A Suprising Leader in the Social Media World!

For this social media blog, I would like to focus on how Whole Foods uses social media to create a valuable experience through their marketing strategy. First, Whole Foods has an awesome Facebook page that is very inviting in terms of user participation. They post local events, new products, contests, promotions, philanthropy, in-store demos, and questions for users to post their answers on the page such as, “What is your favorite cheese?” Facebook allows Whole Foods to write long posts, post photos, and post videos. It also allows people to respond not only to Whole Foods, but to other users and becomes a sort-of conversation between Whole Foods customers. Not only do they have one main page, but also have pages for each of their major stores. For example, Whole Foods Market Austin has its own store page, which allows customers to get a genuine glimpse of their local store’s culture.  It also strengthens Whole’s Foods’ concept of community. After experiencing Whole Foods’ Facebook page, customers might begin to think of their trip to whole foods as a community experience rather versus just a trip to the store. Most importantly, with a Facebook page, all the information is in one spot. Customers can search for Whole Foods and find all they need to know without having to search extensively. The research is done for you; all in one stop.

Whole Foods is most well known for its use of Twitter http://twitter.com/wholefoods Whole Foods currently has close to 2 MILLION followers. All I can is, WOW.  Whole Foods is one of the most popular retailers on Twitter. They use Twitter primarily as a customer service tool. They do promote blog content and may mention promotions such as holiday specials and that sort of thing, but their number-one focus on Twitter is customer service. Most of Whole Foods' output on Twitter is typically used to respond to individual questions or concerns in a conversational manner. They also throw in some freebies like a gift card for the best @wholefoods tweet of the week. Whole Foods also have many niche Twitter accounts that specialize in certain topics, metro areas or specific local stores. For example, http://twitter.com/WFMcheese is WF’s cheese expert who has a quadruple PhD in cheese. Customers are able to follow certain detailed topics that interest them which makes the experience even more personal and engaging. They have a Whole Foods Austin account: twitter.com/wholefoodsatx. One of the biggest is and most popular accounts so far is WholeRecipes which has over 35,000 followers. It’s an automated feed of the latest recipes from Whole Food Markets. This account is pure broadcast, no conversations or @replies. Whole Foods' Twitter accounts offer clear value to followers and create an experience similar to what they might receive in the store. These social media outlets are invaluable in helping them develop new products or think of ways to improve their existing products. They can also get an early heads up on dissatisfied customers and get to those customers quickly to avoid negative word of mouth that could lead to lost sales. Whole Foods' Social media techniques follow the Groundswell evaluation rules of new technology: 1) It enables people to connect with e/o in new ways, 2) It is effortless to sign up for, 3) It shifts power from institututions to people, 4) The community generates enough content to sustain itself, and 5) It is an open platform that invites partnerships. For all of these reasons, Whole Foods social media has thrived.
        
It is very important for companies to ask “Why” before they engage in any social media tactic or marketing strategy. It is my understanding that most companies do extensive research before implementing social media or integrated marketing strategies. There are many research tools out there that help companies know where the conversations are going on, what are the trends, who are the influencers etc. Companies monitor these tools on an ongoing basis in order to adapt to trends, seasonality and changes in what's important to the target market in order to adjust. These tools are invaluable in helping companies discover key insights to make their social media strategy successful. For this blog, I checked out both Google Insights and Samepoint .
        
I decided to conduct my social media research on behalf of Southwest Airlines. Last week they grounded dozens of planes after learning of possible structural problems so I wanted to see what topics were trending related to Southwest and how this possible negative media attention may have affected social media. Using Google Insights, I searched for “Southwest” worldwide, from the past 90 days. I few different categories came up related to Southwest, but the top category was obviously “Travel” and top subcategory of “Air Travel.” 90 days before they grounded planes, the interest level of Southwest remained pretty steady at around 60%.  Around April 4th, the date that the planes were grounded due to cracks, the interest level shot up. I then decided to compare Southwest interest level growth relative to interest level growth of the “Travel” category over the past 90 days. Both interest growths remained steady and around correlated well until April 4th when the interest level of Southwest grew 41% relative to the growth of interest in Travel. Also, search volume was greatest in Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona. The plane was grounded in Arizona which makes sense, but if I were Southwest, I would wonder why search volume in Nevada was highest.

I also decided to try out Samepoint. Samepoint is a conversation search engine that lets you see what people are talking about. SamePoint.com tracks millions of conversations, taking place in more than tens of thousands blogs and social media sites. It is extremely important to companies to monitor blogs and according to Groundswell, blog reading is one of the most popular social media activities with one in four online Americans reading blogs. I decided to search for Southwest on Samepoint’s “Negative Thoughts Search Engine.” It monitors the social tone of the websites, and shows columns that represent how negative or positive the social tone currently is. On sites such as Southwest’s Facebook page, the tone is about 30% negative/70% positive. There was a considerable amount of negative social tones regarding Southwest in many blogs. However, typically, there was more positive social tone than negative in most of the blogs. Many of the posts that the search engine pulled were from Yelp.com and were reviews of the airlines. This could be an important tool for Southwest to use in order to gauge the tones of the various reviews being posted on different websites.