Bryan, the marketing and social media manager at SST Software, is a lifelong geographer. Ideally, he wishes to visit as many places and people as humanly possible by using both actual and virtual travel to accomplish his goal. Adventures in his life have presented many diverse opportunities such as working in an apple orchard, researching archaeology in Israel, maintaining and repairing radars as a sergeant in the United States Air Force, volunteer coaching for the Special Olympics, slumbering in every US state except Hawaii, teaching at Oklahoma State University, and most recently managing marketing and social media efforts for SST Software. Originally from Wisconsin, Bryan insists his travels are best complemented with quality cheeses and beers, kind adventurous people, a soccer ball and his 3-year-old son.
/>Business amateurs and high-level professionals alike are doping on a connectivity phenomenon — social media. Social media is essentially a distance-eliminating steroid for individuals and companies looking to brand a product or seek information about a figurative color wheel of topics. Agriculture is no stranger to these social connections, and the ag industry is highly engaged in a global conversation.
This historically geographically bound ag industry is most used to seeing its participants travelling to the state fair as their furthest form of ag research or ag community. But today, more often than not you will find us ag types tweeting and posting from the truck, combine or fields. The new era of farming is using social technology to seek out new and different technologies. Social media allows even the smallest acre grower to have a global impact in the precision ag conversation. At SST Software, we treat every precision ag acre as your best acre. So it is very important that we stay connected however possible.
At SST, we use social media as a complement to all of our branding and marketing connectivity. The goal is not to be ground-breaking social media experts. It is not a think-outside-of-the-box or reinvent-the-wheel kind of social media usage that SST seeks. We simply want to be where the greatest number of social media users are found conversing about farming. There, we can introduce our brand value by sharing SST’s products, services, and precision ag insight.
Yet, we still need to be at the trade show in order to live-post a photo from the event. We are still in the offices and fields, out to lunch with clients, at a conference and expanding the SST brand personally. The personal touch of business can never be replaced, just like an embrace can never be felt by typing.
The absolute acres that keep agriculture so local in actuality are an issue for ag business, especially as precision farming practices are a continuing worldwide norm. Maybe you have seen predictions that the world’s population is expected to be 9 billion people by the year 2050. Somehow all those people need to be fed and precision agriculture is the solution to maximizing food production.
Currently, SST is responsible for the management of over 78 million acres of cropland across 47 US states, 8 Canadian provinces, and 22 countries. SST’s FarmRite system houses protected user-owned data on nearly 482,000 farms and for over 134,000 growers.
SST is adding acres into our system at a rate of a million or more per month. So you could see how a company of almost 60 employees, many of which are software developers, might value social media to eliminate distance in the fashion that we do.
SST is active in participating with social media because it provides our software users an instant form of feedback on all of our developments. Our LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, and especially Twitter accounts all amplify our ability to identify the wants and needs of SST customers (both current and potential), while providing a public forum of precision ag topics useful for current project research and future product designs.
Just a quick glance at my SST Software Twitter feed and I see corn markets, crop conditions, farm bill politics, tractor setups, and precision farming technologies being discussed by a variety of companies, news and media outlets, agronomists, ag bloggers, and farmers spanning across the globe.
Our SST Facebook timeline is riddled with coop news, farm show updates, and albums of photos both zooming in on the smallest little spider mite and out to the largest combine.
The social media accounts that we share information from also give us a unique outlet for branding and launching new and existing SST products. Right now, SST is unveiling a new mobile farming application and web-based data viewer unlike any other on the market. SST Sirrus, the aforementioned mobile product, is receiving beta test feedback so favorable and positive that if it came from only our mouths one might think that we were constantly boasting.
But the opportunity for public feedback makes it so that it isn’t just SST bragging on our Sirrus products. Public feedback also makes it so that we are susceptible to comments where we have not met certain needs desired by SST users. In between the praise and wants from customers, we also entertain with photos, videos, software updates, tweets, posts, and industry news of our own.
Again, I mention that social media is only a part of our overall efforts in bringing precision ag the best software tools possible. It is, however, a very important supplement because as you might already know, growers and service providers are very busy people. Catching them at their office requires careful scheduling that can be halted in an instant with news of a broken sprayer, invasive insect, or weather related incident.
Sometimes all the time they have is glancing at the flat screen in their hand and we also realize that we can’t hug every acre. So we type a smiley face and add our voice to the symphony of other social media voices.
Actor Jeff Bridges describes the linkage in the film Tron Legacy as, “Bio digital jazz, man.” That’s just about the feeling we get interacting with any precision ag-type social media user. Pretty amazing if you think about where today’s global conversations started… with AOL CDs coming in the mail and cell phones bigger than our heads.
We’re lucky that we connect with an industry, comprised of literally the planet’s hardest working individuals, who are everyday tasked with feeding an exponentially growing population. The world is lucky that these individuals are active on social media and seeking technology that implements precision agriculture practices. Social media is essentially assisting our cropland in producing greater yields.
