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How Starbucks Builds Meaningful Customer Engagement via Social Media

How Starbucks Builds Meaningful Customer Engagement via Social Media

written by: Mikal E. Belicove

Comedian Lewis Black jokes about walking out of a Starbucks and seeing another Starbucks right across the street. Yes, Starbucks has developed an incredible brand presence wherever it has chosen to set up shop--across the country, around the world, on the web, and in just about every social media venue on the internet, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even via internally "owned" properties such as MyStarbucksIdea.com. Starbucks' ability to engage community and foster customer loyalty is nearly unmatched.


To discover the company's secret, I recently attended a conference in San Diego, where Starbucks' social media team presented the 10 philosophical precepts that drive the company's social media efforts:


1. It's about relationships, not marketing.
Building meaningful relationships is key. Starbucks' marketing efforts focus less on traditional marketing and more on giving texture to the brand in fun, engaging formats:

• Last year Starbucks took advantage of April Fool's Day by announcing that it had cracked the code for delivering fresh, hot brewed coffee through the internet tubes and a USB plug-and-pour device.
• With Starbucks Mobile App, customers can enter their Starbucks card number to transform their iPhone into their Starbucks card. They're then able to check their balance, enjoy rewards like free coffee refills and two hours of free Wi-Fi per day, and find the nearest Starbucks. In some markets, you can even use your phone to pay for your order!

2. Social media fits within a larger digital strategy.
At Starbucks, social media is not a separate and distinct entity. Various departments collaborate online and offline to develop and implement plans designed to fully engage the community.


One such effort was Starbucks' Love Project. Starbucks teamed up with several groups--including Playing for Change, Dave Matthews Band, John Legend and U2--to create the "All You Need Is Love CD." With every $15 purchase at participating Starbucks locations, customers received a free CD and an invitation to participate in a mass sing-along by uploading their own video to StarbucksLoveProject.com, which thousands of people did. One dollar from the sale of every CD was donated to the Global Fund to Help Fight AIDS in Africa. Starbucks customers could also create a Love Drawing online and Starbucks would contribute an additional five cents per drawing to the fund for the first 1 million drawings submitted.


Starbucks could have simply offered the CD for sale, but it gave the project more dimension via the website, mass sing-along, Love Drawings, and special Love Drawing cups for sale in the store.


3. Make it clear where to start.
Starbucks believes you need to focus where customers start so people know where to find you on various social media venues. As a result, all of the company's vanity URLs contain the brand name "Starbucks" (Facebook.com/starbucks, Twitter.com/starbucks, www.YouTube.com/starbucks, and so on). For each vertical (jobs, deals and so on), Starbucks launches a separate account, such as Twitter.com/starbucksJobs, which focuses exclusively on generating leads for jobs at Starbucks.


4. Look around the corners.
Starbucks may be full of surprises, but the company does not like to be surprised. Starbucks looks around the corner to attend to all the little details and address any issues that may arise. The company looks ahead to see how customers will reach the page, how they will navigate the site, and how a customer's experience may change five months from now. It also tries to anticipate and plan for incidents in which someone doesn't like a particular product or project and takes them to task for it. In other words, the company plans for all scenarios.


5. Be authentic.
Rule No. 1 in social media is to be genuine and transparent, so this precept is not breaking any new ground. What is crucial here specifically for Starbucks is that they remain true to the brand--they started with a coffeehouse culture, so the social media team is expected to be coffeehouse-like when engaging through social media.
6. Build coalitions.
 
Internally, collaboration is key in inventing, planning and executing any projects or campaigns. Every department--including legal, the call center, communications, PR, managers and executives--must be on board. Starbucks' digital strategy team couldn't have pulled off the Help Haiti campaign and leverage it via social media without coalitions in place throughout the company. The magic of social media is that you can recognize the opportunity quickly. The challenge is in responding just as quickly. Without a coordinated effort and buy-in, you quickly lose momentum.


