3. Web 2.0 tools include
◦ Consumer: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Blogs,
YouTube and others
◦ Business: Yammer, SharePoint, Oracle Collaboration
Suite and others
Content exchange
◦ The type and format of information that can be
exchanged via these tools is endless
◦ Text, documents, sound, pictures, videos, links to
other information, etc.
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Practices
4. Pro Free Reign
◦ Increased productivity
◦ Increased engagement
◦ Increased company
communication and
unity
◦ Enhance company
reputation
◦ Add new business
Anti Free Reign
◦ Decreased
productivity
◦ Little or no oversight
◦ Potential
confidentiality
breaches
◦ Negative comments
about the company
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5. Future Shop
Primark
Ford Motor Co.
Twitter users: successes and non-successes
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6. Why they use it
◦ The highest percentage of their sales occurs in
December
◦ They increase their workforce by 40% during the
holiday season…so do their competitors
How they use it
◦ Through Facebook and various Twitter accounts
they get the word out to their followers about the
jobs
◦ They use those same forums to answer questions
and conduct screening for applicants
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7. Voted most unethical company in the UK
2005
Skipped mass media and targeted social
media to overcome this bad press
Moved from Broadcasting to Socialcasting
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8. Research people that are active bloggers,
Facebookers, tweeters, and others from
among their target audience
Approached them with a proposition for a
test run with a Ford.
Transparently disclosed reasons for doing so
Reaped the benefits of the influence of these
power users
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9. Successes
◦ Interesting
sponsorships
Nissan
◦ Excellent customer
service
UPS
◦ Travel advice and links
British Airways
Failures
◦ RSS Feed, no value
added
Amazon.com
Hewlett Packard
◦ Boring and
uninteresting
eBay
Pepsi
◦ Spam central
McDonald’s
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10. Corporate branding needs to be
complemented with “online thought
leadership”
When trying to use social media as a
marketing tool, listen first then participate
If your company does not use SEO you will fall
behind your competitors
Company policy regarding usage should be
clearly communicated
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Practices
Editor's Notes
They have an excellent brand image among the people that follow them on their various websites and are able to use that strong reputation to their advantage. The people that are active in these areas are their target audience, and represent an excellent resource for the company.
Primark Stores Limited is an Irish company subsidiary of Associated British Food plc.
The company has stores in Ireland, UK and Spain and employ over 25,000 people
(Primark 2008).
This can be in the form of entertainment, an approach taken by Nissan to promote its sponsorship of extreme sports events at nissansports; or customer service, a strategy preferred by UPS, which allows users to track their parcels online via @trackthis.
British Airways offers customer service, travel advice and external links via it’s Twitter account which already has more than 1,300 followers.
Amazon.com uses a 'Twitterbot‘ to automatically publish excerpts from its US blog. These tweets clutter the user’s homepage and add little value beyond that of a standard RSS feed. HP is the same.
eBay’s tweets provide their customers with nothing new that they don’t already get in emails from the company.
Pepsi assumes consumers using the microblogging service are only interested in its products.
McDonald’s tweets tons of advertising messages and irrelevant posts that don’t engage their followers.
Gone are the days making up a marketing message and having that be what the public believes. Blogs and wikis and all other forms of social media keep companies honest, if they try to portray a false message, they will be slammed on the internet for doing so.
Also, prospective employees want a realistic job preview. If all they ever hear is the highly sanitized version of what it is like to work for the company they will be concerned that they’ve never heard any negative comments about the work environment.
For companies that don’t have the brand recognition of the larger conglomerates, even just a small amount of search engine optimization can go a long way in terms of getting the companies name out and causing increased traffic to their site. As time passes more and more consumers are becoming tech-savvy, and so companies that have user friendly sites and receive excellent reviews from the people that regularly use those sites will have an even stronger hold on the market.
The biggest fear of most executive teams in terms of social media usage among their employees is the decrease in productivity that they expect will occur. Not only has this in large terms not been the case, but studies have shown an increase in productivity because employees are able to either use the social media to find better answers to problems they had initially solved, or, by having a little mental break and then getting back to work, employees are more energized and able to give more focused attention to the task at hand.
Company policy regarding social media should ultimately stress discretion and common sense. Sharing sensitive company data or undermining authority should not occur, but if the company has too forceful of a hand it will make employees feel like their employer does not trust them and will diminish engagement.
