Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Social media report for Pepsi and Ford

Pepsi’s Social Media presence

Pepsi’s Social media presence has changed the way that they do business and engage with customers. It is all about the user generated content, directly relying on the reviews, comments and any sort of user inputs about their products makes a significant contribution to their product lines. Pepsi clearly understood this social media impact and have redesigned their home page with tiles that could really engage customers.

Pepsi’s homepage is more of a digital dashboard highlighted by user generated content from Facebook and Twitter. Pepsi also pays lot of attention to what their customers are interested in by using a social media tool called SocialFlow, which ranks the editorial contents in refined audience segments. Pepsi monitors their social media presence and assists their customers with real-time solution when they have any complaints or queries about their products.


Unlike Television and print media in yester years, today digital media provides a way to track their marketing reach via social media presence. It is also possible to market and create brand awareness in location specific regions using mobile media marketing.

Off the total number of employees, more than 300,000 of Pepsi’s employees have Facebook account with an average of 130 friends. That is some 70% of their total number of employees and more than 80% of these 300,000 are willing to talk about their employer which gives the company a scope to understand their employees better. The total number of Facebook ‘likes’ and ‘fans’ will give us a fair idea of Pepsi’s social media presence.


More than 45,000 people follow Pepsi’s Linkedin corporate profile and the company is mostly relying on Linkedin for their recruitments. They are picking up more than 5000 application in any given month for job applications through Linkedin.
By all means, Pepsi has a proper strategized social media plan and they are making best use of it via, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn which are few of the social media tools to list.

Ford’s Social media strategy

The main focus of Ford Motor Co. is to address the customers on their concerns using Social media tools. In an exclusive interview with Ford’s global manager Scott Monty, he wants to address or engage with a customer within hours after posting an issue and get it resolved. They are trying to bring it under 4 hours in his own words.

Ford’s dedicated customer service team has created a customized search engine tool which picks up keywords of concerns through Facebook, Twitter, message boards, forums and other social media tools and then assigns them to a customer service agent until it gets resolved. This practice has resulted in Ford, now responding to more than 2000 people per week via social media and the interactions continue to be on the rise.

Ford also has developed an Influencer relationship management tool called ConnectFord to work with bloggers and people who have their own set of digital audiences. The portal ConnectFord gives bloggers and influencers the first hand information instead of relying on the print media from where they can start blogging and sharing information from Ford.


More than 2.2 million likes on Ford’s Facebook page is a standing piece of evidence for their customers engagement with their employees. Twitter account is no less than their Facebook activity which has more than 400,000 followers with 12000 plus tweets. Ford is also actively encouraging their customers to tweet to resolve any of their concerns which is little challenging for the customers to describe an issue in less than 140 words.





To sum up, Social media is more of an effective way to engage with the customers and reach the customers with new brands and ideas, along with to address any of the concerns that your customer may have. There is no downside for Pepsi, or Ford or for any other company that proactively reaches out to consumers via social media.

References:



No comments:

Post a Comment