Way to Get Social, Okuma and Sandvik!

I just came across the Okuma Winner’s Blog, thanks to a thread on PM by the winner.

What’s going on here? Just some clever tried and true marketing tactics well applied to the Social Web.

Seems that Okuma gave away one of their machines for 2 years to a deserving (in their opinion) shop based on a contest to describe what they would do with such a machine. Very cool. Contests are a good way to get interested prospects to participate and build your mailing lists.

But then they took a cool next step–they gave the winner a blog and asked him to write about his experiences with the machine. That’s pretty cool. They say your customers are your best salespeople. Well Okuma is just putting forward this “customer” front and center to tell his story. I’ll bet one of the things they were looking for as they reviewed the contest entries was evidence that each contestant could tell a good story. The submission was in the form of a YouTube video telling the story, and the winner has a great “Black Hole” story about needing to replace an old machine. Not only does Okuma get that voice talking about their products, but the winner also gets tons of coverage, which has to be good for their business to–a classic “win-win”. And of course, the runner’s up also get some coverage and their story is told too!

BTW, that winner was Charles Blair’s Doraville Custom Machine Services of Lawrenceville, Georgia.

One of the hardest things for marketers to come up with is great content, especially from customers. Okuma has gotten themselves a treasure trove of it for the cost of one machine borrowed for two years. I’d call that a good investment.

It’s interesting to see how some of these companies in the Machining industry are leveraging the Internet. I’m currently about halfway through Sandvik’s home study course on metal cutting. Tons and tons of valuable information is given away and a great textbook on CD. You have to participate by taking tests on each chapter. I think their only goal there is to make sure you actually read and absorbed some of the material. But, if you don’t take the tests, they simply bill you $150 at the end of the 6 month period.

So, in some sense, they hold you hostage to reading their marketing material. It’s actually a lot nicer than that, because the material is good content and not typical marketing spam. Yet, alongside all of the good informative information, it also introduces a fair number of Sandvik products and it leaves you with the impression they know what the heck they’re doing if you didn’t already think so anyway. Plus, if you actively participate by taking the tests you get all that good knowledge for free.

There are a lot of innovative ways to use the Internet for marketing, and machinists are on line. You’d probably be surprised to know that this site, CNCCookbook, gets between 30 and 40,000 unique visitors per month. This is evenly divided between direct accesses (meaning someone typed in or followed their bookmark to the site), search engines, and referalls from other sites. That’s telling me a whole lot of machinists are online and actively looking for something to read or answers to questions they may have!

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