Tegu founders Will and Chris Haughey
MARKETING, MEDIA, & DEVELOPMENT
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube – social media terms now dominate the language of mainstream marketing. Companies around the world have adopted a barrage of digital tools to debut new products, gain feedback from consumers, and, more generally, communicate in interesting and compelling ways with their consumers. Though social media has emerged as the go-to toolkit for traditional profit-seeking companies, could it also be one of the key components of impact-oriented businesses to fighting poverty in the developing world? Agora entrepreneurs Will and Chris Haughey, along with their wooden toy company, Tegu, seem to think so.
TEGU, MAGNATES, & HONDURAS
Will and Chris launched Tegu (short for Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras) in 2009 out of the desire to create jobs in Honduras and to become the employer of choice in the impoverished nation. The company, which now employees 56 people in Honduras and six in the United States, has reinvented the traditional wooden block by incorporating magnets into its design. This simple addition allows for more play possibilities beyond simply stacking blocks one on top of the other.
Tegu Products
“Our first priority when we started Tegu was to address unemployment in Honduras,” Will explains. “The more products we sale, the more jobs we create. If we can engage people with our story, then we can engage people with our products. Engaging people in our products and story ultimately results in more employment opportunities for people living in Honduras.”
LIKES, FOLLOWS, & VIEWS
Will admits he had limited experience in the social media space before starting Tegu. In fact, he did not create a Facebook account until 2008. However, over the past two years, Tegu’s social media accounts have grown appreciably. Currently, the company amasses over 3,600 Facebook likes, more than 1,800 Twitter followers, and nearly 30,000 views on its branded YouTube page. Though Tegu’s digital presence is strong across multiple platforms, Facebook has emerged as the centerpiece of its digi-strategy.
“We like to use Facebook to highlight new products and share images of what we’re doing in Honduras,” Will notes. “We currently have two products that were named on Facebook. We posted a new product and asked our followers to help us name it. We took their suggestions and acted on them.”
Tegu product named by Facebook fans
Will adds that Facebook has been a critical outlet for receiving feedback from customers, ultimately helping the company craft even better products. Just a quick scroll through their page reveals countless company “@mentions” by followers and a stream of shared photographs and videos from customers around the world. Tegu often responds to many of the posts as a way of keeping the conversation active, a process Will describes as “ongoing.”
A LAB COAT, NATIVITY SCENE, & THE MONA LISA
One of Tegu’s more innovative digital marketing campaigns involved showcasing the varied and often unexpected ways the magnetic blocks can be configured. The campaign, titled “Tegu Live,” employed Livestream, a live streaming video platform, as a means of interacting with their digital audience.
Over the course of the campaign, participants could communicate with a Tegu Genius on Tegu.com (via Twitter, Facebook and Livestream). Once navigated to the site, viewers found a mysterious man in a Tegu-branded lab coat, a stark white table, and a jumble of multicolored Tegu magnetic blocks. Viewers typed in their requests, watched as their vision was assembled by the unnamed “Genius,” and, in a matter of minutes, the mass of blocks was shaped into a helicopter, a ship, a checkered board, the Nativity Scene, and even the Mona Lisa, among other creations.
FACEBOOK, ENGAGEMENT, & IMPACT
“Using social media is a great way to engage people in your company or product,” Will concludes. “For us, when people are engaged and buying our products, then they are helping us to create critical employment opportunities for people living in Honduras. In that respect, using social media is an important part of achieving our aim of serving the poor through profit.”
Yes, we are just finding out how ICT4D is so helpful in fighting poverty.
For a while now, we have been procuring building materials and paying wages on cell-phone money transfers and it’s only now that we have realized how helpful facebook has been.
The village administrator, Lanet, from where I come, the area administrator is using twitter to fight crime.