Empower your employees to be your brand advocates

In the first ten chapters of the book Groundswell, I learned how to connect with customers in the groundswell. But what about employees? In chapter 12, The Groundswell Inside Your Company, gave us the answer.

In corporations around the world, employees are connecting on internal social networks, collaborating on company wikis, and contributing to in-house idea exchanges. Some of these applications came from management and others began as skunk-works projects, but what they have in common is this: they tap into the power of the groundswell of ideas among the people who truly know your business-your employees. It's a little scary to put such power into the hands of your workers, but if you want to run faster and smarter, you should consider it.

(Li, Bernoff, 2011, p. 234)

As we know, brand image is one of a company’s top priorities, whether you run a local restaurant or a global company. This isn't something you can fake or build overnight. Having a positive brand image isn't about creating a recognizable logo or name; it's about reputation, and you can't build or strengthen it alone. You need to earn the respect and trust of your employees so they support and believe in your company and its mission. Once you've established that trust, you can empower your employees to become advocates and share your brand's story with their personal networks. So as the authors of Groundswell said, connecting with employees is as important as connecting customers.

From the BestBuy case in the book, Blue Shirt Nation was created to listen to what employees had to say. Allowing employees to make suggestions, pitch ideas, or give feedback gave them a sense of accomplishment and responsibility in the company. It helped employees feel empowered, connected, and more committed on a day-to-day basis. It also helped BestBuy accomplish groundswell’s five objectives: listening, talking, energizing, supporting and embracing.

Actually, many people are passionate about their company and want to talk about it, but they need to know the company supports and even encourages those efforts. So what should company do? Engaged employees. Empowered employees. They live your brand story everyday. They embody the story. If you give them the tools, guidelines, brand-safe content, and support them; they will present your brand story in a trusted, authentic way.

Coffee chain Starbucks is another company dedicated to creating brand advocates out of employees. Starbucks is very care about employees and refers to their employees as “partners”. I believe that at least a part of Starbucks’ success is in how they treat their employees. Let’s watch this video to see what it's like to be a Starbucks partner.

 “We’ve up weighted our commitment in the training and development of our people because as brand ambassadors our partners must truly embrace the values of our company. We know that the longer we keep and develop our baristas, and the more they embrace our values the better our coffee and our service. ”

-----Brian Waring, Starbucks VP of Marketing

With employees being the most trusted sources for customers, it’s vital that your company’s employees are encouraged to participate in your brand. If you’re looking to cultivate loyalty and create brand ambassadors, why not start in your own backyard?

Starbucks: Expect More Than Coffee ------Social Media Monitoring 1

I am a big fan of Starbucks. I love the brewed coffee, special cups, other relevant products, and especially the comfort and relax environment in every store. However, I never thought why Starbucks is so successful to attract people gathering in the stores. This assignment pushed me to explore more about Starbucks’ marketing strategy.

1. INTRODUCTION

There are thousands of coffee shops in the world, but no one, like Starbucks, has been so successful. As we know, Starbucks is an American coffee company and coffeehouse chain. It is the largest coffeehouse company in the world. As of September 2015, Starbucks has 22,766 stores in 65 countries and territories, including 12,802 in the United States, 1,930 inChina, 1,409 in Canada, 1,121 in Japan and 825 in the United Kingdom. Today, Starbucks is no doubt a famous brand all over the world.

More about the history...

Though it is the largest coffeehouse company in the world, Starbucks is still a young company for 46 years, compared to other fast food giants (McDonald’s 60 years, KFC 85 years, and Dunkin' Donuts 65 years).

Starbucks began in 1971. Three students at the University of San Francisco were inspired to sell high-quality coffee beans and equipment by coffee roasting entrepreneur Alfred Peet after he taught them his style of roasting beans. (Pendergrast, pp. 252–53) In the early time, Starbucks only sold roasted whole coffee in 1912 Pike Place Market in Seattle, Washington. Until in 1987, Howard Schultz became the CEO of Starbucks, who rebranded Starbucks and quickly began to expand new markets and products. Between 1987 and 2007, Starbucks opened on average two new stores every day. Today, Starbucks has more than 22,000 retail stores all over the world, serving millions of customers with various products, more than coffee.

This video can guid us to see the company's history, concept and culture.

2. MARKETING STRATEGY

What makes Starbucks so special? Their success cannot live without the unique marketing strategy. According to the information on Starbucks official website, some of their best marketing strategies are outlined below.

•  Perfect Cup of Coffee – Starbucks places a huge emphasis on product quality.

