internet marketing Archives | Ping! >> Loyalty Science in Practice

Social Media Showdown

Posted on May 3, 2012

As I mentioned in the last post, the MBA students in my Internet Marketing class this semester completed a social media project. In the project, they observed the social media efforts of two competing companies over the course of three consecutive weeks. It is not possible to repeat all the 20-page reports in a blog post, but I thought it may be fun for you to see which company within each pair was considered to be better. By better, I don’t mean what the companies have but instead what the companies do. In other words, we don’t use the sheer number of followers, fans, etc. as the judging criterion, as that can be easily skewed by the company’s existing market position. Instead, better is defined in the sense that the winning company is doing a better job interacting with and engaging consumers through these social media channels. In most cases, the social media channels observed were three of the following: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and company blog.

Before getting to the results, I’d like to thank the 21 students who put their hard work into the project and made this information possible. You guys/gals rock!

Now are you ready to see who won the showdown? Here you go!

Industry	Opponent 1	Opponent 2	Winner
Airline	Delta	Aeroflot	Delta (barely)
Automobile	Audi	Lexus	Audi
Automobile	Honda	Toyota	Toyota
Camera	Cannon	Nikon	Canon
Entertainment	Tiesto	David Guetta	Tiesto
Entertainment	The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC)	Bellator Fighting Championship	UFC
Financial	TradeKing	E*Trade	E*Trade Baby
Food & Beverages	Pizza Hut	Domino's	Domino's
Food & Beverages	Panera Bread	Schlotzsky_s	Panera Bread
Food & Beverages	Red Bull	Monster Energy	Red Bull
Food & Beverages	Starbucks	Green Mountain Coffee	Tie
Health	WeightWatchers	Jenny Craig	WeightWatchers
IT	Microsoft	Google	Google
IT	NVidia	AMD	NVidia
Media	Martha Steward Wedding	The Knot	Tie
Non-Profit	Saddleback Church	Fellowship Church	Saddleback Church
Online Service	Match.com	eHarmony	eHarmony
Online Service	Living Social	Groupon	Groupon
Sports	Billabong	Oneill's	Tie
Sports	Nike	Under Armour	Nike, though both are doing a good job
Sports	NFL	MLB	Tie

Do you agree with the students’ observations? Please tell us what you think!

Social Media Lessons from Thirty Brands

Posted on January 13, 2011January 16, 2011

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.

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”