The
social media is gaining power day by day. Just like almost every company is inevitably
having a website of their own, having a presence in the social media is also
slowly becoming a ‘must have’ as opposed to a ‘good to have’.
Sprint
introduced a program called the ‘Social Media Ninjas Program’ as Sprint saw an
opportunity to marry employee advocacy with customer engagement to improve its
reputation by being accessible and responsive to customers in online social
networks. Sprint had poor brand perception when compared to its
competitors. In spite of the fact that Sprint had created shareholder value and
dramatically improved its customer service, perception continued to lag
reality. During this difficult time for the company, the rise of social
communication technologies provided a new opportunity for Sprint to engage
directly with customers and create better relationships with them. Please
refer to this link for details on the program: http://sncr.org/node/448#.USQygqXWgwE
The Ninjas program was introduced in the 1st quarter
of 2011 and brought significant improvements that were primarily two-fold.
1)
Reputation improvement: Key metrics tracked by Reputation Institute – a measure
of how the customers and the public view the company – saw significant gains.
Scores rose in all dimensions including a 4.5 point gain in the Product and
Services category and a 13.7 point gain in Workplace.
2) Ninja engagement: In the
annual employee communications survey, Sprint measures engagement with
information about its products and services. The employees who participated in
the Social Media Ninjas program scored these questions on average 10 percent
higher than non-participants.
Many of us might have seen the controversial video
of a ‘bad delivery’ that was made by FedEx. Link to the video is attached
uploaded on Dec 19, 2011.
As can be imagined, such unfortunate
incidents spread like wildfire and if not caught by the company in a timely
manner, the damage that is caused could be irreparable. I am also attaching the
apology that was made by FedEx Senior VP in response to the incident, uploaded
on Dec 21, 2011
In short, those days are gone when the
customers resort to writing letters to customer care or calling customer care about issues they have with the
products or services. Many of them resort to public statements that are made in
forums like you tube, facebook, twitter etc and if these are left unmonitored,
there is a lot at stake for today’s firms. In addition to timely damage
control, we can also see how Sprint used the social media to reach their
customers more effectively through their Ninjas and this talks to the inexpensive
but far reaching marketing potential the social media offers today, which is
exploited to the full advantage by many small businesses today. So while other
traditional marketing media continue to thrive today, we cannot belittle the
growing importance of the social media in the marketing space!
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