Nov.15

1. I would like to hear your thoughts about the best ways for companies to use social media to do one or both of the things we talk about in class often - gaining insight or creating experiences (or both).

- You can certainly focus in on a company or two that you think are doing a good job incorporating social media into their marketing strategy.

- You can also focus on any type of social media - Facebook, Twitter, blogs, other user generated content. Just try to keep some sort of focus in your comments rather than hopping around haphazardly among the different types of media.

There are a lot of ways companies can gain profits. For example, a company can implement various marketing strategies using social media as a tool. For example, a company can give discounts to customers who visit its Facebook homepage and leave a comment.

However, in order to gain insights and create experiences, companies should do more than just promoting its Facebook homepage. That is, companies have to pay attention to how their target customers live, how they interact with their friends, what kind of companies or products they "Like" (which you can see in the left side of a Facebook user's profile), and how they spread the words between friends. People's profile is a really good way to find a lot about their personal likings, information and details about their persona. Not only that, but Facebook allows users to see all the people who are interested in the same category of hobby, interest, and etc. In short, companies can use Facebook to make a deep relationship with customers, in a sense that the Facebook is a "Social Networking-Based" tool. You can be friends with customers, share interesting information, and etc.

As for Twitter, in contrast, is often perceived as a "Phrase Social Media-Based" tool. To restate, Twitter is a social media program well designed for companies make a lot of followers with a short and simple message in a short and brief time. So there are some deep interactions between the company and customer that are missing. Some say that Twitter is good for making a quick and shallow relationship with customers, but not really recommendable for making a deep relationship with someone.

Therefore, my personal opinion is that, it would be better for companies to use Facebook as a communication tool between customers in general preferable to Twitter because Facebook helps the company to get a closer relationship with customers than Twitter does. However, if the company is big enough to influence people through short and strong messages, such as Apple, Twitter could also be a good option. Like we talked about it in the last lecture, it would be a good idea to hire some employees that take care of communication between the company and customers through social media. For instance, a company can hire employees that comment on people’s feedbacks on their Facebook homepage 24 hours. Or, a company can have employees make their own Facebook accounts and use them as individual message deliverers or feedback receivers to see how customers are thinking about the company’s products or services.

I would like to say that IKEA case in Sweden was one of the most successful cases for a company using social media as a marketing tool. IKEA was opening a new store in a place called Malmö(pronounced, MAL MUEI) in Sweden. IKEA used Facebook tagging function to promote their each showroom section and it became tremendously successful. Basically, IKEA took a photo of each showroom section, and then tagged each photo on Facebook like we tag our friends on Facebook and succeeded in promoting its products and drawing customers into buying its product.