mediaShepherd LLC—a web-based company that provides “actionable intelligence” for media brands—recently announced the winners of their Social Media Awards. Modern Salon was the winner in the business-to-business media brand category for their campaign around their live broadcast of PBA’s 2013 NAHA awards. 

The awards recognize the best social media efforts focused around a specific campaign, publication, brand or company in various sectors of the media industry and were evaluated based on innovation, campaign execution, level of achievement and the viral nature of the campaigns, among other factors.

Modern Salon was recognized for their innovative, integrated-media campaign which took full advantage of their segmented audiences (students, stylists, chain salons, owners, manufacturers / distributors), their full range of digital products, and customized digital / social media tools to drive viral exposure and creative engagement.

According to the judges… “working with industry stakeholders, fans, advertisers and its own multiplatform assets, the B2B publisher crafted a masterful brand experience tailored to the unique needs and desires of its audience.”

The challenge: Build an effective marketing campaign around an annual industry event, the North American Hairstyling Awards (NAHA). The company was charged with pre-publicity, managing the webcast, and merchandising it after the fact.

The objective: Create buzz, build excitement and bring the ceremony to a much larger audience beyond those seeing it live in Las Vegas.

The method: Integrated marketing utilizing technology and human assets to generate and sustain interest up to and beyond the event.

Modern Salon Media publisher Steve Reisswas interviewed by Media Shepard’s Noelle Skodzkinski on the Modern Salon win.

“Internally, we have a variety of different magazines in the industry that appeal to different audiences,” said Reiss. “We have one magazine that is for students at beauty school. We have one that is for stylists and we have one which is for salon owners. We’ve segmented the market so we actually had advertising campaigns in all those magazines. We also have websites consistent with those communities, and we had targeted online advertising to all of those. We have different e-mail products for the different audiences.

We took advantage of each of those platforms, understanding that the tone and the message need to be different on each of them, because it’s a different type of conversation. So, for example, what we’re talking about with Twitter is very different than how we promote things on Facebook. And I think because we’ve been doing this for a while, we understood the appropriate tone and how to make it work."

And, in response to a question about how Modern Salon facilitated third-party participation Reiss said, “It’s almost as if we created a matrix, which in fact we really did. We looked at all the different platforms we had available to us, and all the different audiences we wanted to reach, and we said, ‘How can we check off all those squares in the box that are important? How can we help other people become advocates for this as well?’

So a big part of our campaign wasn’t only utilizing our own resources, but figuring out who were the other people in the industry who could help get the word out, help promote this for us, help drive the kind of interaction we wanted.”

Other 2014 winners of the Social Media Awards included:

• The Onion.Consumer media brand. The Onion’s overall social media strategy has gained the satirical-news brand millions of followers on Facebook (more than 4.25 million), Twitter (more than 6 million) and Google+ (nearly 2 million). It effectively integrates its YouTube channel with content across all platforms and has a high level of audience engagement.

• IDG Enterprise.Business-to-business/custom marketing. IDG Strategic Marketing Services created a custom social media marketing campaign on behalf of its client Starcom/Samsung, called “Tablets in the Enterprise.”

• MVP Media/Turnbuckle Magazine.Niche/enthusiast media. MVP Media fostered a significant community on Twitter from scratch for the launch of its interactive, digital Turnbuckle Magazine.

Read the full interview here: http://www.mediashepherd.com/2014/10/the-full-treatment-how-modern-salon-created-an-award-winning-social-media-campaign-part-1/