Posts Tagged: branding

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11
Nov 11

Newell Rubbermaid: The Importance of Branded Communities- Live from BlogWell

1:30 — SocialMedia.org’s Kurt Vanderah introduces Newell Rubbermaid‘s VP of E-Business & Interactive Marketing, Bert DuMars.

1:31 — Bert begins by talking about MimioConnect, a branded community for educators to learn how to use their Mimio product.

1:33 — Bert: Mimio is a smart whiteboard for the educational marketplace, featuring teaching systems, distance learning, etc. It’s designed to help teachers teach.

1:34 — The big problem is that teachers are given little or no training on using the new whiteboard technology. In 2005, a distributor created the community with 5000 people in New Zealand. Teachers were helping each other use the products to their full potential and to teach students better. Newell Rubbermaid decided to hire the community manager from New Zealand and move him to the US.

1:35 — They also hired the super users in the community to start with as part-time contractors, and eventually hired some of the best as full-time employees.

1:37 — Bert: For us, the technology running the community is not as significant as getting participation. So the technology running this community is not a major issue.

1:38 — Bert: Today, the membership of the private community is 95,000 with high engagement and participation.

1:39 — Bert shared some of their biggest lessons learned from the program:

  • Engaging the most influential advocates and actually bringing them into the team which runs the community can make the difference between success and failure.
  • Embrace video tutorials, as they make learning to use the product easier than any other technology.
  • To be a successful branded community, it must solve a customer’s problem.
  • The best ideas to grow the community come from community members.
  • Identify the strongest advocates and leverage them, and sometimes hire them.

1:44 — Bert says that by paying attention and listening to your community, you’ll find:

  • New Product ideas
  • New ways to use products
  • Quickly identify product problems

1:50 — Bert says that Newell Rubbermaid feels that in the BtoB space, private communities will grow in importance and effectiveness.

Q&A

Q: Does the community know that you have paid advocates?

A: Yes, we are sure that everyone knows that we have hired someone as an advocate.

Q: What are some of the challenges from going from 5,000 to 95,000 people?

A: As it is scaling, you need to make sure the technology is running fast, to ensure the quality of the online experience is still very high. They plan to offer more features in the future.

Q: Does this help with SEO and awareness?

A: The goal of the community is to keep the focus tight on the product line and not expand the focus.

Q: How do you monetize the community, does it move the needle for sales?

A: In the education market, word of mouth is very important because the customers are advocating for us whenever they gather together.

Q: Are you doing any gamification in the community?

A: No, not today — but possibly in the future.

Q: What is the ROI of the community?

A: Pinning down the ROI is very difficult as with most social media channels. But we believe that 95,000 advocates who find better ways to use the products and be more effective in their jobs are happy with us.

- Blog by Sprinklr’s Chris Kieff, reprinted with permission from blogwell.

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10
Nov 11

Brands Fail to Grasp Social Media Oppurtunities

Too many brands fail to integrate their social media strategy with real business objectives and therefore waste money and may actually alienate potential customers.

TNS, a Kantar company, released its Digital Life study Thursday, a comprehensive view of how more than 72,000 consumers in 60 countries behave online and why they do what they do. The study found 57% of consumers in developed worlds do not want to engage with brands via social media.

“Consumers want brands to do more than just sell them stuff… But at the same time, if brands are going to have conversations with consumers, they need to bring more than just marketing packages, they need to actually have a value exchange.” – Matthew Froggatt, Chief Development Officer for TNS

The Three Mistakes brands make

  1. Undertaking activity online without clear objectives and business alignment.
  2. Overlooking the core brand idea when they plan online activity.
  3. Failing to understand the difference between engagement and interruption.

Read more details on this study, and tips for your brands social media strategy at The Wall Street Journal.

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8
Nov 11

Google+ Launches Branded Pages

Google has finally unveiled brand pages for Google+, allowing businesses and brands to join Google’s social network.

Google+ brand page features:

- Similar to Google+ Profiles, except for a square icon that designates that it’s a Page rather than a Profile.

- Users can add brands to their circles.

- Users can view brand information and browse their photos.

When the search giant first launched Google+, brands immediately jumped on the opportunity to gain additional exposure. Google soon asked brands to stop creating Google+ profiles. It quickly became a controversy that forced the company to accelerate its plans for business pages.

Go to Mashable for more details, and video on Google+ branded pages.

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8
Nov 11

All Brands Are Publishers, Learn How to Be a Good One

Brands are all about voice, meaning, values and point of view, having the skills of a conversational publisher is critical to success. It’s not enough to buy engagement ads, have a Facebook page, or man a Twitter handle. You also need to add value to the independent web, so you have things to share on those dependent web services and platforms.

