Dell uses social media to listen, learn and engage with our
customers
Our customers have the best ideas and insights. Through
social media, they take part in more than 25,000 conversations about Dell every
day. What we learn from our customers online helps us be a better company and
deliver the precise products and services our customers need to be successful.
That makes us a better partner to them and their organizations.
For us, social media is far more than a tool — it's an
extension of our brand, which is all about enabling people everywhere to use
technology to grow and thrive.
These words are from Dell's company's homepage. Dell, this originally began and grown in America brand, treats groundswell more and more important than before.
Let's start from Dell's transformation story
When you open Dell's website, you will find it is extremely concise-company and community. The website really gives a well indication that groundswell is as important as a company. Groundswell means everything to a company like Dell.
Dell's transformation can be described as amazing and successful. From the very beginning, complain everywhere till a well self-managing community. To recap, Dell shakes off its stupor and jumps into action at the executive ranks:
It took a crisis or two to get Dell started.
Dell mastered one thing at a time, starting with listening.
Executive push and cover made the difference.
Authenticity was crucial.
Transformation
When talking about how can organisations can prepare for a transformation, <Groundswell> written by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff offers companies advice like below:
First, start small. The change will take time, and company typically only has so much political power to use any one time.
Second, educate your executives. Some of companies' managers think this is for their kids, not their customers. Show them otherwise with research to demonstrate the specific benefits for the company.
Third, get the right people to run your strategy. Pick the person who has the most passion about starting a relationship with customers.
Fourth, get your agency and technology partners in sync. If managers do not understand the groundswell, get them to invest the time and sources-or change agencies.
Fifth, plan for the next step and for the long term.
My perspective
After reading all the book, I realised that the steps companies took to embrace the groundswell are based on thousands of mistakes they made. Transformation made by companies to embrace groundswell has not only external barriers but also from internal barriers. Only when companies met resistance, they will think of groundswell. Only when companies have already made their mind to embrace groundswell, they can adopt into the world with groundswell. Transformation of companies really needs a great patient and efforts to accomplish.
Let's start from a hot hashtag of this week #Yeswedid......
#Yeswedid
When I was struggling with the topic of the final original post, I opened my 1 tweets 4 following Twitter account, then I saw a familiar hot hashtag #Yeswedid. It sounds like somebody's slogan- Yes we can. Then I realised that this is a hashtag of the legendary "Social King", Mr. Obama.
But why it is known as "Yes we did", rather than "Yes I did"? Then I realised that he is not alone, he is the representation of his political "team" and he is also the leader of this country. He did everything with the support of "his people" and this nation. Great slogan!
This is the most heated hashtag I ever seen. Under this #Yeswedid hashtag, people express their feeling about Mr. Obama. Some of them feel grateful for what Mr. Obama did, some of them ironically express their unsatisfied, some of them even use pictures and videos to deliver their attitudes. Though this hashtag is not originally from Mr. Obama's coming campaign, right now, it is.
In my perspective, Mr. Obama's social media team really listened to the groundswell, talked to the groundswell and embraced the groundswell. Because of the small but powerful #Yeswedid hashtag, public starts to focus on the coming campaign and help each other review what Mr. Obama did for this country in recent years.
Further Explore......
Expanded By Wikipedia
Barack Obama on social media
After typing in the two keywords "social media" and "Obama", I realised that it is social media campaign help this man accomplished the president dream.
Form Wikipedia, I found a topic "Barack Obama on social media". After I clicked in this article, I found that Mr. Obama's social campaign is exactly as the book <Groundswell> described.
Can you believe that, six years ago when I knew nothing about Twitter, Facebook and Groundswell, Mr. Obama's campaign team had already used these won the president.
"In March 2007, the Barack Obama team created an
interconnection between a user's account in Obama's official website and
Facebook account, so a user may publish activities via sending postings from
one to another.[5][clarification
needed] In 2008, the Obama
presidential campaign spent $643,000 out of $16 million
Internet budget to promote his Facebook account.[4] On June 17, 2008, after Hillary Clinton ended her campaign,
number of followers of Barack Obama's Facebook account
increased to one million.[6] Meanwhile, in addition to Facebook accounts of
Barack and Michelle
Obama and Joe Biden,
the Obama team created ten more Facebook accounts for "specific
demographics, such as Veterans for Obama, Women for Obama, and African
Americans for Obama."[5]"(Quote
from Wikipedia "Barack Obama on social media")
From the Wikipedia, I knew that Mr. Obama is not only just opened an account like anyone else but also use this account to establish a better and higher image. His Facebook account even has special budget-$16 millions of dollars. Mr. Obama's team created several related Facebook accounts.
