Case Studies In Social Media

Case Studies In Social Media Using Social Media to Reach Customers June 6, 2009 Dan Morrill, CityU of Seattle

Social Networking

Many American Companies use social networking to help bridge the gap between consumers and the company.

For some companies they have a social media policy and use social media well

Other companies are still experimenting with social media with limited use of multiple systems

Few companies outside of technology fully use all the social media systems available to them

June 6, 2009 Dan Morrill

Case Study: Jet Blue

YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/user/JetBlueCorpComm

Twitter – http://twitter.com/jetblue

CEO Blog - http://www.jetblue.com/about/ourcompany/flightlog/index.html

Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/pages/JetBlue/5876656697

MySpace - http://www.myspace.com/jetblueairways

Jet Blue Internal Web 2.0

Jet Blue University – Three different sites that did not communicate before.

Using Web 2.0, They were able to stream line communications between the three corporate campuses, and save training money

Used YouTube to talk about their experience so that other companies could learn from what they had done

What Jet Blue is getting right

Jet Blue has an extensive social media process, both internal and external that helps them convey messages to employees, and interesting people.

They are not afraid to experiment with social media

Using internal evangelists and technologists to test new software and new communications models

Having a person who is continually interacting with social media (like on Twitter)

Monitoring their brand on the internet and engaging both good and bad news on the spot, even though this might be spooky to customers

June 6, 2009 Placeholder for Presentation Name

What Jet Blue should do next

Consolidate their social media holdings by using a system like friend feed or tying them all into Facebook for a comprehensive social media experience

Update their holdings on a regular basis, right now the use of the Blog and YouTube seems more crisis management rather than a steady stream of information. Jet Blue could easily put their commercials up on YouTube, and having at least a blog entry a month would also be helpful in people wanting to know more about the company. Both properties are valuable, but underutilized.

What Jet Blue should do next

Discuss their policy of monitoring the internet to reduce the Spookiness of the behavior. Usually people are startled when they are contacted by a company, if Jet Blue talked about on their own web site(s) what they do, why they do it, and how they do it when tracking social media, that would reduce the spookiness of the process. Include the link when responding to an on line message, blog entry, or otherwise.

Case Study: Comcast

http://twitter.com/comcastcares

http://facebook.com - has many pro and anti Comcast groups, which Comcast may or may not engage with, one of those groups looks official, but with the general level of background noise, there is no way to be sure if there is an official Comcast channel on Facebook.

http://myspace – Comcast has many profiles on MySpace covering local events rather than a unified master profile for their company.

http://fancast.com

Case Study: Comcast

http://plaxo.com

http://friendfeed.com/comcastqa

http://youtube.com - much like MySpace and Facebook they have multiple channels with no unifying structure for those channels.

Comcast CEO Blog - http://www.eliasonfamily.info/blog/ Started October 2008

What Comcast is Doing Right

They have the beginnings of a unified social networking experience for their customers between all the services that Comcast provides

They are active in the social networking space and use multiple systems to help inform customers or potential customers of what is happening or how to get help

Their CEO Blogs – this is one of the more important things that a company can do, making the CEO approachable is always a good way to get more people engaged with the company. This holds true for both internal employees and external customers.

What Comcast is Doing Right

Following their brand, engaging customers, while some of their engagement might be after the fact, they are engaging customers and in many cases showing that, they do listen at the very least. In some cases, they have been able to resolve customer issues on the spot and save that customer from defecting to another service.

What Comcast could do better

They have not integrated their twitter account into their friend feed even though this is a simple thing to do. The friend feed account is separated from their other social networking systems, meaning people will have to hunt and find on the internet to find all the Comcast outposts on the internet. Realistically they should be integrating all their external properties into friend feed or Facebook into a single source of information or single source of links.

Publish their social media policy on line where the ordinary public could get to it, and explain how Comcast cares actually works. That would reduce the spooky behavior when Comcast comes along and answers a blog entry or other entry on line.

Have a community manager, it looks like with all the systems they are involved in, there is no one unifying personality or approach. Having a community manager would help Comcast manage these assets better, and help them be updated over time.

Unify the various personalities they have on the internet, one unified MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook accounts would make it easier to find them on the internet. It would also provide cross-links between systems so that people could wander around and be able to find the information that was of interest to them. This could also provide “Google juice” or links in Google amongst the various Comcast pages and systems to provide a more unified experience for users.

Questions and Answers