Many big businesses have begun to experiment with social media, and have dove head-first into the world of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and beyond. While others still remain traditionally skeptical of the new metrics and pull-instead-of-push approach, companies such as Southwest Airlines and Ford have proven the success of incorporating these new platforms into the company culture.
If you're wondering which big brands do it best, here are 5 big brands case studies that every marketer should know:
Southwest Airlines: Personalize your brand.
Southwest Airlines has effectively used social media to highlight what makes their company unique. From promoting a viral video of a rapping flight attendant on YouTube to informing customers of flight delays on Twitter to uploading customer photos on their blog, Southwest Airlines has developed their image into a friendly, unique, and personable brand, with which customers can build a long-lasting relationship.
Comcast: Serve your customers.
Having an issue with your television connection? Instead of listening to elevator music while on hold indefinitely, tweet about to @comcastcares. Comcast has discovered a way to respond quickly and directly to customers, especially unhappy ones. The company uses Twitter to monitor customer feedback, reactions, and complaints, and responds within minutes to not-so-favorable posts.
Ford: Resolve emerging issues.
When Ford made an internal error that involved threatening enthusiast sites with lawsuits about copyright infringement, the enraged public quickly made the situation a big deal. The saving factor emerged when Ford’s community manager clarified the story and immediately informed the public via social media. Furthermore, as the company resolved the situation, the public was informed every step of the way, preventing further confusion and frustration.
Starbucks: Request direct feedback.
“My Starbucks Idea” is the popular coffee brand’s consumer portal where customers can submit ideas and vote/comment on other’s thoughts about improving the product(s). In a company where the “experience” compensates for the high prices, it is in Starbucks’ best interest to receive feedback directly from the customers themselves. The corresponding “Ideas in Action Blog” is written by Starbucks employees and discusses ideas that are being implemented while responding to other suggestions.
Sun Microsystems: Increase company transparency.
In a world where trade secrets are protected and gaffes are hidden, Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, publishes a CEO blog that addresses company issues and discloses business advancements. By encouraging two-way communication between the head management and employees/customers, Sun Microsystems promotes a culture of transparency and honesty, in which everyone can receive visibility into the company’s actions.
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According to New Media Age, Coke has decided to say goodbye to one-off-campaign-websites in favor of building its existing social media presence on YouTube and Facebook.
This move is not surprising since the Coca-Cola company has already expressed the belief that their social media and SEO presence is a better homepage than even Coke.com. To me, their announcement to discontinue Coke-hosted campaign websites just further demonstrates their dedication to building out the social media communities that are already working for them.
In the New Media Age article, Prinz Pinakatt, Coke’s interactive marketing manager for Europe explains why Coke has decided to cease building Coke-hosted pages for every campaign:
“We would like to place our activities and brands where people are, rather than dragging them to our platform.”
What’s interesting is while the major B2C appears to be consolidating their efforts, Coke’s biggest competitor in the soda space, Pepsi, had decided to forego its 23rd year of Super Bowl advertising in order to invest in a crowdsourcing community called The Pepsi Refresh Project.
If I’m interpreting Coke’s new strategy correctly, the type of community Pepsi is building won’t be pursued in the future by Coke.com. Instead, Pinakatt says that they will either completely forgoe building a campaign website or simply create a landing page for that campaign with a call to subscribe to one of their existing social media communities.
“In some cases some of our campaigns won’t need a coke.com-hosted site. In most cases these will still exist as it’s the most obvious destination for a consumer, but it might only be a page linking to YouTube encouraging people to join the community there."
For a B2C company like Coca-Cola, this move might be a smart one. Building a one-off website every single new campaign can be an expensive and slow process when you factor in build time and QA, then there’s the effort and man-power involved in up-keeping the community you have created. Right now Coca-cola is charged with managing and maintains over 7 different domains including MyCoke.com and Live Positively, so really they’re just consolidating their resources into one common goal – to build the Coco-Cola reach using social media and drive brand enthusiasm through those channels.
For B2B companies, you may be wondering if Coke’s strategy could work for your business. At HubSpot, we’ve had success in creating several app-driven Grader websites like Website Grader. These Grader products generate a lot of leads for our sales team so it’s worth the investment to host and deliver them to our prospects, even if it requires a dedicated team of developers to monitor and manage them.
I do commend Coke for dedicating their marketing team into using social media to build their reach and reinforce their brand. When you build a robust presence on the big social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube), you are essentially fishing where the fish are. However, the one thing that Coke is lacking from all of their websites is a powerful blog presence which I believe would strengthen the connection between their social media campaigns and their own domains.
Do you think Coca-Cola made the right move? Are you investing more time in building your reach in social media this year? Tell us in the comments.