Let's see how expert analysis on Mr. Obama's Campaign
Individual Agency
The increasing use of social media demonstrates to people the power they have as individuals to make a difference increasing both individual and collective agency. Obama’s group tapped into this increasing sense of political empowerment to generate support in spreading the word, encouraging other voters and raising funds. Social media and text messaging create opportunities for individual involvement that feel personal. Personal encourages participation; participation creates ownership. By encouraging contribution through small donations using the social media and cellphones rather than focusing on the traditional big donor strategy, Obama’s campaign succeeded in raising nearly $1billion not to mention the breadth of social capital.
A Campaign of Memes
The immediacy of social media creates instant channels for memes—an idea or symbol—to take hold and spread rapidly. Memes become a dominant cultural event; they frame or even override other messaging. Romney’s campaign was hurt by their lack of understanding of both this phenomenon and the fluidity of Internet media channels. The most notable meme faux pas was the ‘binders full of women’ remark that started on Twitter and immediately went viral across multiple media including parody accounts on Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook.
The Use of Big Data
A final aspect of the Obama campaign’s social media success comes from the increasing sophistication of online data collection. We may equate data harvesting with large online presences such as Google or Amazon, but they aren’t the only ones mining user data. The ability to collect and analyze data on a large scale allowed the Obama team to model behaviors and coordinate and target communications based. They could, for example, predict which types of people could be persuaded by which forms of contact and content. The Obama field offices ranked call lists in order of persuadability allowing them to predict donor behaviors and to mobilize volunteers to get people out to vote, particularly in the critical swing states.
My Perspective
First, I want to say, this kind of social media campaign in China will never ever forever happen. Though probably many American people have already used to it, I still found this is a very smart way to win a campaign.
Second, Mr. Obama's election campaign team really has a great entry point. The team used everybody's daily life social media platforms to promote the new president and made the public have feelings that a presidential candidate is people like us and is close to public. This idea helped Mr. Obama to establish a great and kind image in front of public.
Third, groundswell has features like spread information faster than other medias, open to everybody and etc. Therefore, use social media in a campaign will greatly get people's attention and help to promote the candidate.
Coffee has been part of my life for about 17 years since 1996 and will continue to be my life-long partner until forever. Through 17 years passed, I still remember the first coffee I had, it's sweet but a little bit bitter, aromatic but a little bit astringent. At that time, I was full of surprise and curiosity about this kind of beverage and felt excited about the energy and vigour it brought to me. Coffee is so important to me and it has become the starter of my daily life. I hope to be able to find a coffee shop anywhere whenever I need a cup of fresh brewed coffee. Then Dunkin' Donuts appears. It not only offers me tasty coffee and delicious foods but also offers me a "refuge" when I feel tired and boring.
About Dunkin' Donuts
Dunkin' Donuts is an global American doughnut company and coffeehouse
chain based in Canton,
Massachusetts. It was founded in 1950 by William Rosenberg in Quincy,
Massachusetts.Since
its founding, the company has grown to become one of the largest coffee and
baked goods chains in the world, with 11,000 restaurants in 33 different
countries. The chain has grown to include over 1,000 items on their menu,
including doughnuts, bagels, other baked goods, and a wide variety of hot and
iced beverages.
Dunkin' Donuts' social media can be traced from 1996, in my perspective. It started with the Twitter page only several months after these two social platforms online. And it did start groundswell and communities since 1997, so I give Dunkin' Donuts a name called "Social Queen" in my other blog. For the past several weeks, I have been collecting qualitative and quantitative data on social media habits and online presence of Dunkin' Donuts.
Dunkin' Donuts' Official Website is very user friendly. From the official website, it is easy to find that Dunkin' Donut splits its homepage into three distinct parts. From the homepage, people can easily use normal commercial items to find Dunkin' Donuts' Food, Coffee, Restaurants and DD Perks. Also the official website offers built-in social links and other social functions to redirect a visitor to their major social platform.
Dunkin' Donuts' Facebook, Twitter and Youtube Channel
On the home page of Dunkin' Donuts', on the right side bottom there is a part like a social HUB who's mainly function is to redirect visitors to its three major social homepage. This well designed social media function is definitely a good way to embrace the groundswell.
Facebook
Dunkin' Donuts' Facebook started on April 1st 2013 and has 12,465,483 likes and 733,579visits until Oct. 19th. Most of its posts will have around 2-3k likes and several comments.
In my perspective, Dunkin' Donuts' Facebook account is mainly used as a communication social page, it includes Dunkin' Donuts in people's daily lives, activities, Dunkin' Donuts' lifestyle and Dunkin' Donuts' beautiful pictures. From the keep increasing fans number in the chart above, I can easily get a conclusion that Dunkin' Donuts really have a good social campaign since this July.
Because of the high popularity, many people, brand and other public pages leave comments to try to find more people like them on Dunkin' Donuts' page. This is definitely a good evidence to prove the position of Dunkin' Donuts among groundswell.
