When companies created a business strategy before the ‘social media’ era, the marketing aspect mostly used to be a one way strategy, for example, television commercials, radio commercials, billboard-adds and magazine-adds. Now, the social media era has just started and because it’s a new phenomena, it could be difficult for companies to cope with this new world where different rules apply. And even these rules aren’t very clear and can cause a lot of uncertainties among managers.
The four articles that we had to read in the third week, have a certain perspective on how to cope with this complex world of social media. The main points they have are first of all about the consumer: they are the determining and dominant factor in the social media space. So don’t try to fight that, but try to leverage it in your advantage. Secondly, ROI cannot always be translated into money, but is sometimes translated into social currency. This means you’ll get a stronger engagement with more consumers. The articles show their ways how to involve these main points in a social media strategy.
I want to elucidate these articles by giving two examples of organizations that match with the results found in the articles, but also cope in their own way, with the rules that are part of this social media world. The first example is Starbucks. I thought this was an interesting example, because they showed engagement with their consumers. But they did it on a controversial topic: Starbucks stated to be supportive on same-sex marriage. Immediately, they got a reaction from the NOM, which is an anti gay-marriage organization. They wanted to boycott Starbucks because of this and tried to get people to join them in this mission. But this plan backfired and it made Starbucks even more likeable to the public. So sales weren’t affected and the engagement with the consumer got stronger. A great example of strong social media marketing. But they took a risk though. In a country like the United States, controversial topics can heat things up, which could also lead to affecting a company in a negative way. So, if you do not want to endanger your company, you should know your consumers and where they stand on a certain topic. If you feel certain and secure enough to express an opinion as a company, you can do so and then you will only strengthen the ties with the consumers.
The second example is IBM. As the articles have shown, it is important to thoroughly engage with your consumer when it comes to social media marketing. But this is a time consuming investment with a demand for a lot of efforts. IBM might have found the answer by decentralizing their social media task force: not a small group of people is concerned with the handling of the social media, but all of the employees are concerned with engaging in the social media environment, as the face of the company. This will decrease investments in time and effort and engagement with consumers will be more personal and therefore, as seen in the articles, stronger. And this without even forcing their employees to promote IBM on the social networking sites. Quite an accomplishment one could say, but is this something every organization or company should do? Because this could also go the wrong way: if there are a lot of employees that aren’t that passionate about social media and/or your company, you can have a big problem as an organization. Either, you have nothing going on in the online world, or, even worse, your organization is promoted in a negative way, but the last alternative would be the lesser case. The answer is finding and selecting passionate workers, who are willing to also put this passion in engaging with the consumer in the social media environment.
