Social media is bringing multidirectional change in our society. Be it culture or politics, relationships or PR, marketing or customer service- no field is left untouched. This led to the enthusiasm in marketers for using them for building and promoting brands, getting customer attention. As a businessman you must be eager to know how to use social media for your business. There is no dearth of success stories on the net; successes that have been achieved by the use of social media. Each story has lessons for you that you can use in your business.
Tip - Before we move forward to taking lessons from the success stories mentioned above, one must remember that involvement in social media does not cost you money. The cost of using them is your time. Hence one must understand the nature of his business and then choose and use appropriate social media tools.
Let’s take up the examples of successes with social media one by one.
1. Costco- You must be aware that Costco is the largest membership warehouse club and third largest retailer in the U.S.
The popularity in social media sphere is based on how quickly search engines find your website and on which page they are ranked by search engines. The term is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Costco.com is found in 69 search engine keywords. Such a keyword ranking is obtained only through excellent networking in social media. Google has 16 websites that back-links for Costco, Yahoo has 19. There are 10 other sites that are related to Costco.com in questions. Try going through the site Wholinkstome (http://wholinkstome.com/url/costco.com).
Costco Kirkland brand has been mentioned several times in blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter’s microblog. The people at Costco have been reading content in social media to know about the customer perception about the stores and the brand. In the year 2008, Costco commanded a market share of 55% and was in 71% of the online discussion regarding the retail stores. This publicity created through online discussion forums has gone to an extent that the Costco fan page in Facebook was created by one of the shoppers and out of the several pages present today some attract more than 50,000 fans.
2. BestBuy
BestBuy has been using blogs, networking tools, videos and forum to communicate with its customers, update them with the latest news and build brand awareness. It is almost everywhere.
The Chief Marketing Officer maintains his blog ‘Barry Judge Blog’ which is an essential part of the social media strategy and updates the customers on what’s new. The discussion forums are meant for sharing information about tech related product such as games, computers, T.V., appliances, cameras, audios etc. To make the environment of the forum stimulating, there are sections like ‘Customer service’, ‘Meet the Moderator’ and ‘Reward points’.
Apart from the Facebook fan page and the wall to get customer feedback, there is ‘Shop + Share’ tab to let the viewers go through the promotions. The twitter microblogs are used for latest offers, news, product releases and information about new store location.
BestBuy connect is meant for centralization of customer inputs from tweets, feeds, Facebook walls and blogs maintained by BestBuy employees. Hence employees are able to connect to the customers. BestBuy IdeaX community is used for discussion on new ideas between the customers and the employees. There is also a mechanism to vote for the best ideas. Last but not the least is the humorous promotional videos posted on YouTube. The website StayOnSearch (http://www.stayonsearch.com/best-buy-using-social-media-to-connect-with-customers) tells you the BestBuy story.
3. USAA
USAA is a company that provides financial services and insurance to military people. At this time when the insurance companies are facing challenges due to expensive healthcare systems, USAA has been trying to find out a solution through social media by communicating with the customers. It is using its Facebook pages to communicate credit card fees to the customers. Members of this fan page love the openness of the company. Twitter is used for posting news updates about the products.
In April 2009, it launched a social media site called ‘What’s on your mind’ (https://www.usaa.com/inet/ent_utils/McStaticPages?key=about_woym_migration). It is meant to increase communication among the USAA members. The members can post their reviews and ratings about the various USAA products. There is also a section for personal finance advice and articles related to them. The main website of USAA has a discussion forum too. If you go through the website of USAA do not miss the link (https://www.usaa.com/inet/ent_utils/McStaticPages?key=stories_membership_main) where the members share their stories related to this company. Hence it is giving publicity to the company through customers’ words.
4. Burger King
Burger King’s marketing campaign called ‘sacrifice ten friends’ was indeed a viral campaign. The tool with the name ‘sacrifice ten friends’ was put on Facebook. It said that one can get a free whopper in exchange of 10 friends. With the spread of social media, you get connected to several people you hardly ever communicate with. Hence there were 20,000 people who sacrificed 200,000 Facebook friends for a sandwich in a short span of time.
Facebook stopped this application on the basis of privacy concerns and this creative campaign came to an end. This gives the lesson that one needs to visualize the limit to which a marketing strategy can go.
5. Canadian tire
Canadian tire is the name for family of retail and financial services. It is the most shopped retailer in Canada with more than 1,000 stores and gas bars in Canada. The customer service representatives answer to the query of customers over the phone and through email. Through a service called Ask and Answer done through the small widget by Bazaarvoice (http://www.bazaarvoice.com), the company has reduced customer service contacts requirement to 81%. This is an amazing amount of cost saving through the social media.
6. IBM
IBM decided to capitalize the intelligence of its employees to let the consumers know what happens behind the screen. Thus it created a network of blogs managed by its employees including its CEO. Try going through the webpage on the IBM website (http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/) to get a list of all the blogs. User get to know how IBM employees work and able to build direct connections with them. When employees are writing on what they love to do, it means increased satisfaction of employees as well and the consumers who get to know that the whole company is committed to give them the best.
7. Graco
The infant and baby products company realized the value that still photographs of our kids in our life. That would have been the reason that they decided to knit their social media strategy around Flickr. They had built a community of its customers using Flickr. Later they realized that communicating the customers regarding baby care and raising kids will help them promote their products, they started Graco blog (http://blog.gracobaby.com/). The corporate blogger of Graco uses Twitter to inform about the latest updates on the blog.
These are just a few most famous stories and there are several ones yet to be created. Yours can be the next one. All you need is to look for innovative opportunities to use social media in your business.
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