Social Media Strategy Coca-Cola – Employee Engagement & Active Monitoring

Coca-Cola understands the importance and value of direct brand conversation facilitated by social media platforms. Company has expanded its marketing strategy and included social media marketing into it as customers are looking to engage with the company on various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. Coca-Cole went even further encouraging their employees to actively participate and engage with customers on various social media platforms. Employees actively engage in millions of conversations that take place on various social networking sites and share the optimistic and positive spirits of Coca-Cola brands.  Social Media Principles guide the employees in terms of how to participate both at the personal level and official capacity and mostly surround on the principle of “Have fun, but be smart.  Use sound judgment and common sense, adhere to the Company’s values, and follow the same Company policies that you follow in the offline world.” The company also provides the relevant training to employees and agency partners through internal online learning portals and also evaluates them and update accordingly. Company expects the employees and agency partners use blogs and other social media tools not only as a form of self-expression, but also as a means to further the Company’s business, aware of the implications of engaging in social media and online conversations that reference the Company, its brands, or its business, and that they recognize when the Company might be held responsible for their behavior. 

Coca-Cola also has made certain commitments as highlighted on the company’s website for the customer engagement on various social networking sites like transparency in the social media engagements, protection of consumers’ privacy and comply with applicable privacy policies, IT security policies, and laws, rules, and regulations, respect copyrights, trademarks, rights of publicity, and other third-party rights, responsible use of technology by not aligning with any organizations or Web sites that use excessive tracking software, adware, malware or spyware and judicially monitor behavior of employees and consumers in the social media space, establish appropriate protocols for monitoring social media presence, and keep appropriate records of our participation as required by law. Coca-Cola Social Media Monitoring strategy is first monitoring and reviewing what conversations related to Coke are going on the social media world, second respond to the chatter quickly and with accurate, fully transparent answers, third record short video pieces that respond to the chatter in an entertaining, but informative manner and finally redirect social media users to other content on other social media sites. Coca-Cola also gives more importance to the fans and customers on the social media platforms and encourages them to post and share most of the content on the social networks and also aligned its marketing strategy accordingly. Coca-Cola social media strategy has been to influence purchase decisions and loyalty by leveraging the emotional ties people have with their products. This strategy has been hugely successful for the company as the statistics of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube highlight but the company feels that there still long way to go where social media generates hard sales so that company can increase revenues and profitability. 

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Social Media Marketing Strategy @ Coca-Cola – Coke Facebook Strategy

Coca-Cola has built an active presence on various social media platforms without much effort by the company as the brand is hugely popular and integral part of the daily lives of the people across the world. Moreover Coca-Cola’s customers themselves have been active on various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Google+, etc.  A key step forward was made I the year 2012 when the company announced Content marketing Strategy 2020 where in the company moved from moving from “Creative Excellence” to “Content Excellence” Creative excellence has always been at the heart of Coca Cola’s advertising particularly the 30 second Television Ads and they have decided that content is now the key to marketing in the 21st century on a social web. Consumer engagement and collaboration model was adopted where in Consumers ideas, creativity and conversations on various social networks are tracked and use them to increase brand visibility and market the products. The purpose of content excellence is to create “Ideas” that are viral and uncontrolled which is called “liquid content”. Coca-Cola adopted 70/20/10 Investment principle to creating “Liquid content“, 70% of content should be low risk that pays the rent and is bread and butter marketing (also easy to do and consumes 50% of time), 20% of content creation should innovate off what works and 10% of content marketing is high risk ideas that may be tomorrows 70% or 20% or will fail.

The Coca-Cola Facebook Page is a collection of customer stories showing how people from around the world have helped make Coke into what it is today. Most of the content on the page is consumer created and the company’s focus is on maintaining the brand image and raising awareness of its ad campaigns. Coca-Cola, which joined Facebook in 2008, has garnered close to 75 million likes by engaging customers and fans actively and less focus on product promotion and more on its fans. Coca-Cola's success has been achieved through statuses, updates, videos and photos that increase customer engagement and interaction, supporting various social causes and integrating other forms of social media. Apart from promoting the widely popular Polar Bears campaigns, Olympics and Euro 2012 ad campaigns, Coke’s social team post questions and run polls often, but pictures and photos that are shared generate significant response from fans in terms of comments and ‘likes’. Coca-Cola also has a number of Facebook apps, including one called ‘When will happiness strike’ that is basically a video real of its ads and another called ‘Ahh Giver’ that allows users to send a personalised message and a free Coke to a Facebook friend. Coca-Cola also has Facebook pages for its other products such as Diet Coke and Coke Zero, however these have far fewer fans. But interesting fact is that Coca Cola did not start the Facebook page first, it was started by the company fans, and it is created by its loyal consumers. It all changed when Facebook introduced new rules which mandated that brand pages must be administered by the brands themselves and Coke decided to keep the existing page but manage it themselves rather that they starting a new page.Coca-Cola realized the fact that only traditional advertising is no longer relevant it has to be supported by active social media presence where customers actively engage by sharing opinions, videos, stories and photos and this highlights the fact that the company cares. 

