The Use of Social Media

Let’s start to talk about the new trend in community development and social media expansion in our branding world today.

As we said before, social media are becoming more and more present in our everyday lives. It’s important for a company to be present on Internet and to develop its actions on Social Media.

Some companies do it pretty well as mentioned on this website:

http://mashable.com/2009/02/06/social-media-smartest-brands/

This article will show you 10 of the smartest big brands in Social Media while giving you examples of what they do and where.

Let’s take some of the examples mentioned in the article and see why are the brands powerful in social media.

The first good example is Blendtec. They started a video campaign on YouTube called “Will it blend?” where you could see Blendtec CEO, Tom Dickson, trying to blend objects in one of the company’s blender.

 

This was a low cost campaign and it contributes to a five-fold increase in sales.

I think that what Blendtec did was a very good use of the social media YouTube. Everyone knows YouTube; it’s the biggest video search engine on Internet so by using this social media, it was a good way for Blendtec to get many customers see their videos.

What they do well is that it was funny and original videos that were only a few minutes long so it wasn’t boring and people were enjoying the videos. It demystified the CEO by presenting him doing something funny. It also enabled the company to show how effective were their blenders; because it is not obvious that an iPhone can actually be blend and in the video, you can see that it can!

Another good example is Starbucks. They actually created a new website called “My Starbucks idea” where people could submit their suggestions and the most popular ones were highlighted and reviewed. 

It enabled the company to get consumers’ impressions and feedbacks. I reckon that this was a good move by Starbucks because it gave the impression to the consumers that their opinion counts and that the company is listening to them. Customers like to be taking into account; they feel closer to the company and they are more likely to by their product. 

Moreover, they even created a blog called “Ideas in action” where people could actually see the process of the changes suggested: a good way to show customers that their ideas were useful and even put into place.

And the last example that I can name is the Ford’s one. Ford did an internal gaffe where their legal department sent out cease and desist letters to forum users using Ford trademarks. People were outraged. To repair this problem, Scott Monty, Ford’s community manager, was able to solve the problem quickly and let people know the true story and they were informed of every steps of the way through Twitter. 

This was a very good way to handle their crisis. It showed that Ford was telling the truth and that they wanted to inform their customers. Thanks to the social media Twitter, Ford was able to inform in real-time the consumers and this transparency and constant information were really well received.

To conclude, we can say that they are many ways to use social media. What we can say is that social media are incontrovertible nowadays. Everyone uses it and everything happens there. It’s an important way of communication and companies need to be there! The good thing is that any information is available anywhere in the world at any moment. It gives us the possibility of being closer to the company by knowing what they do.