•  Third Place – Starbucks focuses on creating a “third place” between home and work, a unique and relaxing “experience” and “atmosphere” for people.

•  Customer Satisfaction – Customer satisfaction is a very important issue with Starbucks.

•  Creating a Starbucks Community –The Starbucks creates a community around their brand.

•  Innovation – Starbucks thinks up creative and innovative ideas to add to their products or services.

•  Brand Marketing – Starbucks always focuses on “word-of-mouth” advertising and letting the high quality products and services speak for themselves.

Target market:

•    Starbucks opens stores in main big cities.

•    Target consumers: 18-45 year olds; youngsters who want to gather with their friends; Office workers and students who need to catch up with their work; Those who feel that drinking coffee is “cool”; People who are adventurous, willing to try new things.

3. SOCIAL MEDIA OVERVIEW

I was shocked when I look at the social media of Starbucks. It is crushing social media! Let’s look at these numbers:

•   35.94 million Facebook likes

•   10.2 million Twitter followers

•   6 million Instagram followers

•   216.3K Pinterest followers

•   83K YouTube subscribers

•   4.21 million Google+ followers

•   6.14 million Linkedin followers

Amazing job! Those numbers are staggering but well-earned. How do they do it? Let’s take a look.

a. Website

Starbucks website

Starbucks has a rather strong web presence, utilizing many different platforms in order to reach their consumers and provide information in various ways. On it’s main website, Starbucks continually changes the landing page to coincide with a current promotion that they might be offering. In fact, right now the landing page is about the campaign “One treefor Every Bag”.

Starbucks shop online web page

Besides, from the main Starbucks website, consumers can choose “Shop” which directs them to the online store.

b. Facebook

Interestingly, the Starbucks doesn’t post Facebook updates all that often. When they do, however, they’re usually eye-catching. The posts strike a good balance between fun contests, helpful tips for the java-loving crowd, and subtle sales messages to its customers. The recent post was released on October 9. As of Oct. 12, 229,885 people like this, 3162 people share this.

Incredibly, Starbucks replied every comment including positive and negative.

c. Twitter

Starbucks doesn’t update Twitter all the time, but they do post unique content. Checking out Starbucks’ Twitter page, it’s visible that most of the tweets are directed at users. They use Twitter as a service to reach out to customers talking about their in-store or product experiences.

For example, one follower named Sophie tweeted her disappointment with the coffee shop after she got a cup with the name “Sue”. Starbucks replied, “‪@Sophs_Ritchie‪ Sorry about that, Sophie! ”

In fact, many of their tweets start with “sorry about that!” or “sorry to hear!,” offering dismayed customers solutions to their problems. Instead of losing disgruntled customers, Starbucks directly responds, solving the issues and making sure that customers are, in the end, satisfied! Because people want their voices to be heard.

d. Pinterest and Instagram

Starbucks really shines on visually-oriented social sites like Pinterest and Instagram, where they can post appealing photos to attract eyeballs.

The company maintains 20 Pinboards featuring coffee recipes, tea recipes, Starbucks reserve, flavored coffee creations, pumpkin spice latte, Frappuccino, food, Starbucks cup art, store design .... The boards are full of fantastic images that are almost entirely sourced from third-party sites. I think this is an important part creating a successful Pinterest strategy.

Instagram is an assortment of cool images related to the coffee culture. Same as Pinterest, Starbucks’ Instagram also lets its followers primarily control the content. The vast majority of the images on Starbucks’ account are fan-submitted images from locations around the globe. Starbucks encourage followers to post their own Starbucks photos, along with a campaign-focused hashtag to connect the visual content back to the brand.

e. Others: YouTube, Google+, Linkedin

YouTube

There are 265 videos on Starbucks YouTube Channel. The videos are classified in different contents, such as Starbucks partners, Starbucks jobs, spots, giving back, Frappuccino, tea, coffee Q&A, music … Over 83k people subscribe to Starbucks YouTube Channel.

Google+

On Starbucks Google+ pages, Starbucks have more than four million followers. All of the posts content is taken from Starbucks’ Facebook page and Twitter feed, though there’s nothing drastically wrong with this tactic.

Linkedin

Starbucks also have Linkedin. We can see lots of information about the company, culture and job posted. There are more than 6.14 million followers. Some are employees, and some are those who are just interested in the jobs or company.

Whatever social media platforms Starbucks use, the messages they posted are positive, creative, funny, personalized. And the tone is widely from funny to heartwarming to quirky to artsy, but always reflects their brand personality. What mostly impressed me is the high frequency of interaction between the company and followers. On Facebook, Starbucks replied every comment! On Twitter, they also have lots of interaction to followers.