Here are 5 guidelines to effective publishing for your brand:

  • Conversation over dictation. Instead of delivering a message to consumers, have a discussion with them.
  • Platform over distribution. What matters is how you use a platform to create effective interaction with customers.
  • Service over product. In conversation marketing, you’re providing a service. The more value it adds, the more it will be shared.
  • Iteration over perfection. Good first drafts and speedy responses will always trump corporate speak.
  • Engagement over consumption. Simple consumption isn’t very interesting.

Read more details on these five golden rules of publishing at adage.

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20
Oct 11

Do your customers expect you to respond on Twitter?

Kyle Lacey has an excellent post which follows up on yesterdays post from Jay Baer that 70% of companies don’t respond to complaints on Twitter.

“I found something else in the study and I find it fairly disturbing. Yes, 70% of companies ignoring customer complaints on Twitter is disgusting. However, the study also found that 51% of respondents didn’t believe the company would actually answer them anyway.”

“This is a symptom to the overall problem of communication within the digital world. There is a great quote from Paul Greenburg that pretty much sums all this up.”

“What I do care about is that you conclude that your company needs to change the way you deal with the customer NOW, because the customer has already changed the way they deal with you.”

Read the whole post to find the three things Kyle thinks you should remember (although he neglected to mention Sprinklr’s SIREn platform we’ll forgive him this time.)

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10
Oct 11

The Influence of Online Reviews

According to the 2011 Cone Online Influence Trend Tracker released back in August, four-out-of-five consumers have changed their minds about a recommended purchase based solely on negative information they found online from the social customer.

Higher cost items are more likely to be researched online:

Read the entire article written by Michael Brito on Facebook.


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8
Jun 10

3 Opportunities to use Social Media in the Airline industry – Best Practices from Virgin America, JetBlue and Southwest

Virgin America

A few progressive airlines are quietly using Social Media to re-invent client-facing parts of their businesses. Their success makes them great examples for the rest of the travel industry and big brands at large. A study of social media outreach in the airline industry reveals three major transformative opportunities:

Monitoring Feedback and Issue Resolution

Twitter is proving to be a very efficient way to monitor feedback in real time and resolve customer issues quickly. JetBlue, who is often cited as an example of smart corporate use of Twitter does a terrific job at it. Started as an experiment in the spring of 2007 by Manager of Corporate Communications, Morgan Johnston, their Twitter feed @JetBlue has now over a 1.6 million followers. During its 10th anniversary summit, @JetBlue even created a dedicated hash tag, #jblc10, to push people to voice their feedback.

Southwest learned the need to monitor social conversations in real time the hard way. In February 2010, an incident involving movie director Kevin Smith and the Airline almost turned into a PR debacle for the brand. Thankfully, Southwest, an early adopter of social media (July 2007) was ready to respond quickly and personally to the incident, using twitter to make public amends. Today @southwestair has over a million followers.


Obviously, waiting for an unhappy customer to ‘call’ customer service makes it unacceptably late in the new real time world.

Increasing Branding and Brand Loyalty

Engaging customers using Social Media networks are a great way for airlines to build brand experiences outside of the actual flight. One brand that does an outstanding job of building brand loyalty via personalized conversations on Facebook and Twitter is Virgin America. @virginamerica has almost 80,000 followers on Twitter and about 60,000 fans on Facebook. This week, Virgin America’s Facebook page featured the story of a couple who first met on a Virgin America flight and got engaged this week at the airport in front of the baggage carousel. These types of posts are usually interspersed news and announcements effectively humanizing the entire communications stream. Virgin America has earned a lot of good press for extending their customer-focused, tech-savvy and fun branding on to the web using social media. Twitter even selected them as one of the first brands to roll out their paid ‘sponsored tweets’ program.

Direct Marketing

It should surprise no-one that airlines are capitalizing on customer engagement goodwill to sell tickets. JetBlue has a separate twitter feed, @jetbluecheeps, to post deals (typically on Mondays) giving “the already spontaneous audience of Twitter users a chance to grab great last-minute fares”. @jetbluecheeps has over 78,000 followers. Virgin America and SouthWest broadcasts deals on their main feeds, effectively merging sales with customer stories, service and corporate communications. Occasionally these airlines run contests to stimulate growth and engagement, say 50% off the ticket for the next 50 Twitter followers. As with other channels on the web, actual ROI in dollars can be measured by embedding web analytics tags into outbound message links.

It will be interesting to see how the recent Passenger Bills of Rights affects airlines’ use of social media. David Martin, CEO of the social networking site Kontain.com probably articulated it best as quoted in a CNN article “You can’t just write in a complaint or call customer service anymore… social media, it’s the only weapon,” he said. “Airlines need to be more terrified of that than the actual bill, because they’re going to have to compensate passengers anyway each time they get held up on the tarmac, but they’re also going to lose passengers because their brand will be destroyed every time a passenger uses social media.”

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