Companies investigating the benefits of social media should visit the Jeep Experience community as one notable example. This site is the result of Jeep facilitating conversations on a variety of social platforms. If Jeep Experience had been built during the dot com craze of the late ‘90’s, it would have cost twice as much to create; with half the success—at best.
 
Even Jeep admits that it didn’t establish profiles across sites like Facebook, YouTube and Flickr, with the end goal of creating the Experience site.  But it made sense to aggregate all of this activity into one place to more easily immerse its customers in the Jeep lifestyle.

Distribution or Destination
Social media platforms allow their content to be distributed and shared simply and easily across the Web.  If your brand is prone to customer conversations, it pays to consider these sites as part of your online strategy.   Building a broader presence, well past a single website, allows customers to find a brand they love in places where they already spend time.  Just a few years ago, the only option would be to bring customers to a specific, branded site. Now companies like Jeep are enjoying the benefits of distributed content.

Brands Have Fans
While it’s worth noting how unique the Jeep brand is when qualifying its success in building a community of passionate customers, there are potential “fans” out there for a wide variety of products and services online.  Consider CPG brands that we grew up and the emotional connection consumers have to names such as Sharpie markers or Pringles.  A quick visit to social sites like Twitter, Flickr and YouTube will give you an initial read on a brand’s fan base. Or stop by social search engines like IceRocket for a single view of the conversation your customers are having around your brand.

Mining Insights from Online Conversations
Social media doesn’t make sense for every product out there. Taking the time to monitor conversations, allows brand managers to strategically determine if and where a product/service is generating conversations in social spaces. However you don’t want to spend too much time monitoring before engaging.  These conversations are taking place with or without the brands’ involvement!

Using our proprietary ChatterWatch^sm tool, an Empower MediaMarketing client recently relied on online insights to help fuel their online marketing efforts. This client was able to tap into consumer conversations associated with their product on blogs and message boards to better target the product to customer needs.  The client is benefiting from its approach to social media by engaging their customers online, identifying brand fans, increasing brand loyalty and, in turn, improving sales.

By: Kevin Dugan, Marketing Director