Archive for Social Media
Social media campaigns can spark sales
Periodically I like to share my thoughts on the role of social media platforms in driving business visibility. One that I am very intrigued with right now is the foursquare mobile app.
Using a phone or mobile device, the foursquare app allows individuals to “check in” and voluntarily share their locations during the day with business colleagues, friends and family. Foursquare uses your phone’s location service to make it easy to choose where you are, no matter where that might be.
Every time you check-in to a location you receive points and sometimes “badges” and even rewards or discounts for your check-in. It’s fun and provides a modest feeling of instant gratification.
I frequently travel all over the world and this platform also allows me to share my favorite sites, restaurants and other adventures. From downtown Appleton, to San Francisco, to Recife, Brazil, or even Faro, Portugal, foursquare makes it fun to communicate through comments from friends and family, and even link photos from wherever I happen to be.
Using this new social media platform there are many novel opportunities that are being explored by businesses or brand owners. Foursquare offers many tools and formats that can be leveraged to attract new customers and keep them engaged.
As one example, History Channel has partnered with Foursquare to deliver facts and tips about historical places. A Foursquare badge has even been created to encourage people to explore historical locations like London. More than 10,000 people were awarded the badge the first month and through this, History Channel was able to enhance their brand equity and communication with their followers.
Late last year, RadioShack conducted a nationwide campaign with Foursquare. As you can imagine, Foursquare’s users are more preferential purchasers of higher value devices and accessories and have been documented as spending 350 percent more in store than the average RadioShack customer.
On Black Friday, as a positive, healthy way to help attract these customers, RadioShack encouraged Foursquare users to do “So Right” activities like eating healthy, exercising, volunteering and then checking into a local RadioShack to unlock their “So Right” badge. For several weeks, for every badge that was unlocked, RadioShack donated $1 to Livestrong.
Other organizations have also leveraged this social media platform on Black Friday for inbound marketing opportunities. Retailers increased their visibility by allowing their followers to check in at their shopping location and receive discounts and even free merchandise. For example if you checked in at Payless Shoes or Sports Authority stores on Black Friday, you were offered discounts or gift cards based on your level of purchase.
American Express has set up an arrangement with Foursquare for many exclusive specials. Cardmembers can connect their card with their Foursquare account and enjoy coupon-free savings at selected retailers and restaurants. It’s a hassle-free way to save, and once set up only requires checking-in and using your card at the venue.
Since its creation only a few years ago, Foursquare continues to get more and more popular. That’s understandable as it is easy to use, fun, keeps you in touch with your colleagues, friends and family, and using it can even save you money.
Online customers expect engagement
Like many companies, I’ve been exploring new ways to share information through my website. Many thought leaders are doing the same. It has become clear that the old model of the static website as an advertising medium where we talk and customers just listen is a concept whose time is fading.
Because of the latest technology in social media and mobile apps, communication and sharing is becoming an interactive dialog. That’s why more and more companies are ditching their static web pages and creating dynamic web experiences for their customers and visitors. What is the difference, you ask?
Dynamic sites usually employ interactive components that give the client or customer visiting your website the tools to interact with each other. That includes discussion forums, polls, comments, user registration processes and newsletter subscriptions. Those tools also give them e-commerce options like online storefronts, ticket and accommodation booking systems. Some dynamic sites even go as far as image and text functionalies that allow clients to upload to the site in real time.
Companies of many sizes today are reaching out to consumers through social media vehicles to co-create game-changing products that meet newly identified needs or help take their niche products into the mainstream.
Understanding the role social media plays in a company’s overall strategy is gaining traction, as more companies realize its value. It isn’t just about new products and services delivered in isolation, but new business models where companies partner, or “co-create,” with customers and communities.
So what should organizations do to take advantage of this trend? First, realize that you have several different audiences looking at your offerings through the front door that is your site. Bringing social media and Internet platforms together to create a space for listening to the customers and end users is key. Your customers are engaging in many different social arenas, and you need to be willing to enter into those circles with them.
Things are evolving so there are different ideas about what this can look like, and how much these tools are integrated. But while the technology is fairly easy to master, the listening part is where I often see disconnects. The bottom line is that if we don’t learn to listen and appreciate how our customers use the Internet, we won’t get far in our co-creation efforts with them.
The best place to begin is not with our own ideas, but with theirs. What is the No. 1 need of each stakeholder group? How are we delivering, or even not delivering, what they are looking for? Getting to these answers isn’t easy but social media tools are providing another avenue for information.
Smart companies are fostering collaborative conversations to harness the creativity that is out there. In previous columns I have talked about how Hallmark, Kraft, IBM and Local Motors are taking advantage of Internet collaboration tools to harvesting customer ideas.