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Social Media Marketing Strategy@ IBM LinkedIn Strategy

LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional networking site also one of the major social media platforms that companies across the world use to engage with customers, industry experts and others and also utilize LinkedIn to share brand marketing, company values, and product updates, with potential partners, investors, and customers. Initially most of the companies utilized LinkedIn for recruiting purposes like posting job opportunities, identifying talent and verifying the backgrounds. In a study carried by data analytics firm, Simply Measured, IBM has emerged as the top brand with maximum – 6,052 – number of engagements. IBM shares relevant industry articles to engage computing professionals.

IBM LinkedIn page has close to 1.5 million followers and millions of interactions every year. The company uses LinkedIn to let audience know happenings within the organization, and it also posts articles from around the Web on IBM-relevant topics. Topics like Big Data, Cloud Computing, Research, Innovation, latest product launches, etc. are all covered on the LinkedIn page. Followers comment on the updates and posts, like them and even start their own discussion threads that leads to the millions of interactions that makes IBM the most active company on LinkedIn. IBM promotes its services under the products and services tab, where various products like IBM Training and IBM Software are recommended by LinkedIn users.

For IBM LinkedIn is a crucial social media platform, both as a content channel and a discussion forum for IBM employees to actively engage with customers. “We are finding LinkedIn to be a promising content platform as opposed to just a recruiting platform,” said Ethan McCarty is the Director, Enterprise Social Strategy and Programs for IBM. “Usage of the site is trending a lot more toward professional content consumption – it’s not videos of cats. The fact is, people behave differently on different networks,” says McCarty. “On Twitter we try to structure content around an impactful headline. In [the Facebook] context, people want to talk about less technical topics and more societal impact kind of work. When it comes to LinkedIn, we tend to get deeper into the professional details. If you’re going into a community that’s all about smarter water management, we feel pretty confident about putting more technical water management content in there.”” he says in an interview with Lauren McKay, eMarketer.

LinkedIn Groups play a crucial role in pushing IBM content towards an important and informed expert audience with an advantage of pushing IBM employees to the forefront in engaging with customers and generating opportunities directly. “What’s nice and distinctive about LinkedIn is we can really emphasize interactions with IBM experts and the content they create,” says McCarty. LinkedIn is a perfect ecosystem for IBM as it includes discussion groups, recommendation ads, thousands of job postings, updates, comments, shares  and other forms of social display advertising that is generating significant return on investment for IBM and it also meets the fundamentals of IBM social media strategy of reach, engagement, amplification and conversion.

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Social Media Marketing Strategy @ IBM – Active Listening & Employee driven

IBM had restructured its Marketing Teams with a focus of increased presence and engagement with customers on various social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Google hangouts, etc. Social Media will supplement traditional marketing channels in improving further its product, brand and channel marketing strategy in future, according to Ed Abrams, IBM Midmarket Business Vice President. Marketing Teams were retrained to use social media channels, understand the company guidelines that need to follow while on various social media platforms and drive demand for IBM’s products and services along with actively listening and engaging with customers and prospective customers. The success of the IBM social media marketing strategy can be attributed to the training that was given to the marketing teams as it is very essential for the marketing managers to have right skills to actively engage with customers on various social media platforms and any mistakes or wrong moves will out rightly affect the brand image of IBM. IBM employees are trained and validated before allowing them to engage with customers on social media platforms.

