Should more companies follow Starbucks’ social media lead?
Posted by Ross Furlong, 26/07/10
Fascinating interview via SMI with Alexandra Wheeler – Starbucks’ Digital Director of Strategy on how the company has executed its market leading social media strategy. Ideas are surfaced internally, buy in is from top to bottom and the result looks more like core brand philosophy than mere marketing tactics.
| Category: social media
Great video on what is essentially CRM (why do we always feel the need to re-invent things in digital? ok, let’s call it ‘social crm’). Amazing that a concept as simple as internalising customer feedback can take a huge amount of planning, training and internal sales before even being considered for launch. But that’s what it takes to do it right.
It doesn’t suprise me that American companies are leading the way here. Whereas in the real world the once genuine ‘have a nice day’ has evolved into ‘you want fries with that?’, in the robotic, impersonal, form-filled world of online, a simple (but interactive) digital suggestion box does what a smile used to: it makes customers feel appreciated. The business world struggles with it for some reason.
It’s not obviously ‘bottom line’ stuff, but bottom line it most certainly is.
Great interview. Really enjoyed it. It’s so important to “honor the channel” and really fight for those fans/followers/blogger or other relationships that have been developed.
Thanks for posting.
It may be useful to put Social Media into perspective as a marketing tool. In the first half of 2010 the % of the UK population that uses Social Media is 36. In terms of those with internet access 47% of them use Social Media. So, Social Media does not reach the majority of the population. Ah, you may say, but the non users tend to be older, less affluent, not in my market etc. The figure however, may surprise some people.
The majority of people aged 35+ do not use Social Media, in fact the majority of 35 to 44 yr olds don’t. The majority of Social Grades A, B and C1 do not use Social Media.
In terms of communication Social Media can be a great way of generating engagement, it can be a great way of obtaining feedback and customer opinion, the danger is that if too much reliance is placed on it, it can mislead. Undue weight can be placed on the information from that medium and thus be skewed to just that part of the audience that is engaged in Social Media.
This is not meant to be knocking the use of Social Media for marketing or CRM just that it needs to be treated with care as just one part of the mix. As ever up to date information about just who is using the medium is vital.
Figures are from The British Population Survey January to June 2010.
Survey base; 40,656 face to face in home interviews.
See http://www.thebps.co.uk for further detail.