A good company fosters a good return on engagement (ROE) and a bad company does not.
I define Return on Engagement as data that shows the effort a business puts into social media versus the amount of exposure their brand and products generate through social media (the increased fans on Facebook, Retweets on Twitter, traffic on the website and microsites, reviews on Yelp, Posts through foursquare, etc).
But what does a good social media strategy look like? What elements of a social media strategy foster a positive ROE?
There are two companies that do this particularly well and one company that is struggling in the age of transparency and conversation.
Effective Social Media Strategies: Starbucks and Toyota
Wetpaint and Altimeter keep rankings on the most socially engaged companies. They call it the Engagement Database. In their rankings, Starbucks (ranked #1) and Toyota (ranked #21) have two of the most effective social media strategies among the ranked companies. There is an interesting correlations between these companies. Their social media strategies are very similar, and both have high levels of ROE.
Strategy 1: Social Media is a Company Wide Effort
Both Starbucks and Toyota are limited in their social media teams; Starbucks has six people on their team, and Toyota has three people on theirs. In addition, I doubt anyone on the Starbucks team can make a Frappuccino or anyone on the Toyota team can explain how the sticking accelerator is being fixed. But each company has employees that are experts in these areas.
So, when Starbucks created MyStarbucksidea.com, the social media team wasn't creating content and responding to ideas posted by customers. Instead, "Starbucks set out to ensure the departments impacted by the site (which includes practically every department) had a representative who was responsible for being the liaison" (from Engagement Database Report found on the website). The Mini-Starbucks Card was actually a customer idea that made its way to Chuck Davidson, an employee at Starbucks. He traced the comments, wrote a proposal, and put it into action.
Toyota has as similar breakdown in roles:
"Take a look at the Twitter account and you’ll see that in addition to DeYager, three public relations specialists from sales, environment/safety, and public affairs/community outreach contribute posts. The Toyota Twitter team uses monitoring software to identify tweets mentioning Toyota, then responds from a respective area of expertise using technology from CoTweet to manage multiple authors on the single Twitter account. This same mode is utilized on Toyota’s Facebook pages — response requests are sent out and come back from around the company, depending on the topic" (from Engagement Database Report found on the website)
Clay Shirky talks about how standard company hierarchies are breaking down due to social media, but existent companies are finding ways of incorporating it into their standing organizations. Building through ways to company experts is the beginning of an effective social media strategy with positive ROE.
Strategy 2: Choosing Platforms Requires Effort
Besides being good at spreading social media through the company, Starbucks and Toyota are also picky about which platforms they use to engage. For instance, Starbucks discovered that for every three person that interacted with a particular news item on their Facebook Page, three of their friends joined the page. Facebook enhanced their ROE.
The social media team at Toyota wanted to blog. But organizing it would have been a logistical nightmare. In addition, the higher ups were not so keen on being that transparent. But the team knew that breaking into social media was necessary if they wanted to see the sort of results that Starbucks was getting. So, they began with a YouTube Channel and uploaded pre-made content from Toyota PR. After that, the higher ups became comfortable with the idea of a Twitter feed. They also work with an independent blog, priuschat.com.
Reasons for Social Media Strategies: Dasani.
My last post explained how bottled water companies are coming under fire due to social media. But Dasani has no social brand identity. They have no social way to engage customers. This is a bad decision because the customers are already talking about their brand (once again, see my previous post) on social platforms. They may still engage customers in traditional modes, but customers are no longer engaging them there.
In addition, the report from the producers of the Engagement database charts another reason to engage customers on Social Media.
The chart above shows that the more engaged companies have a better bottom line. This the point at which ROE turns into ROI.
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