If you haven’t started already, now is the time to further developing your social media strategy. Using the Internet, Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare and LinkedIn, we can create an environment that fosters collaborative conversations that can forever change our relationships with customers.
Whether you are a small company or a corporate giant it makes sense to explore customer co-creation to transform traditional product development into new mutually valuable experiences. Don’t let your approach to the Internet remain stuck in the 20th century.
The big change: should Facebook have checked with the crowd?
Today Facebook users got the shock of their social lives when they logged in only to discover that their newly-revamped News Feed wasn’t what they expected. It’s the most talked about topic not only on Facebook, but trending on Twitter and other networks as well. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to see this as a national news story tonight!
The issue is a change in how users view “Top Stories” and “Most Recent” links, because the program automatically decides for readers which stories are more important. never mind that the posts that are several hours old are mixed in with posts from five minutes ago.
The addition of the news ticker isn’t popular either. While it shows the latest posts in real time, there is no time stamp to tell you what time your friend or your page shared the information. The real confusion comes for Facebook Page owners, who are wondering if any of their fans and customers can see their stories and links. Give it another week and page owners will be able to see if the impressions and interactions are as frequent as they were before the new changes took effect.
So what is the overall reaction? Not good, if the posts and comments are any indication. A quick look shows me that while there are hundreds of complaints and negative comments, I have yet to see any positive feedback. Check out this story to see reaction from around the world, and be sure to scroll down and read some of the comments!
Will the new changes last? Only if Facebook decides not to heed the outcry from its millions of users. Google+ anyone?
Related articles
- Facebook changes your page again, picks the news it thinks is important to you
- Facebook rolls out revamped News Feed with Ticker
- How to hide the News Ticker on Facebook
- Facebook adds real-time ‘ticker’ to overhauled news feed, donates old layout to science (video)
IBM culture fosters social media innovation
In one of my recent newspaper columns, I wrote about how IBM is doing something with social media that most companies wouldn’t dare try: allowing their employees to speak for the company! While most corporations hire PR firms or rely on their communications director to carefully craft messages that appear on public sites, IBM lets hundreds of thousands of staffers speak out. Maybe that’s why IBM has celebrated so many birthdays — 100 to be exact. Read on:
Not many companies can say they’ve been around for more than a century. In fact, companies in the 100-year club are exceedingly rare — fewer than 500 of the more than 5,000 publicly traded companies in the U.S.
Among them is supercomputer company IBM, a technology giant that turned 100 last month.
If you were to look at all of the things IBM has done to remain strong over the years, you’d see a string of innovations from time clocks and butcher scales to typewriters, personal computers and even a supercomputer that recently won the game show “Jeopardy!” And there is also the spirit of innovation you don’t always hear about.
I believe IBM can credit its longevity and success not only to the introduction of cutting-edge technology, but also to its embracement of communication, including today’s social media.
I recently did a case study on the company’s unique, decentralized social media approach that is driving unprecedented collaboration and innovation. Many companies today have a corporate blog, a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and even possibly a YouTube channel.
Usually organizations communicate in the faceless, nameless “one voice” that tells the story of a brand. But at IBM it is thousands of voices, and that is the way they want it. Employees are encouraged to not only speak for the company, but share ideas that even the VPs might not grasp.
IBM lets employees communicate internally and with the public without intervention. They do have social media guidelines and employees are individually responsible for what they create, and releasing proprietary information is prohibited.
The approach is succeeding. Today, an internal informational wiki and a user-generated media library generate an incredible amount of online activity. There is also a flood of people that blog for the company.
IBM lists all of its blogs in a simple directory sorted by the name of the blogger. They share thoughts, ideas, presentations, photos, videos and more. The social stats are incredible: thousands of internal blogs and more than 50,000 members on “SocialBlue” (a Facebook-type community for IBM employees). That doesn’t count the many external bloggers and thousands of participants in their occasional company crowd-sourcing “jams.”
Free sharing via social media has been part of the corporate culture since the early 2000s, when IBM conducted its first Company Jam, where employees came together to lead their own three-day discussion forum.
Three years later the concept was take to the next level with an “innovation jam” where participation included not only by employees, but also family, friends and clients. Internal company research projects were discussed and explored, and the ones deemed to be best went on to become IBM-funded incubator businesses.
With a culture as diverse and distributed as IBM’s, getting employees to collaborate and share makes good business sense.
IBM is a company that has lived through changing technology and intense competition but continues to survive and remain at the forefront of innovation. With their innovative approaches to communication I don’t doubt that they will be celebrating quite a few more birthdays to come.
