By Nick Johnson - September 6th, 2011

Hi everyone, and welcome to your latest installment of our Tuesday Update.This week we’re covering stories about Toyota, HSBC and Ariel, along with an assessment of the power of negative reviews....

Hi everyone, and welcome to your latest installment of our Tuesday Update.This week we’re covering stories about Toyota, HSBC and Ariel, along with an assessment of the power of negative reviews. Read on!

Econsultancy give you five simple steps to manage your social media better

Content and consultancy firm Econsultancy have just weitten up a five-part primer on how you can better manage your social media strategy. Covering getting buy-in; allocating resources; hiring well; putting processes in place and testing/reviewing, it's a great introduction to social media management best practice. You can see their full piece here.

Some insight into how to measure the impact of negative reviews and comments

Marketing Pilgrim have just put together a piece looking at the impact of negative reviews. According to Cone, a marketing agency, 80% of people have decided not to buy products after reading negative reviews. More interestingly for us in the social media space, only 12% of people actually ask their networks about products before purchasing. Fair enough, that has grown from 10% in 2010, but it still doesn't hold a candle to good old fashioned 'research'. However, a few of the other responses available to that particular survey question included "Search for consumer or user reviews" (64%) and "Search for opinions from product experts" (43%). Surely both of these, along with the broader "Research" could and would be done over social media? Make your own mind up by reading the full piece here.

Washing powder Ariel runs a fashion shoot - on Facebook

An interesting case study from Procter & Gamble and their Ariel brand was covered by Simply Zesty a couple of days ago. Those lucky enough to travel through Stockholm station recently were able to see a live 'stain gun' ruining clothes - which was controlled via the company's Facebook page. Whist I don't quite get the disconnect - why have the stain gun in Stockholm station when you can control it from anywhere in Scandinavia? - this does seem to be a nice mix of offline and online, and is closely allied with the product P&G are looking to sell. No stats on success yet, but I'll report back as and when. More here.

HSBC progresses from social media marketing to social media stakeholder engagement with "Banking 2.0" 

The UK banking giant launched two 'online newsrooms' yesterday to highlight the company's position on key issues. Along with Twitter and Facebook integration, the bank is also encouraging employees to blog on the site, and aim for it to become a 'centre for engagement'.

Whilst at the moment the site is limited, and perhaps a little late, compared to other similar efforts in recent years, one must remember this is one of the best and most forward-looking examples of social media engagement within such a heavily regulated industry. At our conferences we often hear from the financial and pharmaceutical industries - amongst others - bemoaning the fact they simply can't engage on the level of FMCG or automobile firms. It seems HSBC are intent on pushing forward to the limits of what they can do with social media, and that's to be commended. More from NevilleHobson.com here.

An investigation into how Toyota successfully used social media to address a PR disaster

We've got a conference coming up in March on how you can use social media to prevent - or mitigate - a crisis. It's a fast moving area, and Toyota have emerged with credit for leveraging social tools to address their own crisis. In 2010 they had to recall 2.3m vehicles with a fault, and faced a (predictable) explosion of bad feeling on social media sites.

So Toyota decided to fight back - but rather than use Twitter or Facebook, they looked to Digg, and their 'Dialogg' service. An interview with the company's President was posted, where questions were drawn from various social media sites. 3,200 of them. The video recieved 1.2m views and the company began to look like it was making serious efforts to communicate issues to consumers, and be as transparent as possible.

The results - including charts and a comparison with BP's own crisis, are available on Mashable here.

That's all for this week folks - until next time!

Thanks

Nick

Next Reads

comments powered by Disqus