7. If it doesn't matter on Twitter, it doesn't matter.
To see what's going on with your brand in real time, plug in to Twitter, says Starbucks' digital media team, where things tend to go viral fastest. Real-time monitoring increases your response time to what people are saying about your brand, negative or positive. In addition, it provides early notice of any opportunities that arise--any given second, any given day.


8. Focus on the four responses.
Whenever Starbucks identifies a problem or opportunity, it responds in one or more of the following four ways:

• Amplify: As Starbucks identifies trends or something its customers seem to like, Starbucks amplifies whatever it is to help bring it to the surface and increase visibility and enthusiasm.
• Context-ify: Back in 2004, an e-mail was going around claiming that Starbucks had refused to supply free product to GIs serving in Iraq. Many people believed it, got pretty angry and forwarded the message to all their friends. Unfortunately, the message was false. By context-ifying the message, Starbucks revealed the other side of the story--check it out yourself on snopes.com.
• Change: If it's broke, fix it. MyStarbucksIdea.com actively solicits constructive criticism and ideas to improve its business and gather suggestions for products, services and projects.
• Ignore: You gotta respond? No, sometimes it's best to ignore, especially when it appears you're being provoked into a response or fight. It's easier to ignore things when you can put them into their proper context; for example, if your primary critics are a Facebook Group with 82 members out of the 400 million-plus Facebook accounts, you have little to worry about.

9. Take chances, but "be mostly right."
Starbucks' social media team was scrappy, savvy and confident from the very beginning. It succeeded by asking for forgiveness, not permission, and by "being mostly right." If you're transparent and do mostly right, the social media space is very forgiving, as is senior management within your own company.


10. An economic meltdown is a terrible thing to waste.
When things are going down, appetite for trying something new and different, like social media, grows. In 2008, Starbucks' stock price was headed downhill. Since then, it's on the rebound. The company started its social media campaigning when things were down, and while the social media team cannot take credit for the upswing in the stock price since social media was launched, it certainly hasn't hurt the brand.


Mikal E. Belicove is an Entrepreneur magazine columnist and business strategist specializing in content development, market analysis, and messaging/positioning for individuals and businesses of all sizes. Belicove's latest book, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Facebook, will be available in June 2010, while his current title--2009 Internet Directory: Web 2.0 Edition--is available now at fine booksellers everywhere. You can read Belicove's monthly column on social media marketing and website promotion, management, usability, and design in Entrepreneur magazine. When he is not working, Belicove can be found musing about the world on his blog, Belicove.com.

Article Courtesy of :: American Express OPEN Forum : click to read original post

Express Yourself: Set up your Facebook Profile

Now that you’ve created your account, it’s time to set up your profile. Your profile allows you to share your interests, activities, and anything else you want to include with people you connect to on Facebook.
Your Facebook profile is about representing yourself and sharing what’s going on in your life with your friends.

Start with the basics

To edit your profile at any time, click on the “Edit Information” link at the upper right corner of your Basic Info or click on the “Edit” icons on the upper right corner of each of your profile fields.
Each profile information section represents what people will see when they arrive at your profile. Start by filling out the info that will help people identify you—Basic, Education, and Work.

Read More: Facebook | Help Center

Nine Twitter tips for business | Low Cost Social/online presence 4 your brand

Nine Twitter tips for business | Low Cost Social/online presence 4 your brand

Nine Twitter tips for business

How to strike the right balance when using this popular messaging service

 

by Jason Snell , Macworld.com

Twitter is so red-hot right now that it’s united Shaq and Oprah. It’s also so good at attracting buzzwords that I can’t decide whether to call it a microblogging service or a social-networking Web site. But it doesn’t really matter what you call it, or whether you prefer to follow Ashton Kutcher or Britney Spears. What matters is that users are taking to Twitter in massive numbers. And your business should be there, too.

Does this mean that plumbers need to start posting messages about what they had for breakfast in order to drum up sink-repair orders from desperate Internet hipsters? No, but you can and should use Twitter to connect with your customers, clients, and fans in a way that you couldn’t do before. Here are some tips on how to use Twitter effectively—and a few cautions, as well.

