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Social Media Poster Children
As marketers search for the best methods to deploy and measure social media, they also are scouring the world for success stories to demonstrate the power and effectiveness of social media.
Like the e-commerce success stories that were cited over and over in the 1990s-Dell, Cisco, Amazon.com, eBay- the first round of social media success stories are circulating and recirculating. Thus far, the social media poster children include Dell, Ford, and Zappos.
Zappos is a case of a modern company jumping whole hog into social media, and it has garnered the most attention.
As ReadWriteWeb reports:
"Online shoe retailer Zappos does shoes and social media remarkably well. Scores of bloggers, lots of video blogging and 198 employees on Twitter help keep the company's profile high and humanize the folks behind the shoe sales."
Dell made headlines recently when it revealed it had used Twitter advertisements to rake in $2 milion in computer sales. However, as some observers have pointed out, Dell's use was not that radical, rather a new twist on an old method of direct marketing. Dell simply used Twitter to offer customers a discount.
Paul Dunay used Dell's case as an opportunity to chide marketers who are wringing their hands over the perceived immeasurability of social media:
"How did they do it? With a coupon code! Wow, now that's inventive. But this is not a dig at Dell, it's a dig at all of us marketers who say they don't understand how to calculate an ROI from Social Media. My point is Dell isn't using any secret sauce- it's just plain old common sense."
A commentator on Paul Dunay's blog also found Dell's social media exploit unexceptional, explaining:
"This Dell campaign is not 'social' at all. It's traditional marketing on Twitter with the 'funnel' logic: 100K will read; 10K will check and 500 will buy. Very much like an e-mailing except that opt in emailing makes the consumer more in charge of what he accepts or not."
Ford also does not seem the best example to put forward as a "success" story. In "Why Ford Is Winning on the Social Web," Mark Ghuneim cites without irony the fact that Ford had an impressive 4,915 Twitter posts on April 24 when "the company posted a first quarter loss of $1.4 billion." Ghumein sees Ford tapping into the American spirit and gaining mindshare within the massive cloud of "blog buzz" while conceding that "much of it is doom and gloom." Although Ghuneim makes a case for Ford's social media efforts being admirable, they are not showing results on the bottom line. It seems like Ford is whistling while the ship is sinking.
Perhaps the best showcase for social media is the Being Peter Kim blog, where ex-Forrester analyst and social media beacon Peter Kim has collected and posted more than 1,000 social media marketing examples. The examples have been sorted into categories, with the four biggest categories being blogging, social networking, microblogging, and online video. Widgets is fifth.
While Kim's examples show the creativity being applied to social media, they also reinforce the view of many marketers that social media goals and solutions are variegated, and that there are no one-rule-fits-all methodologies for using social media in business. As Shel Holtz says:
"Depending on your line of business, certain social networks will work better for you than others. It's all about aligning business strategy to the use of each tool. Otherwise, you're wasting time and not reaching the right audience with the right message on the right network."
The amount of work being focused on leveraging social media for business is engendering innovation. Douglas A. McIntyre in "The Ten Ways Twitter Will Permanently Change American Business," provides a sampling of innovative business uses for Twitter, including locator services, data mining, micro-payments, and fundraising.
As McIntyre points out, "plenty of large corporations like Starbucks" are already using Twitter as a marketing tool. "Twitter will probably evolve into both a community of individuals and a community of companies which provide goods and services for those individuals," he says.
Bottom Line
As increasing numbers of companies work with social media, examples are emerging that show the effectiveness of social media for PR and sales. However, as the experts point out, there are no standard methods for deploying and measuring social media for PR or selling, rather the variety of companies, goals, and applications, coupled with the nature of social media, defies attempts to find across-the-board methods.
For companies and CIOs, the key questions are:
Is social media a valuable business tool or waste of time? Answer: It can be both.
Can companies leverage social media to their advantage? Answer: Yes.
Should social media be used to create a positive aura for your brand or to drive sales? Answer: It could be either or both.
How can companies leverage social media to their advantage? Answer: It depends.
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