IBM social media training for employees includes how to get started on various social media platforms and improve their skills blogging, tweeting and using other social media to share their expertise and connect with IBM customers. IBM’s social media marketing strategy is based on fundamental of   “active listening” on social media channels, understand the customer concerns, gather details, in case of prospective customers initiate the fist contact and providing content that is relevant. “In that context, we’ll deliver proof points, access to experts and expertise to solve IT problems of our audience,” Abrams said. “IBM wants to be responsive to our customers,” Abrams said. “We’re out there with our own tools listening to conversations going on in social stratosphere. We’re building a library of influencers who in real time can get involved in those conversations to provide content.” With social media, IBM’s positioning and market direction can be altered quickly: “You have options for the 8-minute, 8-hour or 8-day reaction,” Abrams said in an interview with The VAR Guy.

IBM has decentralized its social media and content marketing by relying on the employees particularly the specialists and subject matter experts related to various technologies and products from across the company and including their personal blogs, tweets and posts into the company’s marketing mix, crucial success factor. Employee engagement is at the heart of how IBM creates great experiences for its customers, explained Ethan McCarty, IBM’s director of enterprise social programs. “We want to create the most innovative, leading-edge experiences” for customers with employees actively engaged in the process. IBM’s social team that includes the HR and legal teams too have been working develop a program to encourage employees to actively participate and proactively manage their digital footprint. It all started in 2005 when the company internally crowd sourced “blogging guidelines” which were necessitated by the fact that employees then were actively engaged on both internal and external blogs and over period of time these guidelines ultimately became the social media policy of IBM that included various other platforms along with blogs and wikis. IBM is having positive returns by allowing the employees discuss and link to IBM products on their blogs and social media posts. 

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Social Media Marketing Strategy @ Kentucky Fried Chicken- Customer Service & Engagement

Kentucky Fried Chicken has been actively and aggressively using the various social media platforms to promote their menu offerings, promotions, contests, new product launches and most importantly focusing on the freshness and juiciness of their chicken compared to its competitors“It’s really about connecting with fans and making sure the brand remains relevant,” said Rick Maynard, manager of public relations at KFC. KFC is active on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. and all of these channels play a crucial role in connecting with consumers all over the world. KFC has a highly loyal customer base who loves their food as they go to their restaurants across the world and also engage actively on various social media platforms. This prompted the company to actively build and maintain social media presence and engage with customers on day to day basis. Most of the fans, followers and likes that KFC garnered on various social media platforms are due to their loyal customer base and they did not spend much on building this except for occasional promotional offers and discounts to enhance customer engagement.

The KFC Facebook page has millions of likes, thousands of people talking about the company and thousands of them are checking in and updating their Facebook status. KFC has restaurants in more than 100 countries and KFC’s Facebook pages of specific countries highlight their international audience and customers actively post KFC-themed photos of their KFC restaurant visits from around the world. KFC only posts about 15-20% of promotional content and most of the posts are customer generated content uploaded and shared by customers mostly their experience in the KFC restaurants. The KFC Twitter feed has a good following and the focus is not on pushing sales but most of the tweets are related to genuine fun which most of the company fans appreciate and the two-way communication is working well for the company. Twitter campaign presented a high school senior with a $20,000 Colonel’s scholarship based on a 140-character Twitter application which also highlighted the Colonel Sanders’ dedication to kids and education. The company received nearly 3,000 tweet applications, national news coverage for the program that awards 75 $20,000 college scholarships each year.

KFC manages its corporate social media tools internally, with a cross-functional team and the strategy: to connect and engage with KFC followers, cultivate relationships and respond to any inquiries.Customers are actively contacting through social media platforms both positively and negatively which forced KFC to use social media for customer service purposes. The company does not remove negative posts and if any customer posts a negative comment/post via social media instead of a phone, company ask for details, handle it and thank them for bringing it to our attention. Since customers are looking for quick response on social media platforms the company has exclusive people online for customers’ service during all normal business hours. KFC sees the social media scene as more of an opportunity to interact and engage their customers, not much focus is placed on the return on investment the activity generates. We don’t get a lot of pressure to justify [the return on investment]. It’s a very important customer-service element, and that’s enough for us. It’s about cultivating relationships, and that has a real business output,” Maynard said.

