
Admittedly, as a small start-up with limited resources, this is all he could really do. He can’t crank up the PR, marketing and advertising machine.
But that doesn’t devalue the accomplishment. Caleb managed to get people interested in his company thanks to his active involvement in social media.
Big companies…are you listening?
*****
See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22Smart+Social+Media+Marketing%3A+Caleb+Elston+and+Toluu%22&public=1
This is a testament to the growing power of the little blogger in numbers. Your points resonate with me. Although some of the blogs including mine have small readership together they created buzz.
Wow. I wish I could say I planned it all out so strategically, but I really just wanted to share, with people who had joined Toluu and were users, what we were launching, since you all have helped in making Toluu what it is, I wanted to give you all a sneak peek.
Even if I had a million dollar marketing and PR budget, I don’t think I would really want to do anything all that differently. Toluu has grown because of users recommending it to friends, and Toluu at it’s core is all about relationships. We believe your friends are one of the best filters for finding new blogs and feeds.
Cheers,
Caleb
Toluu
social media marketing is mainly helping us to make our product to advertise and share our ideas with others