Companies and Social Media

Most companies today have come to realize that some sort of presence on the World Wide Web is necessary for them to survive. With instantaneous communication and inter-connectivity becoming an important part of everyday life for many, companies are turning to social media. Social media is a great opportunity for companies to connect with their customers and gain valuable insights about the uses, perceptions, and opinions of the products and services they provide. One particularly quick and simple way for companies to utilize social media is to "google" themselves: search their brand names and products online and see what results they get. Many outlets of user generated content have ways to search for topics and keywords. Twitter, in particular, allows users to tag buzz words in their tweets by putting a hash mark (#) in front of the word. Twitter then keeps track of these buzz words and compiles them to determine trending topics among users. Companies can use this information to find out which of their products/services are being discussed and how often.

One amazing tool marketer and companies can use to gauge their internet presence and see how much they are being discussed is Google's Zeitgeist. Zeitgeist allows users to view search patterns, trend website traffic data, and even filter search queries by the location from which it was searched. This information can become important data for marketers trying to determine regions and locations of interest. To try it out, I used the "Insights for Search" function, which allows you to view data for terms searched on Google and filter them by category, location, and time period. As a test, I used this function to view the most rising search trends in Austin, TX over the past 7 days, with the results being:
1.  Fort Hood (for the shooting that occurred November 5th)
2.  Sesame Street (which celebrated its 40th anniversary November 10th)
3.  Modern Warfare 2 (a popular video game released midnight November 10th)

Another way for companies to use social media to gain insights is create mediums for interactions between themselves and their consumers. Something as simple as setting up a Twitter account allows a company to contact and interact with their customers. While several celebrities have taken to Twitter to interact with their fans and news medias such as CNN using it to relay breaking news updates, few companies have used Twitter to connect with their customers. The first big company I've seen do this is Best Buy with their "TwelpForce" ("twelp" being a mash-up of tweet and help). Basically, a customer can tweet a tech related question to TwelpForce, and within minutes a Best Buy employee will answer it. This question and answer interaction not only helps creates an individualized connection with each customer but also helps Best Buy understand what their customers want to know the most about; in the long run, this could influence customer service relations, decisions on product assortments in stores, and other business related functions.

All that said, as we mentioned in class, just because a company creates the medium doesn't mean that customers will use it or that they even have an incentive to use it. The biggest example I see of this is the relatively new Fan Pages on Facebook, where a company or celebrity can create a page for users to become a fan of. The problem is that the only benefit to being a fan is for users to meet other fans. It, in a sense, functions the same way as fan websites people could create back in 2001 and doesn't offer the company any additional interaction.

Taking into account how popular as social media has become in just the past few years and how much its popularity and use will undoubtedly continue to grow, a lot of companies are missing out on these numerous and relatively easy ways to gain insights about their valued consumers. I think it is only a matter of time before most major companies make the jump.