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Social Media Strategy @ McDonald’s – Real time monitoring & quick response

McDonald’s engages actively with their customers and fans actively on various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, etc. and is a complex task for the company to do so as it operates in 118 countries across the world. Company has to make sure it is sending a consistent and uniform message to its customers across the globe.  According to McDonald's Global Director of Digital and Social Media Sosti Ropaitis, McDonald’s is global decentralized brand and the local marketing teams within each market take their own decisions exclusively for those markets. It is even more required because of the social, cultural changes that each market has and also the different menus that company customizes according to each market requirements. But the company headquarters will take care of the global campaigns related to global sporting events like Olympics and World Cups. Some of the regional or country specific campaigns like the McDonald’s Canada Campaign “Our Food. Your Questions” giving people a chance to ask the company anything about its food are highly successful.

Real time monitoring is essential part of McDonald’s Social Media strategy. Every month, McDonald's tracks between 2.5 million and 3 million conversations on social media sites in an effort to identify consumer trends. The company uses tools like Radian6 and Sprout Social that helped in increase the speed and visibility of certain issues as they emerge.The company relies on true engagement, which is a function of content, context and timeliness. Lot of time is spent on creating real-time content; create unique transparent campaigns that connect with audiences. Internally with the help of Legal teams, company developed guidelines that help in taking advantage of real-time marketing opportunities like celebrities walking into McDonald’s Restaurants and taking pictures with the company products or tweeting about their experience with McDonald’s, the company retweet the original tweet without adding anything to the tweet.

McDonald’s adopted the constant test-and-learn mode, wherein the company tests and evaluates the different marketing messages whenever they are rolling a new product. Company constantly talks about the various attributes of the product rather than the product itself and this engagement drives significant volumes for the new product. Quick response is also essential for the company to survive as the customers have to be answered and also the company needs to control the social conversations across the various social media platforms. McDonald’s also had certain bad experiences earlier with their social media campaigns and the company seems to have learnt lesson and realized the fact that it is better to keep a constant monitoring on the social conversations and respond as and when there is a negative conversation and try contain the damage or else the company’s brand reputation will take a beating. The biggest learning from McDonald’s Strategy is that for quick response on social media platforms first social conversations have to be monitored on a day to day basis and create an internal framework, guidelines and teams that can respond without wasting time. 

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Social Media Marketing Strategy Case Study – Intel Inc. presence on Facebook, YouTube

Intel was one of the first companies that adopted social media, actively present on major social media platforms like Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. and also uses social network styled platforms both internally to engage with employees and externally to engage with community. The company currently has 75 Intel-related accounts with nearly 180,000 followers. The company has 19 different topical or regional blogs. The company has 11 communities in several different languages plus software community for developers. Intel’s Facebook presence comprises 50 Facebook Fan Pages in different countries, led by Facebook.com/Intel, which has 1.5 million fans, plus a YouTube Intel Channel. The company is everywhere - blogs, Facebook (close to 23 million likes, close to 400,000 people are talking about the company on Facebook), Twitter (close to 2.2 million followers, more than 400 tweets and more than 1,150 followers!), YouTube (2 channels, close to 5,000 videos, more than 45 million video views and close to 63,000 subscribers!), Instagram (more than 200 posts and close to 6,000 followers), Google+, LinkedIn, etc. Intel Free Press is a tech news site from Intel Corporation, covering technology and innovation stories focused on people, technology, events and topics relevant to Intel and the computing industry.

Under Intel’s global social media strategist, Ekaterina Walter leadership, Intel has seen a good 10% to 12% monthly fan base growth. Her principles for Facebook engagement include original content, not just automated, and original videos, not just YouTube links. In August 2012, Intel’s campaign “How computers were made” post on Facebook attracted 102,5K+ likes in a week since it was published on August 9. More than 34,069 people have chosen to share the link, while 3,258 commented on it. 80%, of the conversations around Intel and products happen on blogs and twitter. Facebook usage within the business has also increased with 250 individually created and managed pages which was becoming difficult to co-ordinate and manage multi market campaigns. After reviewing 250 Facebook pages  and 250 Twitter handles/account  presence,  Intel took the decision to alter their social media strategy from being decentralized to a centralized global strategy supported by internal guidelines, training programs, content editorial, publishing schedules, supplemented by a suite of publishing Vitrue, listening, Radian6, & internal reporting tools.This centralized strategy allows them to listen and respond globally, locally or to individuals, based on the context of the conversation.

