I think the best way to learn is through other people’s successes and failures (this is almost as effective as learning from your own!). Help me help you – add to this running list of great examples, tips, and best practices of how companies and non-profits, big and small, have utilized social media.
Remember, though, one company’s social media success could be another company’s social media failure. While some of these strategies you might be able to “cut and paste” right into your situation, the magic of social media is how you make it relevant and compelling for your particular set of customers. Also, some of these examples are a few years old – I’ve only selected ones where I think are still relevant today.
Consumer Products
- Clickz: Skittles social media efforts go from sour to sweet Now, they only trail two other brands (Coke & Starbucks) in terms of facebook fans (March 2010)
- Futurelab: How VitaminWater used facebook to create its next flavor This got a lot of buzz and publicity and is a cool idea, but it’s hard to say whether this led to incremental product revenues.
- P&G tried social media for tampons (that’s right, tampons), targeting takkle.com, a social media site for high school athletes, cheerleaders, etc and also on their BeingGirl.com website that’s all about growing up. Very targeted. (March 2007)
Other Products
- HP realized that they weren’t engaging customers at their critical point of decision – people only visited HP when they had already done a ton of research and were almost ready to buy. Based on research that “50% of people who say they’d recommend you haven’t,” they focused on activating advocacy as one of their primary strategies.
- Legos is leveraging their worldwide community of enthusiasts and build a site just for them called CLICK. But it allows users to generate content to the community on twitter, facebook, etc.(January 2010)
- Social Media Explorer: A Case Study with the Chevy Volt How Chevy engaged the influencers to build buzz around their Volt (March 2010)
- BlogWell: Ford’s Social Media Story They set their content free and let people share it freely and also weren’t afraid for unfiltered, public feedback. Their strategy for social media: “to humanize the company” (October 2009). Money quote: “everyone has a car story… now we can show everyone”
Service & Experience Industries
- JetBlue is already famous on twitter for engaging in real conversations and getting someone a wheelchair within 10 minutes at a specific airport, but recently, they also decided to give away 1,000 tickets to their twitter followers. (March 2010)
- Dairy Queen wanted to humanize their brand, a good move for a company whose been around for a while. They did so with a company blog (written by real employees) and the usual mix of social media tools.
- Comcast, notoriously bad for customer service, is a superstar when it comes to customer service initiated through twitter. (June 2009) Their CEO even said that this foray into twitter has “changed the culture of the company” (October 2009)
- Sodexho uses social media for recruiting Sodexho has one of the most active recruiting presences in social media that I’ve ever seen (Oct 2009)
- Houlihans uses to revamp product line and increase profits Believe it or not, this Irish pub restaurant chain used social media to completely revamp their menu (and their profile margin) (March 2010)
- SeaWorld reached out to 22 influential bloggers to build buzz on one of their key attractions. They calculated a positive ROI – both in terms of new revenues generated as well as cost/impression vs. what they would’ve spent on TV. (March 2008 – ancient, but still relevant!)
Non-Profits
- Illinois Poison Center did a “Blog-a-thon”, showing “A Day in the Life of A Poison Call Center”. Every hour, they posted the representative phone calls they’d get into their call center, and WIRED magazine picked it up.
- Hospital system uses twitter to recruit physicians One recruiting firm utilized twitter to break through the noise to recruit a gastroenterologist. Their tweets were as much about relevant content as they were about jobs. (September 2009)
- Hospital Impact: Social Media for Crisis Communications The same principles of crisis communications applies to whatever tool you’re using – whether it be twitter or a press conference (January 2010)
- Hospitals and the use of hyper-local social media information Example of one hospital tweeter and the 5 different types of tweets that add value (June 2009)
- The Nature Conservancy raised $75,000 through facebook fundraising and a lil app called the lil green patch. (September 2008)
B2B
- Winning Workplaces, a 6-person consulting practice, has utilized LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to build relationships with a lot of potential customers.
- SAP utilized social media (PDF) to skyrocket customer engagement. Money quote from one of their VPs: “We wanted the community to influence the company as much as the company influences the community.” (April 2007)
- HubSpot “lured” this business owner by how they politely engaged her through a long process of several months. This is old, but the principle remains – relationship-building is key (June 2008)
Other Case Studies
- 5 Twitter business case studies Here’s some businesses that have really been thoughtful on how to use Twitter – from exclusive coupons to customer service to real-time aggregation of hot topics (Jan 2010)
- Social Media Examiner: Case Studies Lots of case studies here from a pizza palor to Avaya. My favorite one here is TakeLessons.com which grew so fast partly due to social media. (on-going)
- WOMMA: Case Study Library from the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (ongoing)
- More good (and not so good) practices + AT&T & Best Buy case studies Some good examples on what NOT to do here (June 2009)