Social Marketing Realizing Benefits For Corporate America

Ford Motor Corporation.  Levi Strauss.  Chevron. Starbucks.  What do these big names have in common, besides being corporate behemoths?  They all are on the forefront in using social networking as an essential tool in reaching their customers.

A new article today in USA Today discusses how social networking has made significant inroads into the business world.   What’s nice about this article is that they provide some specific, real-world results of the efforts, something often missing from discussions about effective use of social media tools in the business world.

For example, Intuit, maker of the popular Quickbooks software, launched a new small business site, incorporating Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  The result was that customers flocked to the site and shipments of their flagship product were up 57% year over year.

Papa John’s Pizza launched a Facebook-based marketing campaign and gained thousands of customers, and saw traffic on their website soar by over 250%.

Companies like Comcast and Lenovo are using Twitter to conduct elements of their customer support, and seeing a reduction in call center traffic.

It’s heartening to see some companies realize tangible benefits to their investments in social networking.  All too often you hear more about the ineffective use rather than successes.  Who cares how many Twitter followers you have if it doesn’t benefit your bottom line?  As more and more stories such as this one come out, we expect that more companies will start to evaluate social networking for their own purposes, and we are here to help.

There are the usual caveats, however, as you read stories about these companies’ successes:

• Social networking is not a replacement for other, more traditional marketing tools, but rather an additional tool to leverage.  In fact, the key to success is figuring out how to integrate between all your marketing tools to get the biggest return.
• It takes time to build an audience.  Most all of the successful practitioners have invested time and resources into making sure that their efforts will lead to measurable benefits.  You can’t use the “check box” mentality in this effort, namely just saying “Oh yeah, we have a Twitter account” but not really using it to any specific end.
• Some companies are not particularly suited for social networking.  Most obvious are any industry with tightly regulated information.  Allowing customers to freely post their thoughts could quickly devolve into an administrative or even legal nightmare in such industries.

The article closes with an important warning for those who choose to dismiss social networking in their business plans.  “Companies have no choice.  This is where their customers are going.”