Recent surveys suggest that 80% of marketers worldwide plan to use social media data to enhance their overall marketing efforts. However, more than 40% of marketers cite lack of analytics capabilities as a factor that prevents them from effectively collecting social media data.
This presents a significant challenge that needs to be overcome in order for marketers to tailor social communications in ways that encourage meaningful engagement.
In 2012 some of the world’s biggest brands treated us to some truly spectacular blunders on social media.
My personal favourite was KitchenAid’s attack on President Obama’s dead grandmother, though the Swedish Tourist Board also deserves an honourable mention for its potty-mouthed, anti-Semitic tweets.
Thankfully brands haven’t learned from other’s mistakes so the social fails have continued apace in 2013.
Obviously it’s wrong to make fun of people’s mistakes and revel in their failures, but it’s also important to document social fails as a warning to others (sort of)…
Starbucks is often touted as having an excellent social strategy, so it’s an excellent subject for our series of posts looking at how brands use the four main social networks.
Having previously evaluated a number of brands including Red Bull, ASOS, Walmart and Ikea, it appeared that the brands that were doing well in social all followed the same basic blueprint – they post updates several times a day and are excellent at responding to consumers.
But as this post shows, Starbucks has managed to outperform nearly all other consumer brands in terms of community engagement despite taking the exact opposite approach.
And there is a special mention for Starbucks’ Instagram feed at the end as well…
Competitions are increasingly popular among brands using Pinterest and are a good way to increase the virality of content by encouraging users to spread branded images across the Pinterest network.
It can also be a useful, if slightly cynical way of quickly boosting your number of followers.
This is no different from the way that businesses have been using Facebook for years, and we recently pointed out eight examples of brands that have run Instagram competitions.
Our new Pinterest for Business Best Practice Guide includes advice on how to run competitions on the platform, including analysis of real life examples.
As Random Acts of Kindness week was earlier this month, it got me thinking: is this culture of kindness something that could cross over to how brands behave?
Are they already doing business by doing good? Social media makes it possible for brands to do ‘random’ nice things for customers (or fans or followers).
Is this self-serving? Or is it genuinely the start of something great?
It can happen to anyone. One day you are happily providing tasty prepared meals to devoted consumers, and the next you are accused of serving up horsemeat, committing fraud and conspiracy against the public, and somehow being linked to convicted arms traffickers via the intermediaries that transport meat through the seedy underworld of the European food chain!
Who knew that a humble lasagne could cause so much trouble for so many goliaths of the food industry?
The answer is that someone should have. Because in today’s world of instant global exposure the vast majority of your digital crisis management needs to be in place before a crisis occurs, scenarios practised, scripts written, influencers on-side and communication channels identified.
It should be someone’s role to ensure that this has been done. In the wake of the horsemeat crisis, how many of the businesses involved in it do you feel had an effective strategy to call upon?
In the days before social media it could take hours or even days for a story to break. Today it can take seconds to go viral, so it’s prepare or perish.
In an attempt to deliver more tangible returns from their social media investments, brands are falling back on tried and tested methods of ‘pushing the needle’, most often using the familiar tools of advertising.
This partly stems from the misuse of ‘proxy’ measures in determining social ROI, such as followers, likes, shares and fans. None of these deliver value and are easily abused – with many marketers seeing them as just another contact list.
However, advertising and social media are like oil and water and should never be mixed, here’s three reasons why.
In the latest instalment of our blog series looking at how different brands use the main social networks, I’ve decided to shine the spotlight on Ikea.
The Swedish furniture manufacturer is probably one of the most recognisable brands on the planet, and its catalogues are full of striking visuals that are perfect for sharing via social.
Ikea has also just found itself caught up in the horsemeat scandal, so it’s the perfect time to see how it is using Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+ for customer engagement.
For comparison, I’ve previously looked at how Walmart, Tesco, Red Bull, John Lewis and ASOS use the four main social networks.
Businesses have always struggled to measure quality. The challenge in social media is no better. In fact, it’s considerably worse.
Even the best attempts at measuring quality of a customer relationship, such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), rely on numbers, in the case of NPS a ranking from one to 10, and this has always seemed somehow inadequate to convey the different values and feelings involved.
Google has done a reasonable job of measuring the quality of content published online and ranking it accordingly, yet if you search for “social media quality” you’ll be presented with a list of deeply mediocre, SEO-focused blog posts on the topic.
Perhaps Google’s Authorship will fix this, but the challenge is clear.
So what does quality mean in the context of social media?
If Facebook is to ever rival Google’s dominance in the online advertising market, many believe that the world’s largest social network will need to figure out how to take advantage of its treasure trove of user data.
That treasure trove includes significant amounts of personal information that users have provide about themselves, and it grows by the day as users upload and tag photos, share content with their friends and ‘Like’ brand Facebook Pages.
As we approach the end of Social Media Week, we caught the last session at Hearst with Beyond the Like for Lifestyle Brands with presentations by Richard Jones of EngageSciences, Eve Sangenito of Brandwatch, David St. John Tradewell of Econsultancy, We Are Social’s Robin Grant and Craig Hepburn, Global Head of Digital and Social for Nokia.
One of the biggest takeaways was an urge for marketers to look beyond sheer numbers and to look at who is engaging and what actions these lead to. Why blanket market to 50,000 fans when only 9,000 are actually bringing in the majority of engagement, shares and revenue.
I spent a number of years as a social media manager – first for PayPal, then giffgaff and, most recently, I was the corporate community manager for the BBC. I feel a strong affinity to those behind the brand handle after being through the wars myself. It’s not uncommon to spend sleepless nights at a keyboard, or take a night bus home so you can stay above ground to tweet during an issue ,or be attached to your phone on your only vacation in months. This is the current state of our community directors and their staff.
It was great to see Ogilvy feature three social community managers on their recent panel, The Rise of the New Community Manager, as part of Social Media Week. The panelists included Karen Untereker, U.S. Manager, Social Media at Ford Motor Company, Ariel Norwood, Online and Social Media Team Leader, Northeast Region, Whole Foods Market and Vanessa Wojtusiak, Head of Social Marketing, iHeartRadio and was moderated by Rachel Caggiano, Senior Vice President, Social@Ogilvy.