Intel’s marketing is not just about hardware, chips and engineering--“experience” is the new focus.  "People don’t buy processors…they buy experiences," said David Veneski U.S. Media Director, at Intel Corporation. “You need to turn a moment into a momentum, and a momentum into a movement,” Veneski said. Projects like Intel’s Museum of Me use social media to encourage users to create a “visual archive of their social life.” Another campaign, “Intel Ultrabook Temptations” is a collaborative social experiment to assess how desperate people will be to get their hands on the product. In this experiment users are encouraged to jump around on a custom-built measurement device to generate their “excitement” rating and the event is captured on video and shared socially as the feature on Intel’s YouTube page.

“The focus has shifted from being iconic to posting a status update," said Veneski which makes Intel more humanized and relatable to the consumer. Intel is embracing social media and using it as a key element to understand the driving factors behind day-to-day experiences. Intel’s products are at the core of technologies that people use, and users like to capture those experiences, talk about them, and share them with friends, families and others. Through blogs, video, and social networks like Twitter, Intel is actively onboarding new customers’ faster and strengthening relationships with existing customers. Like most companies, the online community was initially built by marketing. "It is integrated into our marketing plan," explains Laurie Buczek, who heads enterprise marketing for Intel's Storage Group and works closely with the leaders of Intel's 3,000 to 4,000 salespeople. Intel also uses YouTube, which enables product managers to vividly demonstrate new technologies and Twitter (@Intel). Intel’s Social Media Center of Excellence sets the strategy and guidelines for all social media content across the company’s far-reaching locations and business units. 

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Social Media Recruitment Strategy Case Study: Accenture Plc.

Social media has become an essential and powerful recruiting tool available for HR managers and also changed the recruitment process by bringing relationships to the forefront. There is great value in leveraging this tool just because of its natural potential to multiply connections, build viral networks and reach talent faster. The use of social media as a recruitment tool has taken off in recent years with a number of high-profile companies like Accenture, Infosys, Burger King, Reckitt Benckiser, SABMiller, etc. using it to recruit talent for their companies. According to Suzy Style, Accenture's UK recruitment director, the professional services company turned to social media including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to adopt a more aggressive recruitment strategy to find talent. "There is a global war for talent and we believe that to [gain an advantage companies need to] develop long-term relationships with candidates. Social networking sites are one of the key enablers in achieving this," Style says. The popularity of social networks among graduates is one of the reasons the company started to test social media in the recruitment process.

"We're advertising all our roles through social networking and particularly in experienced-hire recruiting on sites such as LinkedIn and what we're finding is [LinkedIn] particularly plays to the strengths of some groups," Accenture's Style says. "We're actively involved with some groups - SAP professionals for example - and we're seeing an increasing number of people using it as part of their strategy to find jobs." This highlights the fact that Social Media also plays a crucial role in recruiting experienced hires too. But it's not just the big names using social sites to access a new talent pool. According to LinkedIn, smaller companies are using the professional networking site's tools to recruit new talent, along with more than 25 per cent of the FTSE 100 in the UK and 50 per cent of the Fortune 100 in the US. "In terms of company size, we have everything from companies with £100bn valuations to agencies and clients that have two or three people," says Ariel Eckstein, LinkedIn's MD of hiring solutions Europe.

According to John Campagnino, senior director of recruiting at Accenture, they are saving over $100,000 for a senior hire by using social media. He estimates that Accenture will make 40% of its hires in the next few years using social media. When recruiting through Social Media platforms HR managers have to know what tools to use for recruiting what type of talent. Social Media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blogs are all separate tools that may warrant different approaches. Accenture's Style says: "You might find that a graduate is more likely to be using Facebook for example and an experienced hire might be more likely to be using LinkedIn, so it's ensuring that you look at the channels for the best way to reach the people that you need."

Accenture has an employee referral program that is the management consulting company's primary source for talent. "[The] program allows employees to search for open jobs around the world and share them with their network through LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter," says Accenture's global head of sourcing, Sjoerd Gehring."Employees can track the status of their referral through their personalized employee referral site. Through integrated communication campaigns we've been able to significantly drive up the volume and quality of employee referrals." Accenture people play an important role in our recruitment efforts because our employees know Accenture well and can . . . help find the right person for the right role. Employee referrals are also a cost-effective way to fuel growth."  