Dunkin' Donuts' twitter account pays more attention on promotion, activities and Dunkin' Donuts' Discussion. Through Twitter, followers of Dunkin' Donuts' will have an up to date news from Dunkin' Donuts. It is very active in Twitter and always creates hashtags for its followers. Dunkin' Donuts always has interesting hashtags like #DDFieldPass. Many famous twitter accounts joined the discuss too.
But Dunkin' Donuts has a problem on both Twitter and Facebook is that it never reply anybody or any comment. Most of time, just a post without any other communication with fans.
Dunkin' Donuts' Youtube Channel mainly focusing on the commercial videos, fans' upload videos, activities videos and Dunkin' Donuts' news. In short, Dunkin' Donuts' Youtube Channel more like a backup platform for its Facebook and Twitter account.
Analysis Based on Social Media Tools
Addict-o-matic
This tool is a free site that exists in order to provide users with a dashboard made up of a variety of sources with related links on a
specific topic of their choice. It is a means to gather information from
different sources and aggregate them all onto one homepage while being
separated by sources.
Analysis:
With the help of Addict-o-matic, I find Dunkin' Donuts has a pretty good and positive social performance, especially on Delicious Tags and Bing News. Nevertheless on Flickr, the change is rare.
Social Mention
Oct 6th Monday
Oct 14th Tuesday
Oct 19th Sunday
Social Mention is free, real-time social media search and
analysis. You can explore or opt to receive social media alerts (similar to
Google Alerts but for social media only.) You can choose to receive free daily
email alerts of your brand, company, CEO, marketing campaign, or on a
developing news story, a competitor, or the latest gossip on a celebrity.
Analysis
Through the monitoring of Social Mention, it is easy to find that Dunkin' Donuts has features like below:
Dunkin' Donuts very active on Twitter because there is a football game tonight
Most People love DD, but there is also negative judgement
1. Dunkin' Donuts has a pretty high mentioned ratio among social media platforms, especially on week days, but during weekends, it's mentioned ratio goes down. Probably because, during weekends, Dunkin' Donuts' social public pages has fewer activities or most people go to Dunkin' Donuts most on work days.
2. Dunkin' Donuts has a very high positive review among social media platforms. The reason Oct. 19th sentiment goes down is because Dunkin' Donuts was accused of allowing cars to park on
a protected grassy section of the property next to a brook, failing to maintain
the area as a meadow and not submitting required twice-a-year stormwater
compliance reports. 3. Dunkin' Donuts has a high reach index, which means Dunkin' Donuts' social mention is not just made by a little group of people, in stead, it is mentioned in a variety of different authors. 4. Basically every 20 seconds Dunkin' Donuts will be mentioned online which means Dunkin' Donuts roots deep inside groundswell.
Google Trends
Google Trends is a public web facility of Google Inc., based on Google Search, that shows
how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total
search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages.
Analysis
As the chart shows above, recent years especially after 2011, the search for Dunkin' Donuts on Google.com has increased a lot. In my perspective, this tends formed because of the market strategy changes. For instance, Dunkin' Donuts started to have more online activities and offer more free coupon, what's more, DD perks online makes a great contribution on the trends. Because DD perks based on online payment and reward system, people start to search more on Dunkin' Donuts.
Ice Rocket
IceRocket is generally for blog searches but has expanded
into searching the popular social networking websites Twitter and Facebook as well as
allowing searching of news and the world wide web.
IceRocket's Big Buzz feature allows users to search Blogs, Tweets, news, images
etc. all from one page.
Analysis
From IceRocket, it is easy to have a better view on the mention of Dunkin' Donuts in blogs online. Usually, most social platforms just have a very short or less effective mention of them. Nonetheless blogs are wrote specially for subjects. Thus, blog trends can offer a more persuasive indication on brand. From the chart above, it is easy to find that Dunkin' Donuts appears on blogs a lot. Blogs by topic like mine, specially makes a great contribution on this figure.
Brief Summary
After all these days social monitoring on Dunkin' Donuts, I really have a deeper understanding on this two short words and brand, culture, social strategy behind these two words.
From the analysis, it can be concluded that:
1. Dunkin' Donuts put more strength on Social Media.
2. Social Media contributes a lot on the increasing development of Dunkin' Donuts.
3. Dunkin' Donuts still have a district limitation on social media.
4. Compare to other brands and commercial cultures, Dunkin' Donuts does a better job and profit from the early entering of social media world.
Our customers have the best ideas and insights. Through
social media, they take part in more than 25,000 conversations about Dell every
day. What we learn from our customers online helps us be a better company and
deliver the precise products and services our customers need to be successful.
That makes us a better partner to them and their organizations.
First, start small. The change will take time, and company typically only has so much political power to use any one time.
