Tag: best practice

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 — Effective Use of Twitter

Posted on

What is it?

In this entry, I am going to discuss two organizations: McKinsey Quarterly and Brooklyn Museum.  These two organizations are very different in many ways.  But they share one commonality in that they both use Twitter very effectively in gathering customer intelligence and strengthening customer relationships.  McKinsey Quarterly’s Twitter username is @McKQuarterly; and Brooklyn Museum is simply @brooklynmuseum.

Why is it a good idea?

Many companies use Twitter or other microblogging tools to bring customers more timely updates about the business.  This is what I call a “broadcast” model.  While it is useful in its own right, McKinsey Quarterly and Brooklyn Museum went beyond that by practicing the following:

(1) Attach links to tweets so that users can choose to drill deeper into a topic if they are interested.  Not only does this offer a higher level of interactivity to satisfy user needs, but with proper tracking it also provides useful insight on what interests customers.

(2) Use @replies functionality to build a dialogue with customers.  For those who are not quite familiar with Twitter, one can add @username into one’s tweet to reply to a user or to refer to a specific user.  Both Brooklyn Museum and McKinsey Quarterly closely monitor user comments and use @replies to respond to those comments in a timely fashion.  This approach makes users feel appreciated, which encourages future participation and builds loyalty.

(3) The third tactic that I would like to discuss is used by McKinsey Quarterly.  They have turned their twitter account and their large number of followers (7645 as of right now and it’s not hard to imagine the high relevance of these followers)  into a marketing research machine.  Earlier this year, for example, McKinsey Quarterly published an article on Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work.  Then using Twitter, they asked their followers what organizations get the most out of Web 2.0.  Combined with a special hashtag (#web2.0work), they were able to track responses from users.  The company then updated the original article based on the ideas they received from the Twitter community (of course they posted a tweet about that update too).  Does it get much better than free marketing research?

Best Practices — P&G Mr. Clean Car Wash

Posted on

What is it?

You might be aware of the Mr. Clean AutoDry Carwash System.  Well, Mr. Clean Car Wash I am talking about here is not a product.  It is an actual car wash service that P&G opened up in Ohio.  Two locations have been opened so far, one in Mason and the other in Cincinnati.  Besides this innovative brand extension, it has also been reported that P&G is opening up Tide-Y dry cleaners in the Kansas City area.

Why is it a good idea?

(1) Household products are a highly-saturated market.  Branching out from the product market to services opens up a whole new set of opportunities and revenue potentials. As an added bonus, the services area is also highly fragmented competition-wise, unlike the product market.

(2) A physical shop gives P&G an opportunity to put a face to its products. Managed well, this can lead to more intimate and meaningful customer relationships.

(3) The shops can serve the function of advertising and publicity for the physical product/brand.

(4) Having first-experience with people’s carwashing and dry-cleaning behavior can give P&G valuable market research information.

Small Print

Sometimes an idea is so pioneering and unusual that it naturally comes with some risks. For P&G, the biggest risk is in its ability to execute these service shops well.  Being a consumer packaged goods company, it is not exactly an expert on services marketing and service logistics.  If not done right, bad customer experience from the physical shops can have a damaging effect on the core brand.  I suspect this is partially the reason why P&G has been very cautious in this area, so far keeping a very low key, only experimenting with the idea in selected local areas and possibly rolling out nationally if the experiments prove successful.