In the past 3-4 years, Social Media recruiting has gained prominence and HR Managers are using social media sites for both checking the prospective employee backgrounds and also using the data provided on sites like LinkedIn in their recruitment process. The second aspect of social media recruitment is the distribution of information relating to job openings and requirements through 2nd degree network referral effect like Facebook’s “Like” and “Share” buttons, Twitter’s “ReTweets” and LinkedIn’s that allow rapid spreading of content (i.e. jobs and candidate referrals) to second and third degree networks, that also pushes message out to a much larger and more qualified audience. Another big advantage is the low cost factor as most of the social media sites are free to sign up and also charge lesser amounts of sign up fees which will definitely help the companies to save money on recruitment processes. But the fact remains that social media recruitment is a good option but companies still have to rely on traditional sources of recruitment for majority of their recruitment and for best results they should maintain a best mix of both the types of recruitment. 

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Social Media Marketing – Ford Fiesta: A Social Remix, Revival of 2009 Fiesta Movement

Ford Motor Company had redesigned the Fiesta car in 2009 with a target of reaching the young customers and first time car buyers and company launched the Fiesta Movement, the campaign that sparked chatter on social media, and user-generated content became the basis for the company’s TV and print ads. Ford gave 100 digitally-connected people a Fiesta for six months with one mission create a themed video every month, documenting their time with the car on social media. Ford then put the content up in real-time, unedited and unfiltered, essentially turning over the brand to its consumers. The Fiesta Movement that started in April 2009 "was entirely driven by social media" without any traditional media set against it, and, Scott Monty, Head Social Media, Ford Motors  said by April 2010 the conversion rate from reservations to orders was 10 times higher than this process for any other vehicle. Ford began accepting reservations for Fiestas on Dec. 1, 2009. The Fiesta Movement does show sales figures resulting from just social media efforts. Aside from the 7 million video impressions on YouTube, 750,000 photo impressions and more than 40 million Twitter impressions, Scott Monty says more than 130,000 consumers registered at FiestaMovement.com to receive more information about the vehicle when it came on the market. About 82 % of those registered hadn't owned a Ford before. And for the ultimate metric, conversions, Monty says 10 times more reservations become orders than did so for any other Ford vehicle.

In February 2013, Ford announced a new social media campaign named Fiesta Movement: A Social Remix that was a revival of 2009 Fiesta Movement.Like the 2009 original, which was Ford’s first social media marketing endeavor, the new Social Remix campaign will revolve around 100 people with large social audiences online, whom Ford is calling “agents.” Each will be lent a 2014 Ford Fiesta for six months in exchange for a commitment to produce one video about the car each month, and every video will have to conform to a new “mission” or theme generated by Ford, but the automaker will not edit any video at all. These six themes are travel, adventure, style and design, entertainment, technology, gaming, social activism (focused on local causes) and healthy lifestyle. All the videos will be showcased at the campaign’s Fiesta Movement website, and partnerships with prominent TV, entertainment and sports events — including American Idol, the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival and the Summer X Games — will generate “the elements that help amplify” what all of the participants produce. the videos will form the basis for all 2014 Fiesta advertisements, including TV spots and print and online ads. The 100 participants in the new campaign will include some celebrities and alumni of the 2009 program as well as people recruited by Ford for the first time. Ford is aggressively using the social media platforms for promoting its brands and engaging with customers and this has proved to be a huge success for the company since 2009 and Ford customers too have actively engaged with the company on different social media platforms. This is very important as most of the companies across the globe have social media presence but they fail to engage customers and social network users increase their participation and ultimately drive revenues for the company which only Ford Motors is doing successfully. 

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Social Media Strategy @ Ford Motor Company – One Social Vision

Ford social media strategy is integrated into the company’s overall business strategy not just with marketing strategy. Ford had adopted the social media strategy that included employees, dealers and customers which helped the company to exactly understand the key drivers and critical success factors that are driving the company success. Ford social media also provides a unique view of the customers and other social media users’ feedback, opinions, wants, needs and this engagement also led to generation of crucial information that help Ford Motor Company to improve product development, advertising or product marketing. Ford has created its Social Hub, website called Ford Social which provides a platform for costumers and fans to consume information interact with other users and provide feedback and suggestions to Ford. Of all the ideas users submitted, Scott Monty, Head of Social Media, Ford Motors Co said that 40% were either already in vehicles or were currently being worked on. Ford spends 20-25% of their total marketing budget on the digital platforms that roughly estimates to close to US$150 million per year which is higher than any other player in the automobile industry globally.