Continue reading "Nine Twitter tips for business" on Business Center| Macworld

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Building an Army of Hyper-Local, Mobile-Connected Advocates - Advertising Age - DigitalNext

Building an Army of Hyper-Local, Mobile-Connected Advocates

Or, Why Marketers Should Pay Attention to Foursquare

Posted by Allison Mooney on Adage.com 08.05.09 @ 03:00 PM 

 

Allison Mooney

No, this isn't "the year for location" in mobile. That phrase has become industry cliche by now. But it's hard to ignore the hype that one location-based service called Foursquare is getting in some circles -- and no advertiser should. The NYC-based startup has built a sticky platform, an avid fan base and, quite possibly, the next-generation platform for proximity marketing.

Foursquare bills itself as 50% friend finder, 30% social city guide, 20% nightlife game. Basically, you tell it where you are (a bar, a park, a museum, whatever) by "checking in" (via iPhone app, SMS or mobile site). The service then tells your network of friends, recommends things to do in the area, and awards you points and badges for your activity. It also lets you recommend things other people should do and track what you have done yourself.

Part of the appeal of the service is how it links the digital and "real" worlds -- truly putting the "social" in "social networking." After its big unveiling at SXSW, the service has garnered a passionate and growing base of early adopters (full disclosure: I'm an alpha tester and "super user" myself). The other weekend, some avid Foursquarers in New York even organized a bar crawl, called Town Holler, for people who'd achieved "mayor" status at a certain venue.
....(Con't)

READ MORE Building an Army of Hyper-Local, Mobile-Connected Advocates on Advertising Age - DigitalNext

Everything you need to know to make the most of the new Facebook “Like” Button

Everything you need to know to make the most of the new Facebook “Like” Button

Published May 18, 2010 Tips & Tricks 2 Comments

You may have noticed a new Facebook ‘Like’ button popping up on many sites (e.g. CNN, ABC, Fandango, etc.) across the web, but what does this actually mean for your business? We’ve broken this new feature (the so-called Facebook “Open Graph”) down to it’s essentials so you can understand exactly what it means for your company and how to make the most of it in your marketing strategy.

In case you haven’t come across the new Facebook ‘Like’ buttons, see the example below. Any company can now display these Facebook ‘Like’ buttons on their website; read on to find out what they mean for you and how you can implement them.

Fact # 1: The ‘Like’ button enables you to build your Facebook fans
When someone clicks the ‘Like’ button on a website they essentially become a ‘Fan’ of that website. What this means is that the owner of this website can publish Facebook status updates to these consumers just as they currently do to fans of their Facebook Fan Page. So adding the ‘Like’ button to your website is a great way to convert your existing users into ‘Fans’ and to build an audience that you can regularly communicate with via Facebook status updates.
Fact # 2: The ‘Like’ button spreads the word about your website to friends of your website visitors

When someone clicks the ‘Like’ button a newfeed story is generated on Facebook. So if a visitor to your website clicks the ‘Like’ button and they have 250 Facebook friends, up to 250 people might be exposed to a message about this website visitor liking your company website. This is a very powerful way for you to utilize your website visitors to spread the word about your business to their friends.

Fact # 3: Clicking the ‘Like’ button adds your site to Facebook user profiles
When someone clicks the ‘Like’ button on your website, not only does a newsfeed get generated but a link also gets added to the ‘interests’ section of the person’s Facebook profile. So, for example, if I visit RottenTomatoes.com and click the ‘Like’ button on the Godfather movie page, the Godfather movie will automatically be listed among my favorite movies on Facebook. The interest topics on Facebook include: Interests, Music, Movies, Television, but even if your website doesn’t fit neatly into these categories it’ll still be listed under other ‘Likes’ and interests. This means that anyone visting the profile of a person who ‘liked’ your website can discover your business and click directly through to your website. This is an entirely new way for your business to get discovered.


