Two years ago, Tom Boesen didn’t know squat about social media, and his company’s absence from that burgeoning online realm reflected it. But he realized that social media could help him reach out to under-40 customers and increase his sales, so he decided to join the conversation.

“I knew I needed to be there, but I wasn’t there,” said Boesen, co-owner of Boesen The Florist & Garden Center. “I’d go to meetings and it was beaten into my head: ‘You’ve got to do social media.'”

Now, people looking for flowers in Greater Des Moines are finding the company through a host of social media tools, such as embedded how-to videos about wedding flowers and plant care on its blog-based website, Twitter tweets and Facebook postings.

“It’s really about relationships, and how you can build relationships,” Boesen said. “And it’s not always about selling; it’s about helping people. If you have a poinsettia. how can I help you take care of it? You can do so much more (with social media) than (with) a 30-second television ad.”

Compelling content

Doug Mitchell, founder and “chief brand amplifier” of online consulting company createWOWmedia, has worked closely with Boesen for the past two years to build the company’s online brand and its social media usage. Mitchell and his colleagues spend 20 hours a week creating online content for the florist.

Much like flowers, “online findability” must be grown and cultivated, Mitchell said.

“It comes down to creating compelling content that gets linked to by others; that’s still number one,” said Mitchell, 38, whose company consists of himself and a handful of online media specialists he employs on a contract basis.

“That concept of organic findability is an all-encompassing approach that we try to bring into our clients’ world to say: Use all possible avenues of content that make sense and get them out to the proper distribution points,” he said. “You want to widen your web, because ultimately you want to be where people are looking, and not make judgments about where you think you should be found. You just want to be there.”

For Boesen, that meant creating an entirely separate blog-based website, FlowersDesMoines.com, in addition to Boesen.com, as a platform for generating social media. In less than six months, FlowersDesMoines.com was generating 15 percent of the company’s total aggregate online traffic. More than 90 percent of the referral traffic from DesMoinesFlowers.com to the Boesen.com website consisted of new visitors.

Online video in particular is rapidly becoming a critical tool for all types of businesses, Mitchell said.

“YouTube nowadays is the second most-utilized search engine behind Google,” he said. “So in my humble opinion, if you’re not leveraging video, you’re missing a massive opportunity to be found online. If you think people aren’t searching for plumbers on YouTube, that’s incorrect – they are. And they’re finding out who they might want to work with ahead of time.”

Startup savvy

Mitchell, who moved to Greater Des Moines five years ago from Orange County, Calif., was the marketing director of and an equity partner in a start-up company that developed logistics software to help heavy-equipment rental companies more efficiently transport equipment across the country. After some close friends in California moved back to Greater Des Moines, Mitchell and his wife decided on Central Iowa as well.

As the national economy was sliding into recession in 2007, Mitchell was trying to launch his own company, RentalMetrics, to provide heavy-equipment rental customers with access to online multimedia content.

Mitchell quickly found his customers were much more interested in buying the membership software from him than actually using his product. They were also attracted to the multimedia he was using on his website.

“They said, ‘I really like what you’re doing with this multimedia stuff; nobody’s doing that around town. Can you help us out with that?’ So CreateWowMedia was born.”

Since then, createWOWMedia has attracted a small but enthusiastic customer base, among them Ryan Irwin, owner of Nutri-Sport Full Potential Training, a personal training and nutrition shop in Clive.

“I’m definitely not a techie, but I saw the potential right away,” said Irwin, who has used Mitchell’s expertise to create embedded videos on his website. A champion natural bodybuilder, Irwin has combined video with a regimen of blogging, tweets and Facebook posts to build his company’s online presence.

“I just went and ran with it, and I saw the benefits of it right away,” he said. “It’s given our existing customers an easier way to make referrals to us. I think a lot of it is that it allows us to build our credibility.”

More efficient

Irwin is “an example of a guy who’s willing to do it on his own, to understand how powerful (social media) is,” Mitchell said, noting that Irwin now gets client referrals via Twitter. “And he’s doing it within the realm of what a normal business owner can handle.”

Irwin said he’s become “more and more efficient” in developing social media content. “Putting a good video together probably takes me three hours a week, and I don’t always get it done. But it’s certainly been worth it,” he said.

Irwin said Mitchell is now working with him to add a subscription-based component to the website so that Nutri-Sport can offer webinars and other online forums. “It could be for a current client that we design nutritional workouts for to also have access to the forums, or it could be someone who’s not a client who could subscribe,” he said.

“Doug does a great job,” Irwin said. “He not only tells us what to do, but he also gives us the tools to do it so that we can be self-sustaining, and that’s kind of cool.”

Boesen said he was impressed with how quickly Mitchell was able to learn the flower business. “I really consider him part of the team,” Boesen said, adding that he will likely continue to have Mitchell guide and develop much of his company’s social media content. That limits the time he and his employees spend with social media to just a handful of hours a week.

Boesen admits he’s far from being a social media junkie. “I’m not hooked on Facebook,” he said. “I don’t care what you had for lunch. But I know I’ve got to play the game.”