Week 12: Community Relations 2.0

Social media is an important part of many brands future and many brands are taking the opportunity to build strong community through avenues such as facebook, twitter, google+ and recently pinterest.   Pinterest is of particular interest to me since my wife’s business, uVinyl is getting a lot of traffic from the site.  The social bookmarking site has taken off in recent months and is now the 60^th most visited site on the internet.  This is particularly impressive because site visitors are generally a limited demographic (savy, stylish females).  This provides marketers a unique opportunity to segment and target customers based on what they are interested in (“pinned”).   Pinterest links commonly point to handmade items on etsy.com or home items on Target.com or items on Amazon.com.   The people that spend time on pinterest are shoppers, not just lookers and has driven more traffic to company websites than google+, linkedin and twitter combined according to this study.   A great article about how Pinterest can be used by businesses explains that businesses on the site must not only provide pins of its own product, but must also be an active participant to have impact.  This means the business must focus on providing community benefit and not just seek to publish a catalog of its own items.

Pinterest has recently passed facebook to become the third highest source of traffic to my wife’s etsy uvinyl store (behind google and etsy searches). 

Another site that is similar to pinterest but with a more marketing focus is thefancy.com.  This article explains that thefancy is more brand friendly with an active approach to marketing.

I found 6 Compelling Reasons You Should Use Pinterest for Marketing from hubspot.com to be very informative and useful. 

Learning Journal Considerations

1. Does your firm use social media in its communications effort? How?  Is it effective?
1. The company I work for (Avery Dennison) recently invested heavily in an internal social media site similar to facebook or google+ where employees can create communities (wikis, discussion boards and file sharing), maintain profiles and blog.  It is marginally successful already and is very promising.  As more of my colleges begin to use it regularly it will become a more valuable resource.   I don’t think we participate in any public social networking communities. 
2. What types of messages do you think work best in Social media? Why?
1. Some messages don’t work well in social media and others do.  Bragging or touting one’s own accomplishments are not received as well as real customer interactions.  Seeing a customer’s complaint and the company response can be a strong brand building interchange if the company handles it correctly.  
3. Will social media make other Marketing Communication forms obsolete?
1. This is definitely a possibility.  When a company has an announcement to make, I could see them focusing on social media outlets as opposed to other forms of communication.  Instead of announcing something by calling a newspaper, companies could just post the announcement to their facebook site and let the newspapers find it in their feed.