Social Media Strategy Case Studies Using the Customer Experience Lifecycle – Part 2
Previously, I presented the Customer Experience lifecycle as a framework for companies defining Social Media Strategy and Business Objectives. This model shows you where consumers are looking for information to meet their needs.
By focusing Social Media efforts on where your customers are looking for information, you can better define your Social Media Strategy around helping customers solve their problems.
Here’s a quick reminder of the framework:
The Customer Experience Lifecycle:
- Realization - Recognition of a problem or need
- Awareness - Connection between need and your product
- Evaluation - Consideration of you (and your competitors) product benefits and tradeoffs as a solution to the need
- Transaction - Money is exchanged for product
- Consumption - Product is used
- Service - Post-purchase support for your product
Evaluation – Consumers compare product benefits
Best Practice – Best Western – On the Go With Amy
- Business Objective Increase sales by providing travel tips (and Best Western deals) through informative content
- Tool: Blogs – Through “On the Go with Amy”, Best Western offers good content mixed with deals on their hotels
- What They Do Right: Provide tips and advice on how to make the ENTIRE trip more affordable
- Hotel costs are just part of the travel budget; by sharing tips on how to reduce the total cost, they increase the value to their customers
- Content is relevant to customers for example use smaller cars which are cheaper to rent AND have higher gas efficiency
- While the blog isn’t highly trafficked (Alexa rank of #2,201,016 on June 8, 2009), that’s an easily solvable marketing problem. The content is great and is a perfect place to start a dialogue
Company to Learn From – Skittles Interweb the Rainbow
- Business Objective: Encourage consumers to redefine brand
- Tool: Mashup – A combination of Twitter, Wikipedia, and Facebook
- What You Should Learn From: A PR play is not Word of Mouth
- There’s no such thing as bad pubicity, but Social Media seems to work best when it’s a 2 Way dialogue
- To paraphrase a famous chart, 1% of traffic were people who care about Skittles; 99% of traffic were Social Media Bloggers
- Skittles should do more than promote consumer dialgoue, they should USE this as insight for a two way dialogue
Transaction – Money is exchanged for product
Best Practice – DellOutlet on Twitter
- Business Objective: Increase sales by offering exclusive deals on Twitter to PEOPLE WHO WANT THEM
- Tool: Twitter – Using Twitter Search to find and Twitter to execute, DellOutlet promotes deals
- What They Did Right: Increase the outlet store’s value by responding to customer needs in the moment
- Many companies are using Twitter to promote deals, but Dell takes it further by responding to people’s needs
- By selling refurbished, scratch and dent, and previously ordered Dell products through Twitter, they increase the perceived value of “used” merchandise
- Not all posts are deals – Lots of times they offer tips like this one to a new student
Company to Learn From – Belkin’s “Fake” Reviews of Products
- Business Objective - Increase sales through reviews of products at Amazon.com
- Tool: Customer Reviews – Or more specifically, manipulated customer reviews
- What You Should Learn From – Customer reviews are sacred; manipulating reviews is never worth the benefit
- Though Belkin says they have a high standard of ethics, Gizmodo reports that Belkin had a culture of “doing whatever is needed” to get good reviews
- Customer reviews are sacred in Social Media. The payoff for faking a review does not stack up to the damage from getting caught.
- If you google “Belkin Reviews” , the first thing to pop up is a story about Belkin paying for reviews
What other examples come to mind?
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Christopher Rollyson