Via Cheryl Perkins Column, Post-Crescent Newspaper
Calling all Innovators: Don’t miss this event
This June I’ll be in Phoenix to moderate this year’s Conference on Social Product Development & Co-Creation. I’m partnering once again with PDMA, and this year co-creation pioneer, Local Motors, is helping us raise the bar for this exciting, ground-breaking event. Social Product Development is making a major impact on the way companies are innovating now and into the future.
I think you’ll find this conference features the best-of-best elements and people, and we’ve designed it so you’ll be able to exchange ideas, forge new connections and fuel sustainable innovation within your organization that drives growth. Among the highlights is a how-to guide to build a co-creative enterprise from the co-author of leading business book “The Power of Co-creation.”
Social product development is key, and you’ll discover how communities can be used to solve some of your toughest innovation problems, as well as how to build your business around an existing crowd of passionate people. In other words–crowdsourcing for real results.
It all happens on June 27 & 28, and I hope you can join us as we bring together an unprecedented group of thinkers, makers and doers to help you understand and apply co-creative approaches to your work. This event is for anyone who wants to drive breakthrough results in product development and innovation.
We’re featuring more than 20 keynote speakers across a variety of industries representing companies like LEGO Group, InnoCentive, Harvard Business School, Wired Magazine, American Express, Kimberly-Clark Corporation, Hallmark Cards, Intuit Labs and Microsoft Design Studio, plus many more.
Be sure to register by May 20th for a huge savings. See you in June!
Customer identity and data mining: How social media can help
The evolving nature of social media means that many companies are putting an enormous amount of resources and money into staying ahead of the curve. Especially when case study after case study shows that social media is tremendously helpful in analyzing data.
Data mining via social media tools can show us not only the customer profiles and historical buying patterns of those who might buy our innovative products, but an also widen our insight into the hobbies, tastes — and I think more importantly — the needs of what customers want.
There are drawbacks and challenges to collecting data through social media, such as identifying correctly your customers among the millions of participants in any given online community. Luckily, technology is helping us in this area! Here is a great article about how to avoid some of those pitfalls.
The bottom line is that if you can get to the core of consumer needs and then develop a solution, you’ve just differentiated yourself in the marketplace. And if you can do that, you’ve won the hearts of consumers for the long haul.
Tree Hugger uses crowdsourcing to green up crowded house
How does one “go green” with only 420 square feet of living space? The founder of Treehugger.com and VP of Interactive Media at Discovery’s Planet Green is getting media attention this week for engaging hundreds of thousands of people in a contest that resulted in some truly innovative architectural solutions.
Graham Hill launched the contest back in October and promised entrants that he not only would pay for the winning design, he’d live in it. The public was asked to design a fully functioning living space in a tiny New York apartment, complete with room for a sit-down dinner for a dozen people, space for two guests, a home office, a hideable kitchen and a bed, shower and bike storage.
Hill says he wanted consumers to think about how much we really need in terms of space and stuff. The contest was designed to inspire architects and others to think environmentally by reducing their eco-footprint. Hill received 304 submissions, 600,000 entry views and thousands of comments on his website.
The winner’s design is titled, One Size Fits All. Check it out, along with the photos from the runners up here.
Social gaming soon to be a $1 Billion industry
If you are a software development entrepreneur, the hottest trend in the next few years appears to be the gaming industry for social media platforms.
I’ve not played too many games on social media, but I know a lot of people who do. And this year social gaming is predicted to become a $1 Billion industry.
That’s according to a new study from eMarketer. The group says more than 62 million Internet users in the United States — that’s almost a third of us — will play at least one game on a social network each month this year. That’s a huge surge from last year, when only a tenth of us used social media gaming to pass the time.
Check out the article and some very interesting statistics here. One thing the study does not touch on is the increase in mobile phone apps for gamers.
Does your business have Klout?
What’s your “Klout Score?” It’s a question you’ll hear more and more often in the months to come.
One of the social media trends for 2011 continues to be the gathering and leveraging of opinions. Not just opinions of those who like one brand over another, but of those who are so influential as to change the minds of the folks who very well could be your new customers.
Klout, a network that allows users track the impact of opinions, is becoming a powerful tool for companies who want to collect large amounts of data about how people interact with their brands, services, products and overall image. You can use this tool to identify key influencers and keep track of their online influence.
Here’s an interesting case study from a few months back: Virgin America used Klout to hand-pick a key group of influencers and then took them on a free flight to Toronto–their newest destination—from either San Francisco or Los Angeles.
What did the airline company ask in return? Nothing but a simple online acknowledgement – good or bad – about the flight they had just received. Of course the recipients blogged, tweeted and posted their good fortune and even now the ROI is producing great results!