4. CURRENT METRICS

a. Social Mention

Judging from the data on the Social Mention anytime, it is good to see the strength (the likelihood that the brand is being discussed in social media) is 66%, which indicates most people are talking about Starbucks on the social media. And the sentiment (the ratio of positive to negative) is positive and neutral, and the reach (a measure of the range of influence) is 50%.

People can use many key words to find Starbucks, but the most common word is the name Starbucks. According to the listed sources, Starbucks appears in many different kinds of social media, the famous social media is Photobucket and Twitter. Moreover, this brand will be mentioned every 40 seconds in the Internet. That’s really a hot word.

b.  Google Trends

According to Google Trends, we can see that the interest of Starbucks is increasing gradually during the past ten years. The growth is very stable in a big picture.

 Starbucks is very popular in its homeland---United States. It is also popular in Singapore, Canada, Philippines and Hong Kong, because Starbucks stores are mainly located at big cities in developed districts.

c. Meltwater IceRocket

This graph from Ice Rocket shows the Daily Blogs Citation Trend of the term "Starbucks" in the last month. Clearly, the term Starbucks is a hot word, having averages 312.13 posts per day.

5.  CONCLUSION
Above all, I can see that Starbucks is not only a coffee company giant, but also a social media giant. Starbucks has a presence on most of the major social media sites including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, Google Plus and Linkedin. In addition to these well-known social media, Starbucks has special marketing campaigns, its own online community – My Starbucks Idea, and even mobile applications. (I’m going to explore more about that in monitoring 2)  I can say that Starbucks has fully embraced the power that social media technologies have provided businesses.

Social media, energizing tourism of New Hampshire

Last week, my friend shared a link “ Experience New Hampshire at its peak----with our foliage tracker” in Wechat (Chinese version of Facebook).

 

I was shocked when I saw the amazing picture. It was so beautiful! Of course I clicked the link with no hesitate and wanted to know more information. It was an official website of State of New Hampshire Division of Travel and TourismDevelopment, showing plenty of information of traveling in New Hampshire. 

It includes What to Do, What to Eat, Where to Stay, Vacation Ideas, and social media links (such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Youtube).

I was never thought a government department had a so amazing website and social media platforms. It totally changed my impression of New Hampshire.

Indeed, social media has changed everything, even the Government agencies’ work style. Many government agencies are increasingly using social media to engage with citizens, share information and deliver services more quickly and effectively than ever before. Some smart government, like New Hampshire Division of Travel and Tourism Development, can use social media to develop local tourism. Let’s explore more about how New Hampshire does this.

1. Official website: http://www.visitnh.gov

They have an official website with rich information. If you are planning to travel there, logging in the official website is enough. You can find anything you need.

They also have two sub-websites, specially for meeting planner and wedding planner. You can find professional service there.

Official meeting planning site of New Hampshire

Official wedding planning site of New Hampshire

2. Social media platforms.

They use as many as social media platforms to interact with people, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, You Tube. They really interact with followers frequently, like discussing something, giving advices, or just say Hi.

Part of VisitNH Facebook webpage

3. Activities.

As we known, fall is the best season in North America because the colorful foliage. People come from all over the country and the world to see New Hampshire’s spectacular fall scenery. And more, next Monday (Oct. 12) is Columbus Day, and most people have a long weekend. How shall we enjoy the beautiful autumn? VisitNH gave us many advices: scenic driving, outdoor recreation, visiting farm stands, festivals, agricultural fairs, and attractions. Shopping is also a popular activity during vacation trips to the state.

I also found a special contest in the website---Class Act video awards 2016.

The New Hampshire Division of Travel & Tourism is excited to announce the 2016 Class Act Video Awards! This is your chance to work together with your class and produce a 60 second video showing off all of the things you love and have learned about New Hampshire.  Act, sing, make a commercial, do an interview or reenactment...or come up with a brand new idea of your own! Your video should show visitors to our beautiful state how much fun it is here and help them learn about all the things they can do when they get here.

All of the above is very attracting for travellers, especially for those who live in New England area, near New Hampshire.

Using social media is powerful and effective. And there are other benefits from doing this, like booming local tourism economy, strengthening or rebranding a region's image, attracting former residents back to an area ……

One more video about New Hampshire.

I can't wait to go there and enjoy trees glowing with vibrant colors!

P.S., I have lived in Worcester for one year, but I never heard there was some special large event to attract visitors. You know, Worcester is a historic city for hundreds years, the heart of the Commonwealth and New England. Do you have any idea to boom Worcester?