The Social Media Revolution & Customer Interaction

     It was not too long ago that companies found it very difficult to interact with their customers. It was a dramatic change from the 90's to where we are today. In the 90's people would call and write letters to give their customer feedback. In the early 00's customers could write emails, complain through the companies website interfaces,  find them on  web chats, and send text messages. That's not saying that they'd get any kind of response or even some type of compensation if they were complaining about a bad experience.

    With the rise of Social Media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and even YouTube, customers now have the power to give live feedback to businesses they buy from. By doing so they have the potential to cause a chain reaction in the social media community they're on. However, this interactivity can go both positive and negative. Meaning if a business has a great product or what can be seen as an awesome promotion it can go viral in a very good way, where if a businesses has done something terrible, or been known for doing something bad it can go viral as well.

    Negative customer interaction. With the way social media works today every time someone posts on someone else's wall including businesses, about 20% of their friends and network see their post. Since the average amount of friends an active Facebook user has on Facebook is around 500 friends, the average post that they put on Facebook would reach about 100 people through the news feed alone with just one interaction. One can see how "Virality" can play such a huge role when it comes to customer interaction with businesses when you see how the customers interact among themselves on one of Facebooks blogs:

 http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=72975227130

This concept alone creates a huge impact on businesses and how they present themselves to their customers.

Another great example is the BP scandal where they were responsible for an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Although many people may have heard about this on the news, it was actually through social media that many of the people in the new generation found out. One of the memes that was generated for BP was this one:

  
At the same time BP made the mistake of trying to combat their negative image with a Public Relations technique that was a gigantic mistake, creating a youtube account to try to increase a positive image through "promoted videos" on YouTube. Although they've since reset the "likes" and view count, at one point these videos had millions of views and hundreds of thousands of video
"thumbs downs"  Here are two print screens of their activity: 

Now that it's clear on how a negative thing can go viral through social media, it's time to get to the good stuff... how can this "virality" can benefit a business through customer interaction.

Lets take a look a business who's done it right, lets pick.... Toms.

By creating simple campaigns on Facebook where people can take pictures of their Toms and possibly have them featured on the Toms Facebook page they have enabled the activity to promote their contribution to the world, which is what the company is primarily about. Cause Marketing plays a major role in how Toms sell their shoes, for every pair of shoes you buy they donate a pair to someone less fortunate around the world. They are able to push their product by showing the good they're doing and simultaneously advertise what you can be contributing to if you buy a pair of Toms. (It's a Win-Win-Win - Buy Toms, Save The World)  You  may notice that nothing about the Toms campaign involves the consumer getting any discounts, coupons, or special offers. That's because they're being successful through their charitable campaign in reaching a great amount of consumers. (1,428,251 likes · 24,284 talking about this)


If we take a look at another business who's got things right we can clearly see how you can use these new platforms to interact with your customers in a more promotional yet equally viral manner. Lets take a look at Chilis:

By using a new meme that's going viral (e-cards that they usually change the text to to say ridiculous funny things that you would probably never see outside of the internet except for in a store like Spencer's) They have created a viral meme that is both funny yet promoting their $5 margarita deal.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, the social media revolution has completely changed the way businesses operate their customer interactions and its definitely a cause for businesses to try to keep their publicity as clean and benevolent as possible. It has become so key in developing and maintaining certain marketing strategies and it's definitely one of the most important things businesses should invest in.


Bennett Bonta
Social Media Consultant
Be Noticed Media







References and videos print screned:
Facebook - Sheryl Sandberg


"Social Media Customer Engagement" - Frost & Sullivan
http://www.sitel.com/downloads/frost_sullivan_social_media_customer_engagement_white_paper.pdf


Sandberg, Sheryl (2009), "How Many Friends Can You Have?"
< http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=72975227130 >


"Video of LMRP Cap Installation Process"


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGFi-W6IdVs&feature=plcp&context=C4138583VDvjVQa1PpcFNlz8ZacL7aqlAP6OyPJy6Pk0HcyVQKbYc=


"Kevin Costner's Oil Spill Centrifuge Technology Deployed"


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9-e0TfwrIc&feature=plcp&context=C465d8ccVDvjVQa1PpcFNlz8ZacL7aqu2QsaDrdZCvKI50lo2hRTg=

E-Marketing and Politics: How Social Media Plays a Giant Role

The 2008 election was the beginning of a new era in politics. Not because there was an African American president in office, but because of a revolutionary tool his campaign used: Social Media. No other presidential candidate has ever been able to realize the full potential of the E-marketing as much as President Obama. Case studies have shown that millions of people supported Obama's online campaigns and that they even brought him millions of dollars in fundraising.

The graph above shows the online support Obama received through social media and other internet platforms. By looking at it you can see that both of these presidential candidates receive millions of viewers on their YouTube videos, and millions of unique website visitors. This doesn't include the ridiculous amount of impressions their ads on both YouTube and Facebook received. 

The real issue with understanding how social media and other forms of E-Marketing change presidential campaigns is seeing the way in which campaigns that attack other candidates. The fact that everything has the ability to go viral isn't necessary a positive thing, the fact that everything has the ability to go viral in a matter of minutes makes it so much easier to spread the word across social networks. A prime example of this is Rick Perry's political campaign, one that I saw crash and burn hours after it was launched. The second his team publicized the some of his campaign commercials it immediately invoked a negative response among the Tumblr community. Whether or not Rick Perry was severely against the Gay Community wasn't even a question anymore, everyone had already spread the word that he was a kind of Gay Community Anti-Christ because he mentioned something along the lines of there being something wrong with the world we live in because of the fact that gays can serve openly in the military. His video was passed around Tumblr with hate messages so much that people began to dislike his ad on YouTube, here's a screen shot of what his video likes and dislikes were at at one point:

Rick Perry's campaign on social media was an example of one that fails, although he one the race in the state he ran for, had he run for president he wouldn't have stood a chance due to the power of social media. As for content going unsupervised one can see an example with this gif image I found on Tumblr. 

On online ad campaigns

It's important to realize how many impression online ads receive through both YouTube and other social media sites. On YouTube ads work very differently than they do on Facebook. Instead of just being an impression on the side of the page, ads on YouTube show in the following way.

Most of the time we are obliged into watching propaganda and political advertisements on YouTube, and while we can skip them after a few seconds the propaganda is done whether the information in the ad is true or not. There are absolutely no barriers to entry when you are making an ad for a social media site. Unless a ton of people report you there are no true boundaries as to what you can put in an ad, as long as you have a working credit card and follow the few guidelines YouTube and Facebook have for their ads that mainly restrict certain products and mimicking their own elements and logos, you're in the clear. 

I believe that a lot of the information put on the internet is based on truth, and it's important to verify sources and check several different reliable sources before jumping to conclusions about anything you see online. Propaganda and politician ad campaigns are never 100% true. It's important to realize that before deciding on what we vote for and what we decide to give our full support. 

For more info on Obama's Presidential Social Media Campaign visit: 

“Applied lessons from the Obama presidential campaign” singlegrain.com Web. 04 Mar. 2012. <http://www.singlegrain.com/blog/social-media-applied-lessons-from-the-obama-presidential-campaign/ >.
"Barack Obama 2012 Campaign"  Huffington PostWeb.04 Mar. 2012. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/28/barack-obama-2012-campaign_n_886280.html>

-B.Bonta