‘Corner store’ marketing utilizing social media

Most people wouldn’t think to celebrate a oneyear anniversary with a plateful of chargrilled meat, but for the ladies behind All Beef Media, there was no better way to mark the occasion.

Twelve months after company founder Jennifer Nachshen reached out to a few select female friends with the idea of starting up a social-media consulting agency, All Beef has grown by leaps and bounds and now counts clothing giant Le Chateau and pastry purveyor Beavertails among its clients.

“It started because I had been asked by some brands to blog and tweet for them . . . and they just had no idea about how to structure that,” Nachshen said recently as she took a bite out of a celebratory burger at Montreal’s famed Mr. Steer restaurant. “Nobody knew how you’d pay for it, or how you’d hire someone to do that. I saw that as a business opportunity.”

Nachshen recruited partners Joanna Campbell and Jacqueline Wallace, and All Beef Media was officially incorporated on July 26, 2010. The company – which owes its name partially to the fact that both Wallace and Campbell hail from Alberta – now has a total of seven individual clients, three of which came aboard within the past month.

Using social networks to advertise a product or service is not a new concept, of course. For as long as Twitter, Facebook and blogging have existed, companies have recognized their potential as marketing tools, and in response, most advertising agencies now offer advice about how to make use of these forums as part of an overall marketing strategy. Very few, however, specialize in social media.

“We wanted to create a really well-functioning boutique agency,” Nachshen said.

“Social media is our focus.”

Between them, the three women have experience in publishing, marketing, magazine writing, cultural studies and even clinical psychology. It’s that combination of skills that they say has produced a unique approach to the online sales pitch. They always start by meeting with a new client and doing an assessment, which Nachshen describes as “a personality questionnaire for a brand.”

“Essentially, we’re trying to figure out the brand’s voice,” she said. “That persona can then be enacted online.”

According to Campbell, establishing a cohesive “voice,” then blogging, posting and tweeting not just about your product but about broader themes related to that product, is what separates the winners from the losers in forums such as Twitter.

“For instance, if it’s for Le Chateau, we might (tweet) about Paris fashion week .

. . or travel, or beauty,” she said. “Then there’s (the) marketing layer, where we talk directly about their business or product. But we try to emphasize added value, and not just ads.”

Wallace said All Beef Media is actually repurposing some very old business concepts for a new, digitized world.

“We think of it as ‘corner store’ marketing,” she said, explaining that in the past, people would stroll down to their local butcher shop for a pound of beef and end up talking to the guy behind the counter about any number of things.

That’s the kind of relationship social media allows companies to build with their clientele, she said, because it allows them to interact with customers on a daily basis.

“Once you have that (interaction), people don’t have to check the meat in that brown paper package,” Wallace added.

“They trust that the product is good. It’s actually a very traditional way of doing business.”

Currently, the women do a lot of the tweeting, blogging and Facebook posting for their clients as part of their contracts, but they also employ a handful of local freelance writers and offer training sessions for companies that want to learn more about social media.

The business is being run largely out of Nachshen’s home and various cafes with Wi-Fi access in Montreal.

It was important to “think lean” when they started, Nachshen said, but that will likely change in the coming months.

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