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Everything you need to know to make the most of the new Facebook “Like” Button « Wildfire Social Media Marketing Blog courtesy of « Wildfire Social Media Marketing Blog

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The Top 6 marketing strategies to Promote Your Site

The Web Marketing Checklist:
37 Ways to Promote Your Website
by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, E-Commerce Consultant
Courtesy of, Web Marketing Today, June 2, 2009

This article is designed to introduce you to website promotion, getting visitors to come to your website. It gives you the basic information, which you can then explore through dozens of links to other resources, much of it entirely free. As one of our most popular articles, this was revised most recently on June 2, 2009.

Business lunch about Web marketing and e-commerce

How can you get more visitors to your website? What can you do to stimulate traffic? Here's a checklist of 37 items you need to consider. Many of these may be doing already; others you meant to do and forgot about; still others you've never heard of. Of course, a great deal has been written about this. You'll find links to thousands of articles about website promotion in our Web Marketing Today Research Room (www.wilsonweb.com/research/)

While I'm not breaking any new ground here, I've tried to summarize some of the most important techniques.
Search Engine Strategies

Perhaps the most important -- and inexpensive -- strategy is to rank high for your preferred keywords on the main search engines in "organic" or "natural" searches (as opposed to paid ads). Search engines send robot "spiders" to index the content of your webpage, so let's begin with steps to prepare your webpages for optimal indexing. The idea here is not to trick the search engines, but to leave them abundant clues as to what your webpage is about. This approach is called "search engine optimization," abbreviated as SEO.

1. Write a Keyword-Rich Page Title. Write a descriptive title for each page -- rich in keywords you want people to find you with -- using 5 to 8 words. Remove as many "filler" words from the title (such as "the," "and," etc.) as possible, while still making it readable. This page title will appear hyperlinked on the search engines when your page is found. Entice searchers to click on the title by making it a bit provocative. Place this at the top of the webpage between the tags, in this format: . (It also shows on the blue bar at the top of your web browser.)

Blue bar at top of web browser containing the Title

Plan to use some descriptive keywords along with your business name on your home page. If you specialize in silver bullets and that's what people will be searching for, don't just use your company name "Acme Ammunition, Inc.," use "Silver and Platinum Bullets -- Acme Ammunition, Inc." The words people are most likely to search on should appear first in the title (called "keyword prominence"). Remember, this title is your identity on the search engines. The more people see that interests them in the blue hyperlinked words on the search engine, the more likely they are to click on the link.

Competiton for search engine ranking occurs every day2. Write a Description META Tag. Some search engines include this description below your hyperlinked title in the search results. The description should be a sentence or two describing the content of the webpage, using the main keywords and keyphrases on this page. Don't include keywords that don't appear on the webpage. Place the Description META Tag at the top of the webpage, between the tags, in this format:



The maximum number of characters should be about 255; just be aware that only the first 60 or so are visible on Google, though more may be indexed.

When I prepare a webpage, I write the article first, then develop a keyword-rich title (#1 above). Then I write a description of the content in that article in a sentence or two, using each of the important keywords and keyphrases included in the article. This goes into the description META tag.

Next, I strip out the common words, leaving just the meaty keywords and phrases and insert those into the keywords META tag. It's no longer used much for ranking, but I'm leaving it in anyway. I think it may have some minor value. So to summarize so far, every webpage in your site should have a distinct title and META description tag. If you implement these two points, you're well on your way to better search engine ranking. But there's more that will help your ranking....

3. Include Your Keywords in Headers (H1, H2, H3). Search engines consider keywords that appear in the page headline and sub heads to be important to the page, so make sure your desired keywords and phrases appear in one or two header tags. Don't expect the search engine to parse your Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) to figure out which are the headlines -- it won't. Instead, use keywords in the H1, H2, and H3 tags to provide clues to the search engine. (Note: Some designers no longer use the H1, H2 tags. That's a big mistake. Make sure your designer defines these tags in the CSS rather than creating headline tags with other names.)

4. Position Your Keywords in the First Paragraph of Your Body Text. Search engines expect that your first paragraph will contain the important keywords for the document -- where most people write an introduction to the content of the page. You don't want to just artificially stuff keywords here, however. More is not better. Google might expect a keyword density in the entire body text area of maybe 1.5% to 2% for a word that should rank high, so don't overdo it.

