Case Studies and Interviews
A Look Into How Brands Are Becoming Open
The concept of opening up to public brand conversations is new one for many brands. The world of real-time content streams, distributed public conversations, and new power dynamics can seem overwhelming. Many brands are setting new precedence for the future of brand-customer relationships.
This series explores how brands are adapting to social media. Focussing on how have they been successful, when have they been challenged, and how they see the future of brand management shifting.
In February 2009 The North Face had no social media strategy. They considered their efforts an utter-flop for the brand. They were communicating every so often with their customers, rarely responding to fans/followers on Facebook and Twitter (8627 Facebook Fans and 1087 Twitter Followers). In April 2009, Amy Mengel did a great assessment of the brand's social media efforts in her blog post, Social Media Smackdown: Mtn Hardwear vs. The North Face. In just 12 months the company was able to gain a total of 150,000 Facebook Fans and 10,000 Twitter Followers.
What did they do? Small Changes, Big Results
Our first case study in this series comes from Intuit, a software company for small business and personal finance, with brands such as QuickBooks, TurboTax, and Quicken.
How has your brand been successful using Twitter?
We look at our success in Twitter in a few ways. First, are we learning what works and what doesn’t within the context of Twitter? For example, are we learning about what topics are most interesting to our followers so we can share more in the future? We’re definitely winning with this one using a variety of measurement tools to understand what topics are re-tweeted, shared and/or have driven an increase in followers. Second, we’re learning what works in terms of promotion. We launched @intuitdeals, for example, because we wanted to allow our @intuit account to focus on topics that small business owners care about and not excessive promotion. That said, we know a lot of people want to know about our deals, so we created a special account to handle that.
Recent
- CASE STUDY: The North Face Gets Social
- PRESENTATION: Social Media is Pushing Transparency on Brands
- Joey Shepp interviewed by Michael Leifer of InfluenceXchange
- The Open Brand: How Twitter is Pushing Radical Transparency in Brand Management
- The Open Brand: Beyond Green Washing
- A real time look into what people are thinking about a brand
- OpenBrands mentioned on TriplePundit.com
- New Twitter Login
Tweets from @OpenBrands
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RT @JessicaNorthey @zaibatsu: ALERT: @montanamonica's daughter is missing! Last seen in the Seattle area http://bit.ly/d0a1EN Please PLZ RT
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2010 Amsterdam Global Conference on Sustainability and Transparency http://ow.ly/1PYm3
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How not to get “brandjacked” like BP Global PR http://ow.ly/1POz1 by @thebrandbuilder via @byrnegreen
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Making and Measuring Online Buzz: Learn how brands can best use social media to create conversation #SB10 http://bit.ly/sb10_program
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Subvert and Profit: Are you friends getting paid to Like you? http://bit.ly/bqdImQ #transparency