How Big Businesses are Leveraging the Power of Social Media

What I learned:

Whole Foods really does utilize the many different avenues of Social Media, and they do it well - from corporate to the local markets. They inform and engage their shoppers. Some of the many vehicles they use are Corporate + Local FB fanpages (what are they calling them now, 'like-pages'?) Gowalla, Foursquare, twitter... and on and on. They are really tapping into the new technology.

Best Buy really uses social media to connect and personalize their company for their shoppers. They concentrate on helping their customers rather than speaking to them. Employees have it on their iPhones and they respond as they see comments. Everyone is empowered to socialize.

Home Depot is also focused on customer support. They will open all night in weather emergencies and they broadcast this via Twitter. They are focusing on customer service and accessibility. Social media allows them to gather feedback and to personally reach out to their individual customers. Like Whole Foods, corporate created a Landing Page and their social media gets directed from there. It gives them a credibility that sets them apart from the fraudulent copy-cat sites.

This session was a series of quick hit case studies of how large companies use the social media, which I found interesting.

in the Q&A, some of the interesting responses were:

How many people do you have dedicated to SM? Best Buy: 2,600 (obvious), Whole Foods: 6, Home Depot: 2 dedicated and a slew of customer service reps that were already employed in this area.

How do you find a conversation and when do you jump in? Scan the 'room', do not pitch or sell within a stream.

What is the one takeaway you can share?
WF: had a retweet contest - one instance, a customer 'won' and had their tweet retweeted (with a defamatory slang) which resulted in a backlash via blogs, etc.

BB: Listen to your customers. Take the feedback seriously. Use it to shape what you do and how you do it. Take risks.