Social Media Success

Social media is an extremely important topic in our society today and needs to be discussed in an appropriate fashion. Many companies know that they must incorporate social media into their marketing plan in order to keep pace with the industry. However, these companies often do not realize how to optimize their social media experience and how to connect with the consumer in the most appropriate fashion. I will discuss how 2 companies/organizations are doing a very good job of incorporating social media into their strategy.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think-tank based in Austin, TX, has done a tremendous job using social media to influence many of its constituents. My fiancé used to work at TPPF, and although she was not in charge of social media execution, she did participate and provided advice to future strategy. One of TPPF’s largest initiatives in the past year or so has been the healthcare fight. TPPF has been fighting against Obama’s health care plan (contrary to my own beliefs), and in order to create a larger group of supporters, have leveraged Twitter and Facebook. TPPF maintained constant conversation on Twitter, creating new posts, responding to potential donors and supporters, and did a great job of creating buzz. TPPF also performed live tweets from the Senate floor, in order to keep constituents up-to-date with the political conversations on Capitol Hill. Additionally, TPPF used many functions of Facebook to connect with potential supporters, including: inviting people to join a health care fight group, providing information regarding events in the Austin area concerning the health care fight, and connecting people together to increase support and dedication to the fight. The Groundswell chapters that we read for class drives home this point when it says that “if a tool makes those connections more interesting, more varied, or more frequent, it has good potential for adoption” (Groundswell). TPPF supporters joined the fight and used the social media tools to connect with each other. TPPF provides a great example of how a company can use social media to create relationships with its supporters and create relationships within the support group.

Dr. Pepper Snapple Group provides another example of a company that is trying to use social media to enhance its brands and to encourage brand loyalty with its consumer base. DPSG relies heavily on Facebook to encourage loyal consumers to post comments on beverage “walls”. Additionally, consumers can connect with each other and provide advice, recipes, and other information regarding the specific beverage or product. Increased situational involvement connects with some of the commentary in Chapter 3 of the Groundswell reading. Chapter 3 discusses why consumers participate in social media, and provides many reasons, including but not limited to: fostering friendships, creativity impulse, and validation influence. These are very interesting motivations for consumers to participate, because although they may never meet, see, or talk (in person or on the phone) to these people; consumers do trust their opinions and do feel some peer pressure to get involved. This is great news to DPSG, because it would love for consumers to pass around information about its brands, and have new consumers learn facts and exciting aspects of the beverages. However, there are some caveats to this situation, because when bad information is passed around social media interfaces, companies have little to no control. Companies have trouble dispelling this wrong information, and unfortunately, this information will be passed around to all of the consumers who interact with that site.

Overall, social media can be a very powerful tool that can create competitive advantage for organizations and companies world-wide. It will be vital for companies to monitor its social media, and understand how consumers are using it currently, and how consumers could prefer to use it or interact with it in the future. As the Groundswell reading mentions, the numbers are rising for consumers (especially young consumers) who use social media. Companies must understand what forms of social media are most important to their target markets in order to gain the true value of the social media experience.

Wal-Mart Knows Too Much

After reading “What Wal-Mart knows about Customers’ Habits” I have a whole new fear of the data that Wal-Mart controls and the power that the company has over consumers in the marketplace. The article was very interesting and shed some light on Wal-Mart’s current database system. In the following blog, I plan to discuss Wal-Mart’s ability to use consumer data to optimize their products and stores, Wal-Mart’s obligation to maintain privacy for its consumers, and Wal-Mart’s impact on its suppliers and the relationships that are formed.

First of all, I think that Wal-Mart has done an incredible job in capturing a huge amount of data from its consumers. The article discussed how the amount of data that Wal-Mart holds onto in its systems equals about half the data that is floating around on the internet. This is a huge amount of information, and it is very impressive that a company can be so organized and forward-thinking to know that this data is extremely useful and necessary to continue to survive in the competitive market. Wal-Mart has a done a great job leveraging this data to provide the correct about of supply of certain products to consumers at certain times of the year. For example, the article discussed how when hurricanes and storms were coming, Wal-Mart knew (from thorough analysis of its data) that consumers bought lots of pop-tarts, in addition to bottled water and other products. Due to the fact that Wal-Mart conducted a proper analysis of its data, Wal-Mart knew to stock the appropriate amount of inventory that its consumers would want to purchase.

Although Wal-Mart has leveraged the large amount of data that it has collected from its consumers, many people do fear (including myself) that Wal-Mart has too much of our information and could potentially pose a problem to consumers in the future. I am very bothered how much information and power that they have, and I am not sure that I trust them to do the right thing at all times because Wal-Mart is a large corporation with one main objective, “Make Money”. The article discussed how Wal-Mart could find out social security numbers, do credit checks, and find out other personal consumer information if it wanted to pursue that avenue. Although Wal-Mart has not gone that route at this point (at least that we know of through this article), I do worry that Wal-Mart could create exclusive discounts and savings from consumers who do not shop at other grocery stores. Wal-Mart could track consumers’ purchases through credit checks, in order to ensure that they were being faithful. Although this sounds like a conspiracy theory at this point, and Wal-Mart may never “cross the proverbial line”, I do fear what could come about in the future with a powerful corporation in possession of my personal information.

In addition to Wal-Mart having a lot of power and information on its consumers, Wal-Mart also has the power in its relationships with suppliers. P&G, the world’s largest CPG Company, were told by Wal-Mart to follow its rules, or P&G products would not be sold on any Wal-Mart shelf. P&G cooperated with Wal-Mart’s requests because it knew that its company could not survive without Wal-Mart. This story holds true for every other supplier that interacts with Wal-Mart, which forces these suppliers to follow Wal-Mart’s policies and procedures. However, Wal-Mart knows how to run a very profitable business, and has improved the way some of its suppliers operate. Wal-Mart does provide its suppliers with some of the data that it collects from its database, in order to improve their efficiency, inventory management, and overall business interaction with Wal-Mart. If Wal-Mart ever chose to divulge more information to its suppliers, then this could turn into a win-win situation for both sides. However, providing too much data and knowledge about Wal-Mart to its suppliers could decrease Wal-Mart’s leverage and potential to keep its consumer data secrets in house. Barring any unforeseen changes, Wal-Mart will continue to horde its data, providing little pieces to its supplier in order to ensure that business keeps booming as usual.