On a Friday night this past September, over 170 people gathered at Aloft Tempe to party on behalf of charity. They gathered to eat, drink, and be merry in each other’s company at Twestival Phoenix Local. Twestival is an “international movement where people meet offline for one night, have fun and do some good for an important cause”. Galas, balls, and other social events have always been a core fundraising tactic, but what sets a Twestival apart is that it is promoted almost exclusively by tapping into online social tools.

Invitations are sent via status updates on several social platforms, event pages are set up on Facebook and Upcoming, and tickets are sold through Amiando, which leverages Twitter API and Facebook Connect integration to allow users to tell friends that they’re attending Twestival. Because most user social graphs are not constrained by geographic boundaries, each person who posts about attending Twestival is not only inviting friends who live in their same city to the local event, they implicitly invite friends across the country and the world to participate in the Twestival event occurring in where they live. The effect is that the money raised for charity is multiplied. A quick look at the numbers from 2009.

Like social media networks, Twestival is a connector. The event itself enables attendees to not only catch up with friends, meet new friends and discover local food vendors, businesses and artists who participate through sponsorship and auction item donations. Meanwhile, the planning process teaches small businesses and local charities about the potential of social media to drive awareness.

For the September event, Twestival Phoenix event organizers wanted to be certain that the selected charity benefitted from more than just money raised. Chris Lee, who spearheads much of the planning, said that locally, they looked at how engaged each non-profit was involved in social media. Were they heavily involved and well-versed? Were they avoiding social media altogether? Or had they dipped their toes in the water, demonstrating interest and a real potential to flourish under a little guidance? Event organizers also invited community to participate in selection process by recommending and voting on charities through UserVoice.

By inviting community participation throughout the process, from planning to partying, event organizers helped Saint Mary’s Food Bank through a sustained awareness campaign. Some notable results:

• @StMarysFoodBank’s Twitter followers increased 241% from July through the night event.
• They received countless tweets and media hits they wouldn’t have otherwise received if they had not been the beneficiaries of Twestival Phoenix.
• On the day of the event, www.firstfoodbank.org received double the average number of hits for a Friday.
• The money raised at Twestival Phoenix enabled St. Mary’s to distribute food for over 65,000 meals.

The third Twestival is tomorrow night (March 25, 2010). Another global initiative, it will benefit Concern Worldwide, working towards the elimination of extreme poverty in the world’s poorest countries. Twestival Phoenix will be at Martini Ranch. You can follow their efforts and get event information by following @TwestivalPhx on Twitter join them on Facebook or visiting the Twestival Phoenix website.

Hat Club, a leading retailer of baseball caps, skater hats and accessories, was seeking ways to increase revenue and generate respect and loyalty within their brand for both their online and offline channels. E-commerce was an area the internal marketing team had dabbled in—enough to launch the online sales effort and sell hats online. However, it was time to get more serious about selling merchandise online. Hat Club turned to Terralever to show them how to do it strategically, effectively, and with great success.

Objective:

Terralever and Hat Club wanted to create an online experience that would not only raise, but reset the bar for sports retail e-commerce. High importance was set on creating a strong presence on search engines and stimulating Hat Club Membership to create loyalty, repeat web site visits and revenue.

Solution:

Terralever envisioned a premiere membership-based, e-commerce web site, coupled with a balanced campaign of SEO, PPC, email marketing and social media marketing as Hat Club’s solution. Terralever provided an extensive strategic plan, e-commerce website design and development and a proactive strategy and analytics program.

Results:

Hat Club’s online sales are up 245% since Q2 2008. Hatclub.com, formerly listed as the most poorly performing retail outpost across Hat Club, is currently the top selling, surpassing its counterpart brick and mortar store locations. Awareness and affinity for Hat Club online has grown steadily since the execution of Terralever’s online marketing plan. The combined approach of sustained online marketing and the launch of a new persona-based, search engine optimized website, has produced a steady increase in Hat Club’s online performance metrics.

Comparing web visitors ending Q2 2009 with the same period 2008, Hat Club boasts a 175% increase in traffic, while maintaining an industry enviable balance of returning and new clientele. Additionally, Hat Club increased pageviews and time spent on site by 280%, while reducing the site’s total bounce rate by 15% across the same period. Within the first quarter of proactive online marketing, revenue increased 245% year over year, and continues to trend upward in a down economy.

SUMMARY

Product: Baseball caps & accessories
Retail locations: 21
Online: hatclub.com
Target Market: Fashion-minded millennials
Founded: 2001

Online Results

• Visits:  +175%
• Unique Visitors: +175%
• Pageviews: +280%
• Online Sales: +245%
• Bounce Rate: -15%

Project: Red Bull Facebook Connect – http://connect.redbullusa.com

Red Bull is a global brand with tremendous media and content dispersed throughout the web. Through branding they reach a variety of people across a variety of portals everyday.

The Objective:
Although Red Bull reaches huge amounts of people everyday; the content they provide is disconnected. Knowing that many Red Bull content blog visitors have similar interests, Red Bull wanted to find a way to bring the individual blog portals, along with the people who visit them, together.

The Solution:
In order to meet this objective, Terralever implemented Facebook Connect on five of Red Bull’s content blogs. These implementations allow users to use Trusted Authentication to sign-in to their Facebook account at anytime during their visit on the blog. Once signed in, users can comment on postings through Real Identity, eliminating anonymous comments that are common in the blogosphere. Furthermore, a flash-based hub-site was created to house all blog content. On this site users can view activity from each of the portals, as well as view Red Bull content that peers in their social network are engaging in. In addition, Social Distribution is leveraged to draw more users into the experience.

The Highlights:

• This implementation of Facebook Connect was presented as a working demo at the F8 conference in 2008
• It was the first implementation of Facebook Connect in Adobe Flash
• It was the first time Facebook Connect was leveraged to link together multiple websites

The Results:

• Users were able to leverage Facebook Real Identity to comment on the blogs and and nearly all users chose to use the Connect implementation when leaving a message.
• The cross-pollination of content on the hub-site allowed users to engage with content they never knew existed, and share in stories and postings that were being viewed and commented on by friends in their social network.
• Additionally, peers who were notified through newsfeeds of their friends’ activity were drawn into the Red Bull sites to view the content and share their own comments.