This is Darrell Stern back again with another digital marketing ROI tip for you.

I am your digital marketing, inbound marketing, content marketing, social media marketing Jedi. So, I wanted to talk to you about doing social media just for social media’s sake. What I do mean by that? There are some Facebook pages out there that do things like inspirational quotes or Star Wars photos and movie clips or comic books or whatever, fuzzy cats or whatever or even a big one like Goalcast where they put up inspirational, motivational videos and that’s all they do. Guess what? Their business is literally just putting those videos on social media.

I’m talking about doing social media just for social media’s sake, right? Not to sell a product, not to get people into a click funnel, but literally just to create media that people would engage with socially. Look at it this way, I grew up going to Disney World and I love Star Wars. I thought of making a Facebook and an Instagram account just called, Growing Up on Star Wars and Disney, that’s it. I’ve got pictures in my photo album that are all me going to Disney World, getting dressed up as Darth Vader when I was a kid and all this kind of stuff. What if I just made an account, a Facebook page, and an Instagram account, Twitter and all that and just did that and just showed off and put up posts just about growing up on Disney and Star Wars? And then started to ask you, “Hey, would you like to contribute? Hey, would you like to post your picture of your best Halloween in the ’70s when you were a Star Wars character or playing with your first Millenium Falcon toy”. Do you know what I mean?

Sometimes we can do social media just for social media’s sake. Now, you can do this with your brand. Let’s take the example of Starbucks and the pumpkin spice latte. Have you seen this? Okay, they take the pumpkin spice latte and they put it in parachutes, they put it in the pumpkin patch, they put it all over, it’s fair shooting, it’s driving in the sports car, the cool pumpkin spice latte. That’s doing social media with branding, of course, it’s a real drink, but it was just for social media’s sake. It was just to get people to go “Haha, that’s funny. Oh my God. That’s funny, the pumpkin spice latte’s jumping out of a plane, haha”. But what did it do? What did it do? It ingrained in us, #PSL, it ingrained in us, pumpkin spice latte and guess what happened? 7-11 has pumpkin spice latte now, all the other coffee shops have pumpkin spice latte. Pumpkin spice latte is everywhere, right, especially during the fall and winter season.

So start thinking about that and let’s schedule a four-hour Stern-storming session where we’re going to talk about doing some things that are strictly social media just for social media’s sake and when we do that we’ll find that we can actually really, really grasp and understand what this media really is. What this social media really, really, really is and what it really, really, really does and it might teach us some valuable lessons also about our target market, how they react to different things and what eventually we could promote to them.

Thank you very much, this is Darrell Stern, your digital marketing Jedi, reminding you to do or do not, there is no try. I’ll see you next time and may the force be with you.