Brands That Have Embraced Social Media Marketing

Sun Microsystems CEO uses blogging to stay in touch

CEO of Sun Microsystems, Jonathan Schwartz, uses his own blog to encourage his consumers as well as those working in the organization to post comments about the company without inhibition. This resulted in the blog receiving 400000 hits in a single month back in 2006. But more importantly it boosted confidence and gained the trust of its customers in the market.

Multiple IBM blogs

What stands out in case of IBM’s use of blogs is the network of blogs it maintains for separate departments of the organization which allows its workers to post experiences about their job at the company. Not only did this help IBM gain confidence of its employees, but it also gave its consumers the chance to interact with them and gain insight into the operations of the company and its products and services.

Tell us what you think at Starbucks

Websites may be mandatory as part of online marketing strategies for most businesses, but allowing customers to put in their suggestions is what Starbucks aimed at achieving through its “My Starbucks Idea”. Along with customer feedback on their websites, they also maintained a blog called “Ideas in Action” which responded to customer suggestions, notifying them of any relevant changes that were made by the company based on them. This shows Starbucks’ initiative to include customers into its company on a significant level. Along with that, Starbucks also uses Twitter to stream real time opinions with its customers.

Blendtech uses YouTube to blend

One of the most successful examples of social media marketing has been Blendtech which has been the brain child of George White. The idea was to show viewers how to blend different objects in a blender.

Blendtech exploited the subscribers on YouTube to advertise their blender campaign which raised their sales significantly, proving to be the perfect example of an inexpensive method of social media marketing.

Zappos Tweets

Zappos has probably made the most dynamic use of Twitter by encouraging its employees to have active accounts on the micro-blogging site and gain access to the complete stream of tweets on a single page to keep in touch with all its customers as well as fellow employees.

Not only does Zappos use Twitter as an advertisement base for its products and services as retailer, but it also interacts with its customers by updating them about their product facts and keeping them in the loop of interesting ideas and activities of the company.

Burger King encourages you to sacrifice friends on Facebook

Although the “Sacrifice Ten Friends” campaign on Facebook did not last too long because of potential privacy policy violations, it did have a viral effect on the Burger King fans for a while. 200000 friends were sacrificed via the activity for free whoppers by 20000 users. This is an example of yet another cost-effective short-term attempt at making an impact through social media advertisements.