Knowledge@Wharton Spotlights Clear Admit's Alex Brown Using Social Media for Social Causes
- Brown combines a passion for horses with Internet marketing expertise
In his lengthy interview with Knowledge@Wharton, Brown shared what he has learned about nurturing an online community through the creation and launch of his blog, Alex Brown Racing. What began as a site that got three visits a day has grown into a vibrant community that includes 1,000 Facebook group members, several hundred Twitterers and a discussion board that gets more than 1,200 daily posts.
Striving consistently for authenticity and transparency, Brown has used emerging tools such as Facebook and Twitter as well as wikis and YouTube to build trust and bring attention and money to the cause of improving horse welfare. But as the interview reveals, there was strategy behind each of his decisions to embrace new social media. “I think it’s important, when you look at these different tools, to have goals for them and stick to that,” Brown says.
Making mistakes along the way is also a part of the journey, Brown adds. “If you’re not prepared to make mistakes, you’re not prepared to figure it out, right?” he says. As an example, he mentions that a brief foray into MySpace ultimately proved to be the wrong fit for Alex Brown Racing’s demographic. And so he refocused on other tools that added more value, like an interactive, user-judged video contest on YouTube.
As the Knowledge@Wharton interview shows, the lessons Brown has learned – coupled with his deep Internet marketing expertise – can be extrapolated to other business models. The most critical building block is a strong mission statement or galvanizing factor around which you can build a community. Start with that, experiment along the way and grow strategically by incorporating new social media tools that advance the mission statement and your result will be a very strong, very vocal community capable of effecting real change.
To read the Knowledge@Wharton interview in its entirety, click here. To visit the Alex Brown Racing website, click here.
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