Category: Best Practices

Social Media Lessons from Thirty Brands

Posted on

Last semester, my Internet marketing students completed a social media project. They were asked to follow three social media channels by a company of their choice, and then write up their experience about it. Together, we observed 30+ companies’ social media practices, ranging from lesser-known brands to major players in the social media arena such as Starbucks and Best Buy. In this blog, I would like to share some qualitative conclusions from those observations.

Twitter Chirp

Photo by Flickr User Widjaya Ivan | CC 2.0

What Works

Polls and questions: Asking consumers easy questions that are tangentially related to the product seems to receive good reactions from consumers, and many do respond. A key to this practice is to time the questions based on what’s on consumers’ mind at the moment (e.g., holiday, economy, etc.).

Contests and submissions: It may seem like a lot of companies are running contests nowadays. But in our observation, it still seems to work quite well among consumers. Visibility of winning is important. An example is ESPN’s use of fan-submitted photos as its profile picture. This is updated every week so that the chance of winning is pretty frequent.
Continue reading “Social Media Lessons from Thirty Brands”

Best Practices — Old Spice Marketing Campaign

Posted on

This year is a good year for Old Spice. Starting with the “Smell Like a Man, Man campaign” followed by the successful Old Spice Man viral videos, the once quiet brand is now stirring up plenty of buzz among marketers and consumers alike. When I went to the Society for New Communications Research 5th Research Symposium earlier this month, I attended a session where Old Spice brand manager James Moorhead told the stories behind the recent marketing success. In this blog, I’d like to share some of what I learned with you.

Campaign Summary

The Old Spice marketing campaign is called “Smell Like a Man, Man”. So far, the campaign has gone through three phases:

Phase 1: Launched around the Superbowl time, it uses humorous vignettes featuring a sexy man to convey the brand’s role in the journey from a young man to full manhood. During that same time period, Dove was planning to launch a competing new men’s personal care product line Dove Men+Care on Superbowl. But Old Spice decided to launch its campaign “around” Superbowl rather than on Superbowl for cost efficiency and proper audience reach (more on that later). Below is a commercial from this phase.

Continue reading “Best Practices — Old Spice Marketing Campaign”

Averting Service Disasters – Quicken Loans the Sequel

Posted on

Last week, I used my unpleasant mortgage application experience with Quicken Loans to demonstrate the danger of force locking in consumers instead of fostering loyalty. Since then, I have received some interesting communication from Quicken Loans. As a consumer, I emerged from the entire experience feeling OK again about Quicken Loans as a lender. While Quicken Loans had lost us as a customer for this mortgage because we already chose another lender, it successfully averted future negative word-of-mouth and ill will against the company. I detail my experience in this post as a case study of how companies can use social media to discover and address service failures and customer dissatisfaction.

Chronology
June 29 My unpleasant phone conversation with a Quicken Loans customer service representative
June 30 My blog on the experience as well as negative review on Epinions.com (note: consumers act fast when they feel unhappy)
July 1 Kelly at QuickenLoans commented on my Epinions.com review, offering to look into the problem and requesting more information from me
July 2 I emailed Kelly with full details of the incident
July 6 (after Independence Day Holiday weekend) I received a call as well as an email from Scott King, Lead Client Advocate at Quicken Loans. He had listened to my original conversation with their customer representative and read my blog. In the phone call and email, he apologized for our unpleasant experience and offered to introduce us to one of their best mortgage banker for a second chance.

The Response
You can read Kelly’s original comment on Epinions.com. With Scott’s permission, I am publishing his email response below: Continue reading “Averting Service Disasters – Quicken Loans the Sequel”