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If you're trying to wrap your head around social media branding, try thinking of flowers.
If you do traditional branding, you buy plastic flowers. You pay some money, you put them in a vase, and you forget about them.
It's easy, but they never smell or make people happy the way real flowers do.
If you do social media branding, you grow your own flowers, organically. You have to plant the seeds, make the soil rich, pull weeds out from under adolescent shoots -- then hope the rain falls and the locusts stay away.
It's a lot of work, and you don't have complete control of the outcome, but the result is rich.
In the traditional world, marketers and small business owners could create ads and buy media to define their brand any way they wanted.
Today, it's not what you say about yourself that matters, but what others say about you. Dominos put millions into advertising this year, but it was the stories that came from their employees that did the most to define their brand.
Chest thumping doesn't work on social media. You have to do the hard work -- the cultivation -- that gives other people reasons to talk about your brand on social media for you.
So how do you do that? What sort of steps can you take to encourage other people to talk about your brand online?
At HubSpot, we focus on four ways of encouraging discussion of the HubSpot brand online:
(1) Build an Awesome Product. It doesn't matter if you're on Twitter. It doesn't matter if you're on any social media platform. If you create an awesome product, people will talk about it and build your brand for you. You can't pay for comments like this one. They're authentic, and the only way to cultivate them is by creating an authentically great product.
(2) Create a Transparent, Web-Savvy Company. Share information across your company and encourage your employees to use social media. If you do this, and you hire great employees, they will help define your company's brand for you every day.
(3) Create Content -- Lots of It. There are two big reasons content helps cultivate your company's brand. First, it helps define your brand. If your website has two pages of brochure-ware explaining what you do, your brand will seem thin. If you have 400 blog entries, your brand will have far more depth. Second, content helps spread your brand across the web. Two pages won't spread very far across the web; 400 will.
(4) Engage With Social Media. Most traditional advertisers approach social media like an advertising channel -- they broadcast. That doesn't work today. You have to engage -- to discuss, comment and build relationships. When you do this, you will build and spread your brand.
What do you think? How are you building your brand online? Please speak up in the comments below.
Join me for a free marketing webinar, How to Use Social Media to Manage Your Company Brand Online, this Thursday at 1pm, EDT. Sign up for free now.
Flickr Photos: Rickydavid & Martin Heigan
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Thomas Clifford, or @tommytrc, is a personable guy who loves creating videos for his kids, blogging, and building relationships on Twitter as the top Twitterer in Wisconsin. He's given talks on how to "Be a Social Media Rock Star," inspiring audiences to develop strong relationships in social media.
Tommy is a great example of someone who has used his personality to create a strong online (and offline) network. He holds nothing back, even sharing the the birth of his son with his online network by live-tweeting.
In the video below, Tommy talks about what building a personal brand means to him, and how being yourself online can help your business. Who wants to do business with people they don't like?
Here are Tommy's three steps to building a personal brand:
1) Start slow. The number of tools available can be overwhelming. Pick one or two, learn them, and move on. You're not going to tackle the whole world overnight.
2) Just do it. There are plenty of excuses not to try, but social media is an experiment. You don't know what does work until you find out what doesn't work.
3) Be yourself. Don't be a fake person or a robot. If people fall in love with you on a personal level, they are certainly going to want to do business with you on a professional level.
Who do you know and/or appreciate for their strong personal brand?
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In the digital age technology allows information to be spread and copied much more easily and quickly. For most marketers, this is a good thing - the content you are producing can spread faster and more easily - helping you to grow your brand. For instance, articles on this blog, the videos we make, our webinars, and other content can be shared on Twitter, Facebook, email, LinkedIn, and other blogs. People can download and distribute our content almost instantly.
But in some cases this is a bad thing. If you sell digital content, or if you have a brand that people try to copy, your job can be a lot harder. Piracy is a big deal to some marketers. Some blogs (called spam blogs or splogs) completely duplicate all of our articles, trying to get the SEO traffic for themselves, in effect stealing what we have earned with our hard work. Monty Python finally embraced a certain level of piracy and put their own video clips on YouTube because everyone else was doing it for them (and after they did so, DVD sales rose over 1000% because they linked to the videos from the clips). PayPal, eBay and most banks regularly have their brands pirated for scams and fraud, which imp-acts their brand value and image.
Counterfeiting and piracy cost the U.S. economy alone between $200 billion and $250 billion per year, and stole as many as 750,000 jobs. What do you think about this issue in marketing?
Want to help marketers understand the piracy issue better?
Answer the CMO Council's "Protection from Brand Infection" survey and share your thoughts. The CMO Council will compile the results from lots of marketers and share a summary. Answer marketing survey -->
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