Social Media Branding

In Chapter 4 of Social Media Management, Shields fleshes out the need to develop a social media brand strategy and the different approaches to do so. Developing a social media brand presence is critical to reaching customers and establishing rapport. Shields uses Whole Foods as an example, which has grown to identify with the nickname “Whole Paycheck”.

While Whole Foods emphasizes their focus on only selling organic, locally grown or produced products, the prices associated with the store haven’t gone unnoticed. Customers who shop here are not always necessarily getting the best “bang for their buck”. When Whole Foods received this feedback they re-strategized their marketing techniques and worked on enhancing the “in-store” shopping experience for customers. Free samples, prepared food and talkative staff helped promote the ambiance of the store and increase customer satisfaction. Whole Foods eventually developed a strategy that combined a “global master brand account” and a “local account” to reach out to customers via Facebook and Twitter. I definitely applaud Whole Foods for taking this approach instead of doing one or the other. By having both types of accounts, the brand can have a universal, corporate voice to reach customers but also have smaller, more tailored voices to specific stores and locations. If a customer ever has an issue with a product they purchased at a specific store it would be inefficient to have the corporate account address it. A corporate manager won’t be able to easily personalize a response as Whole Foods likely has hundreds of stores across the country.

I believe that this approach will translate best not only for Whole Foods but for any company or brand. Large corporations with many locations should take advantage of having both a widespread voice that customers can rely on, but also a specific store presence to communicate with customers. I work at Stack’d, which started out as only two restaurants owned by the same person. Now there are multiple locations in Pittsburgh and the company is continuing to expand. I hate the website Yelp, but for this blog post I will mention it here. If someone posts a bad review about our restaurant on Yelp, the website allows managers to respond directly to the review. Since we now have multiple locations reviews are location specific, so the manager of the individual Stack’d can respond. This personalized voice establishes customer rapport and is better than having an overall regional manager respond to a comment, as they might not know the specifics of the issue. Social network branding is a growingly important strategy and business plan to work on. Twenty years ago having a social media presence on Facebook or Twitter was not nearly as important or vital to a company’s outreach success. I wonder what the next twenty years will bring for marking and social branding.

 

Shields, Ben. Social Media Management. Oxford University Press, 2016.

 

Analyzing Metrics

Chapter 15 of Social Media ROI: Managing and Measuring Social Media Effects in Your Organization, focused mainly on how to set business objectives and ways in which to measure progress towards these goals. I think this type of skill will be pertinent to our social media platform projects leading up to the symposium. With the symposium being just 3 weeks away, one of which is spring break, time is of the essence in terms of spreading the word and reaching a target audience. Attendance at the symposium will greatly depend on how successful our social media outreach attempts are. We have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and Pinterest covered. At this point it’s just a matter of who will follow our accounts and be drawn in enough to spend their Thursday afternoon with us. According to Blanchard, “Business objectives give purpose to a social media program, give momentum to a social media program, makes everyone involved with a social media program accountable to the rest of the organization and provides adequate measurement of a social media program and insight into what is working and not working”. We can translate this information into our objectives related to the symposium. Our purpose is to educate students, faculty and Pittsburgh residents on how to use social media in a professional way across multiple platforms. Posting daily gives us momentum into engaging with our audience. Each group is actively posting on their given social media platform on a weekly (or more frequently) basis, involving the entire class in our objective. We are monitoring how many people like, follow, repost/retweet, etc. our posts to see what sort of attention we’re attracting.

Blanchard also advised on how to calculate metrics accurately and to avoid a couple pitfalls. Sometimes businesses get caught up in “popularity metrics”, a term that represents only focusing on the exact number of followers a certain platform contains. Blanchard describes these as “empty numbers”, since the actual interaction of one person clicking follow on a page then moving right on to something else is very minimal. A celebrity might have 5 million followers, but many of these people may not look twice at what they are posting. The quality and actual interaction of the follower is what should be focused on. Empty followers have zero value in terms of reaching a business objective. Another term that is warned about is “moment in time metrics”, this references the rise and fall of certain brands, people, etc. and their popularity. A celebrity that was popular six months ago may have fallen in the shadows by the current date. It’s important to track metrics in terms of overall trends, not by random spikes based on circumstantial situations. I’d say an example of this would be Rebecca Black, a somewhat dated example but we’ll go with it. Black came out with the hit “Friday” in 2011 and was popular for about a week. Her song wasn’t necessarily good, but it certainly made an imprint on the pop-cultural scene of the time. Today, nobody talks or knows about her. Measuring a metric from 2011 for that one week would imply she is very popular, but today the metric would look entirely different.

The best advice I took from this Blanchard chapter was that the only way to improve or rely on metrics is to test them out, evaluate with feedback and then repeat with modifications. We have the benefit of having last year’s symposium to learn from. This year we’ll be able to take the feedback the class received and use it to help our symposium reach more people, be more informative and spread useful information. We’ll be sure to develop a feedback response system so that attendees of this year’s symposium will be able to provide their thoughts on how we did and what we need to change.

 

• Blanchard, Olivier. “Planning for Performance Measurement.” Social Media ROI: Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization. Indianapolis, IN: Que, 2011. 30-40. Print.