Social Media Integration – A Case Study

Social media is here to stay. Let’s just get that out of the way. Many organizations are now looking to integrate social media into their web communications strategy and I wanted to share how FourTen Creative is helping people do so.

The Case Study – SimplyMusic

SimplyMusic approached FourTen to integrate their current website with Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, an eNewsletter and a blog. The only hitch was that they had invested heavily in their existing web content platform and were not able to move their whole operation over to a WordPress install at this time. We decided to come up with a way to complement the current website with a social-media-rich WordPress install with some key components.

Subdomain Installation: We started by creating a sub-domain of blog.simplymusic.com and setting up an account at Bluehost.com to host it because of a locked-down hosting environment on their existing servers.  We proceeded to install WordPress (actually WPMU for posterity’s sake) and moved on to focus on the user interaction.

Integrated Site Theme: We then created a theme that mirrored the exact look and feel of the existing site including menu structure to provide a seamless navigation experience between main site and blog (and between servers on different continents…the internet is pretty cool sometimes).

WordPress Social Media Tools: We then set up our WordPress install with tools to display latest tweets and send latest blog entries to the Twitter account. (Facebook can receive those same Tweets through the Twitter application installed on your Facebook profile. See previous post.) WordPress also enables the displaying of YouTube videos in their pages and posts.

Custom Social Media Graphics: Aside from an investment in their CMS, Simply Music had invested in a fabulous set of artwork that tells the story of a musical journey. These source graphics were adapted to customize their Twitter and YouTube environments.

Newsletter: A powerful newsletter is in the works by utilizing a 3rd party distribution system (Mailchimp.com) and the blog to host full content. That means a digest email can be sent with custom a template and will link readers to media-rich content hosted on the blog.

Summary

Overall, this unified social media presence creates a multitude of new discovery points for new customers to find your content and stay connected to your business. FourTen Creative is proud to offer this full Social Media Integration for new & existing WordPress based sites as well as existing sites running on other systems. Contact us today to learn more.

Posted on Wednesday, January 20th in news.