5. Include Descriptive Keywords in the ALT Attribute of Image Tags. This helps your site be more accessible to site-impaired visitors (www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/glance/) and gives additional clues to the search engines. The ALT attributes do help get your images ranked higher for image search (see #12 below).

6. Use Keywords in Hyperlinks. Search engines are looking for clues to the focus of your webpage. When they see words hyperlinked in your body text, they consider these potentially important, so hyperlink your important keywords and keyphrases. To emphasize it even more, the webpage you are linking to could have a page name with the keyword or keyphrase, such as blue-widget.htm -- another clue for the search engine.

See the entire http://www.wilsonweb.com/articles/checklist.htmrticle on The Web Marketing Checklist: 37 Ways to Promote Your Site

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Extending the Customer Experience - the Zappos Story | Futurelab – An international marketing strategy consultancy

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Extending the Customer Experience - the Zappos Story

by: Matt Rhodes
Zappos is a well-known social media case study. The Las Vegas shoe retailer was founded in 1999 selling shoes online. In ten years it has expanded to include other products like handbags and sunglasses, and it has grown to be a $1 billion per year business. Very impressive statistics, a good Image via CrunchBase business model and a really good example of using social media.
For Zappos customer service has always been a critical part of the brand, indeed early on they made the deliberate decision to divert their marketing budget to customer service. They allowed customers to do things like try and return products for up to a year, only list stock that’s in their warehouse, encourage customers to call them about nearly everything, and they invest in ’surprise’ free overnight shipping for most customers. Customer service comes first, with the aim to acquire customers through word of mouth and retain existing customers through good service. And for them this approach seems to have worked. It is also one that fits well with a strong social media strategy.
So Required Reading for Easter at FreshNetworks is this presentation by Brian Kalma at Zappos, showing how they have used social media and the benefits they have received. It’s great to see how these micro-interactions and the emphasis on customer service have had real word of mouth benefits for the brand. And then how this has translated into customers and loyalty. For me it is also great to see how they have worked internally to engage staff and involve them in making this process work - getting 440 staff to be customer facing and engaging with customers on a daily basis.
A great presentation and a great chance to learn from what Zappos have done.

View more presentations from Brian Kalma.
Some more reading

• Zappos CEO Talks Culture Fit and the Importance of Creating a ‘Wow’ Experience (readwriteweb.com)
• Social Media Three For One (marketing.blogtanker.com)
• Some takeaways about organizational culture from Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO (beth.typepad.com)
• Guide: A Brand Strategy Checklist (thecauseisthehabit.com)
• Steve Rosenbaum: Circuit City Goes Bust: Zappos Flies High - Why? (huffingtonpost.com)

Original Post: http://blog.freshnetworks.com/2009/04/extending-the-customer-experience-the-zappos-story/

Extending the Customer Experience - the Zappos Story | Futurelab – An international marketing strategy consultancy

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Why the Web Is the New Media Kit | Marketing & Advertising

Why the Web Is the New Media Kit

Interview with Michael Greece of Padilla Speer Beardsley, a New York public relations firm.

See Full Text Transcript

MICHAEL GREECE: A media kit generally is designed to define the messaging and positioning and identity of a brand or company. Quite frankly a media kit is, probably is becoming, to some extent, an anachronism, because the web has taken over as a search vehicle for people figuring out what the brand or the company stands for. And the details, once you go to someone’s home page, of messaging, of positioning, of mission statements, of all those things, of objectives, and products, and values, is very well-defined by most people’s homepage. So, I think the web has sort of taken, to a large extent, has taken the place of the media kit. I happen to think to some extent that it’s still valuable to have something hard to hand somebody when they come to meet you, because what basically you are doing is you are separating yourself from the noise. That is, everybody has a homepage that defines them, but not everybody has something to hand somebody that they can take back and slip in their briefcase, so I’m probably taking a maverick point of view, that to some extent, an element, or pieces of what historically people call a media kit might still be valuable in defining a small or middle-sized company’s brand.

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Why the Web Is the New Media Kit | Marketing & Advertising from AllBusiness.com

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