At yesterday’s Social Media World Forum in Santa Clara, CA, I attended a panel discussion entitled “Benchmarking Advertising on Social Networks.” The panelists represented American Airlines, Harley Davidson and Warner Brothers Records. I also recently attended a social media discussion with Dell Computer at the TechTarget Online ROI Summit. Here’s a recap on how these top brands are leveraging social media to acquire and engage with customers and fans.
How is Social Media Being Used?
- American Airlines (AA) uses social media in targeted geographies, known as “geo-targeting” to boost passengers on specific flights. They also provide travel-related content beyond flight information as a value-add to their passengers (restaurants, entertainment, lodging, etc.)
- Harley Davidson uses social media for new customer acquisition and to build a community of evangelists among its customer base.
- Warner Brothers recently brought its advertising in-house as it experiments with ways to monetize content that is often free on sites such as YouTube.
- Dell Computer uses social media to engage with prospects and customers and to track and respond to what people are saying about them. Dell uses blogs, online forums, bookmarketing/share widgits, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, flickr and LinkedIN. Through social media, Dell sold over $2M of product last year using a Dell Outlet promo code. Employees can engage with prospects and customers online and follow a code of conduct that requires them to identify themselves as working for Dell and to “use their best judgment”. (To see the largest collection of social media policies, check out the Social Media Governance website.)
Benchmarking Process
- AA benchmarks by setting measurable goals, such as the number of passengers on certain flights.
- Harley Davidson uses Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as 1) relationships (no. of fans or friends), 2) click-through-rate (CTR) on paid ads, 3) visitor engagements (number of times content was shared among friends) and 4) media value (profile visits, cost-per-click).
- Warner Bros. tracks and measures the amount of traffic that they drive to an artist’s site, and the number of Facebook friends and Twitter followers.
- Dell uses tools such as Buzzient to see the most active sources of a topic as well as Radian6, GoogleTrends, Google Alerts and TwitterSearch to measure their “share of voice” in comparison to competitors. They track changes in Twitter follower count, number of re-tweets, changes in website or blog traffic and their Twitter influence using a tool called Twinfluence.com.
Use of Facebook and Twitter
- AA uses Facebook to spur conversations among their passengers and to hook people to content, what they call “virtual hubs.” Twitter is used as a listening tool to monitor what people are saying about AA. Six full-time customer service reps monitor Twitter and reach out to people to assist them if appropriate. Twitter is used to deliver flight information as well – especially delays due to weather issues. As a result, calls to the AA customer support 800 number have dropped.
- Harley Davidson uses Facebook for initiating conversations with and among fans. Twitter is used by fans to see “what’s happening this moment” at Harley Davidson-sponsored events.
- Warner Bros. views Facebook as a place for conversations to happen. They post photos of fans with an artist and the fans will tag themselves. Twitter is viewed as a “digital billboard” to drive traffic to Facebook or an artist’s site. It also is used for scavenger hunts in which fans use clues delivered by Twitter posts to find CDs and concert tickets.
- Dell monitors Twitter for both positive and negative mentions of the company or their products as 20% of Tweets mention a product name or company. They have several Facebook Pages to build fans and discussions among their target user segments.
Summary
Key advice from these brands:
- Listen first – find out where your audience hangs out online and what they’re saying about you
- Integrate social media into your overall communications mix, being consistent with content and messaging
- Set measurable objectives and monitor results
At the end of the day, social media is another avenue to build a strong community and trust among your prospects, customers, partners and investors.
For more information, check out these blog posts: