Social media tools have added more visibility to your brand, providing a channel for anyone’s unique thoughts, opinions and experiences to be distributed to the world almost instantaneously. Given this new reality, what do you do? Do you become the online police of your brand? Instead, let's consider a different approach.
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The relationship between companies and their customers is no longer about information driven from the top of an organization, out to the customer. A relationship controlled in large part by the company. That relationship is looking more like a dialog. Like the customer owns a huge stake. Like shared decision-making . Your brand is looking more and more like a community.
The hallmarks of a social brand are alignment of values, transparency and a conversation. The online experience, particularly social media, turns out to be the ideal tool for cultivating a social brand because of its innate ability to create community—whether it’s around Boston terriers, kickball or your product/service.
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Think about finding these conversations and harnessing them to build relationships with your customers.
Best Buy’s social media strategy is all about linking disbursed team members for collaboration and to promote individual contributions. Their strategies really put employees in the driver’s seat. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_jhLGxH-m4 [Need to download this and edit it down]
Mayo Clinic’s Facebook page is I think the best example of using social media to connect with employees, patients and the larger community. It’s an understated page—and by that I mean that they really let the fans contribute to the page. There aren’t a lot of posts by staff—other than individuals who want to comment or tell a story. It doesn’t feel like a marketing venue, it really does feel like a place where people can connect about this truly one-of-a-kind experience Brand promise=it’s all about the patient. Facebook gives them a venue to celebrate that aspect of their brand.
In addition to the obvious examples of collaboration across departments by using intranets or Wikis to share information (remember the Best Buy examples), there are also some interesting ways to further incent and encourage that collaboration. This example from Starbucks is not only breaking down traditional silos between customers and the company, but any idea picked up by Starbucks receives the attention of a cross functional team to make it happen. So it encourages collaboration across departments with the customer. This is a great example of the company extending the third place concept on to the web.
Comcast monitors Twitter for customer concerns and uses that information to advance product development efforts and problem solve. They’ve also taken monitoring to another level by responding to customer problems when identified in Twitter. Comcast brand promise=innovation and reliability. By monitoring Twitter, this allows them to be highly responsive to customer service issues like downtime (thereby improving reliability) while demonstrating their tech savvy. http://mashable.com/2009/05/09/twitter-customer-service/
Zappos brand promise=fun culture and unique relationships with customers. Zappos does a very good job of humanizing their brand by giving us a window into their corporate culture. Employees from all over the company are encouraged to Twitter with a few simple rules in mind like be authentic and be reasonable. Jo Casey, the Help Desk Coordinator emphasized the importance of the freedom to be themselves, saying, “Anyone can do what we do, but nobody can be who we are.” This is particularly important for a website that sells shoes. They sell a lot of shoes. But anybody call sell shoes online and does. Zappos’ strategy is brilliant because it clearly sets them apart from their competitors by building a personal relationship with customers. This is also particularly brilliant because they have no physical retail location—normally thought of as the best way to develop a personal relationship. http://mashable.com/2009/04/26/zappos/
http://www.aon.com/attachments/Social_Media_and_Employee_Communication.pdf Let’s also hyperlink here to the portion of the Best Buy video that shows the productivity increase they’ve achieved through their social media useage
SAP has encouraged all employees to blog, tweet ect. because this demonstrates their commitment to individual contributions. As a result they have 1500 employee bloggers and 400 employees actively publishing content in other forms. By encouraging employees to publish their thoughts on such concepts as cloud computing and timeless software, they have demonstrated their prowess as a team of innovators and they have a culture that appreciates and values this support, creating thousands of internal champions.
[Example of a company who’s brand is clearly reinforced through their social media strategy]
Mountain Dew’s brand is all about the “extreme” and individualism. So this customer driven video campaign is the perfect example of how to celebrate the individual and to give them a venue for proving just how extreme they are. People submitted videos demonstrating why they love Mountain Dew to YouTube, Mountain Dew selected their favorites, and then 50 of them were sent boxes from DewLabs—with 7 potential new MountainDew flavors. The recipients then get to vote on the new flavor. In the box was commemorative artwork, cool swag and a flip camera to record their votes.
Most social media guidelines are a ‘vanilla’ list of “do’s” and “don’ts”