Social Media

I would like to discuss Wal-Mart’s social media strategy (on blogs and facebook), the flaws of it and how do best practice companies do.

Stay objective

Facing the ever-demanding customers, Wal-Mart understands that it cannot only build its relationship passively with customers by simply offering the lowest prices. Instead, it should proactively reach out to customers, hear their voices, and actively build more emotional bonds with them by offering them additional values. Wal-Mart started to frame its social media strategy a few years ago and Elevenmoms Program is its first attempt.

Elevenmoms is a program which Wal-Mart actively reached out to famous mom bloggers through social media sites and invited them to share their tips for “Save Money, Live Better”. Through this program, Wal-Mart was trying to offer its customers more values through money-saving tips and to build a community with common interest. The community would enable Wal-Mart to identify its target customers (generally moms and that’s why it intentionally invited “mom” bloggers) quickly on social media sites and to participate in the conversations with them to eventually gain insights from them.

Even though the program successfully helped many customers improve their experiences, it had a major flaw. Some customers on the social media sites did not believe what those mom bloggers said and therefore were reluctant to browse the elevenmoms blogs. Those customers thought Wal-Mart offered those mom bloggers some monetary interests for writing those tips and therefore, the content of the blogs lost its objectivity. This indicates an important point mentioned in the article- one of the problems about blogs is that they are not regulated. For those bloggers who fail to disclose interests of conflict, they may not be considered trustworthy by the audience and therefore the content they generate is put in doubt.

It is therefore crucial for a company to maintain a good balance between actively engaging in the conversation with customers through social media and being objective in order to succeed in their social media strategy.

Close monitoring and quick reaction

Wal-Mart’s second attempt on social media is the revamp of its facebook fan page. Wal-Mart has set up its fan page for a while but it was not until the start of this year did it come up with a solid facebook strategy.

Before then, Wal-Mart’s facebook page was a mess. Wal-Mart did not even pay any attention to it and negative comments were everywhere on its wall. I remembered there’s only one post on the wall by Wal-Mart: “Wal-Mart, the best company in the world” and there were thousands of negative comments towards that posts and no one from Wal-Mart really came out to manage them. It was definitely a bad demonstration and failure on social media strategy. Wal-Mart’s image was not improved by the setup of its fan page but seriously deteriorated.

However, last year they did start to fix the problem by revamping its social media sites. I was honored to engage in the process. We have done much research on the best social media practice for Wal-Mart. For example, quick reaction to any customers’ inquiry could make tremendous impacts on a brand/company image and could also make customers become ambassadors for the company through word of mouth. For example, we found there was one customer posted an inquiry on jetblue’s fan page saying that “Jetblue, I need a wheelchair!” and this person was contacted by jetblue in 15 minutes after the post for the solution to his problem. The quick and professional reaction disseminated quickly and significantly reinforced the brand image.

Let customer know you hear their voices

Because one of the key objectives for Wal-Mart’s social media strategy is to gain more insights from customers, it is important that it hears customers’ voices, efficiently prioritizes them, and most importantly, lets customers know their feedbacks are put into consideration/execution so that they are more willing to share their ideas.

One of the best examples for hearing customers’ voices is Dell. Dell has launched a site that allows customers to leave their feedbacks. Dell then asked all customers to rate/vote for thousands of feedbacks and those highly rated feedbacks would be put into execution. The whole process does not only gain insights from the customers but also deeply engage them with the company.

Another example is Kate Spade. Kate Spade actively solicits new ideas from customers through its fan page and incorporates those insights into the new design. This not only helps its design more fit in customers’ needs but also successfully create a conversation with customers and make them feel to be part of the brand. The strategy skyrockets the sales of Kate Spade.

In sum, social media is a relatively inexpensive yet effective way to do marketing. To be successful, however, requires a solid and well-executed strategy. A poor-designed or badly-executed strategy could not only get a company nowhere but could possibly put the entire brand image at risk.