As mentioned before, social media success doesn’t happen overnight- it’s a long-term plan, a social media strategy. Lois Kelly and BL Ochman lay out some tips for successful strategies using social media. Developing a strategy means that you have a goal in mind, a goal with measurable objectives which will provide the foundation to your social media presence. Without goals and objectives your organization could use different media incoherently, not accomplish much at all, and have nothing in the end to measure to see if the use of social media was beneficial or not. As part of your strategy, you must develop a coherent plan of action, meaning that all your agencies (IT, digital, marketing, sales…) must work together and not compete with each other. Working together will best drive traffic to your websites, and collaborating internal involvement is key to integrate your social media strategy into to overarching goal of your organization.
A key piece to putting together a social media plan is getting the “OK” from the top executives because down the line you will meet less opposition, which will expedite the changes to your company. You also want to involve the legal teams, who, along with execs, are sometimes hard to convince utilizing social media is the best strategy. Legal teams can put together guidelines for the best use of networking sites to ensure the protection of the organization. The next step then, is to educate your employees of how to properly use social media to their advantage.
A great example of a well-implemented social media strategy is through Best Buy Co., Inc. Gina Debogovich, manager and communities/social media strategist for Best Buy, created a presentation outlining Best Buy’s social media engagement. The overall goal is to show that they are concerned and connected retailers in online community relationships, through objectives such as educating people about the technologies they supply, decreasing sale-related stress, and drive product discussions in their online blogs, forums, and other available networks. Barry Judge is the CMO for Best Buy and in the video (below) expands on the intentions of their social media plan. They developed a campaign called “Dream Support,” which creates an experience in and out of stores to know the reasons why consumers buy the products they want, to see technologies “come to life,” and to show customers how to use their products to make their dreams come true. Judge expresses the power of transparency in building trust – the more of both good and bad that are shown the better.
Judge himself has a blog where he provides unfinished ads, asks for feedback, and provides rooms for opinions and comments, but a large amount of Best Buy employees are also blogging, tweeting, and on Facebook and are encouraged to do so. Internally, they use forums, wikis, and Voice Box. All of this involvement in social media has driven over 1 billion visitors to their websites every year.
Best Buy definitely knows the importance of digital communication to ensure a successful social media presence. They extend their buyer/seller relationship to be more meaningful through these different technologies and participation in social media. For Best Buy, they really showcase that it is all about better reaching their audience.
I think it’s great that companies such as Best Buy and Zappos, the online shoe retailer we have read about, encourage their employees to use Twitter. A company’s employees are probably its most important group of stakeholders, because who knows a particular company better than its employees? That’s why employees Tweeting good things about their company, as Best Buy employees do according to Barry Judge, can be deemed as credible information.
I also like the online discussion forums that Best Buy has implemented. This way, consumers can not only share their experiences with the company, but they can also interact with other Best Buy consumers who might have similar issues/problems or things they like about BB.
I think that the idea for using social media for internal communication is an idea that companies should look into because if utilized properly, it can have amazing results. Also, when you invite employees to provide feedback, use it for collaboration, etc. it makes them feel involved and heard which could really benefit the organization.
I think that Best Buy’s social media strategy is smart and that it has paid off for them. That video covered many of the topics that we talked about in our class and did a good job of explaining what they meant by certain things in a way that people could understand, such as transparency.
[...] as I’ve discussed in my previous post, Social Media Strategies, you also want to coordinate your internal teams such as IT, marketing, and corporate [...]