Ford has integrated social media into its marketing mix through a hub-and-spoke model, which means employees throughout the company can play a significant role in customer engagement process by knowing the message the company wants to give to customers and communicating with consumers in their own voices based on their specialization. Ford Social Media Strategy can be summed up as consistent presence in free social networking sites, paid digital efforts and other emerging forms of public communication. Consumers can engage with Ford in everything from Facebook pages to ads, from Twitter profiles to promoted tweets and trends, and from banner ads to rich media. Ford has more than 1.9 million likes on Facebook, more than 244,600 followers on Twitter, more than 171,000 subscribers and 4.4 million views on YouTube. Ford's Yammer enterprise social network internally for engaging employees has grown to have about 17,000 registered users (about 10% of them active participants). Ford is using Yammer to prove the business value of internal social networking with employees but no long-term commitment to Yammer has been made as the technology of choice.

According to Scott Monty, Ford has begun implementing the “One Social vision,” which was approved by top management of the company at the end of 2012 which is sponsored internally by the Ford’s chief marketing officer, chief communications officer, chief information officer, and chief technology officer. Scott Monty said, “The vision has been approved but we’re going back to some of the executive committees to get a commitment to structure and funding and putting a plan together.” As it stands now, he explained, there are “four pillars” to the One Social vision: Listen and engage; measure and monitor; learning and training; and growth and scale. “The notion is, turn Ford into a social business,” bridging its external social networks presence and internal social structure so that there’s a free flow of information from one to the other. “Whatever department you’re a part of, any of these four pillars should be relevant to you,” he said.

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Social Media Marketing Budgets & Marketing Strategy by Indian Companies 2013

According to Ernst & Young's 'Social Media Marketing - India Trends Study, 2013', a 40-question survey of 48 people responsible for the online or digital marketing strategy of some of India's largest companies, including Bharti Airtel, Ford India, Bajaj, Cafe Coffee Day, Honda Cars India, Pepsi India, MTV India, P&G India, Microsoft India, etc. Most of the companies in the survey highlighted that the annual social media budget is a small in lakhs of rupees mostly around Rs 11-25 lakh which is a smaller proportion of the total marketing spends by most of the companies that have marketing budgets in hundreds of crores of rupees. 

The E&Y study highlights that 95.7% of the surveyed social media-savvy organizations in India use the medium to build communities and promote usage of their brands while 76.1% use social media as a platform to highlight brand news. Around 16% of organizations use social media for both the above reasons and most of the Indian organizations utilize it for customer service, lead generation, and research indicate the increasing levels of  social maturity of Indian social media users and businesses successfully engaging with their customers and audience effectively. Facebook is the most important platform for marketers in India for engaging customers followed by Twitter, YouTube and blogging had been used by most Indian companies for the past few years and employ bloggers or online influencers who have authority and strong following for this. Even the usage of emerging platforms such as Pinterest, Google Plus, and Foursquare are also on the rise by Indian corporates. 83% of the social media-savvy organizations surveyed said that they have used social media ads, with majority of the ads being used to promote a contest/promotion or for brand awareness. 88.6% said they find social media ads to be beneficial in achieving those objectives. 76.7% of social media-savvy organizations said they have their marketing department handling social media with the rest being handled by a cross functional team/across functions or by the PR/communications team. Other than marketing, 34.6% said they use social media for thought leadership and 26.9% said they use social media for CSR. 73.8% of surveyed social media-savvy organizations have chosen standalone digital agencies as compared to PR, ad agencies, or freelancers. 

% of Market Budget Spent on Social Media          

Social Media Budget Size per Year 

Source: E&Y Study

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Social Network Users Statistics India 2013 till 2017 – Maturing growth next five years

According to a new eMarketer report, “Worldwide Social Network Users: 2013 Forecast and Comparative Estimates,” the number of social network users in India is expected to cross 100 million users and reach more than 127 million users by end of 2013. The total numbers of social media users will more than double and reach close to 283 million users by 2017. But the interesting fact is that the number of users has already started to see slower growth from 2013 and the decline in the YoY growth is expected to continue which also highlights the maturing numbers for the social networks in India which is also a global trend. There has been a strong social media adoption in India since past few years as the business organizations, government organizations and even political parties are actively utilizing the various social media platforms and social network sites to reach the people. 75% of Indians who are active internet users use social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest etc. and interaction with friends, relatives, colleagues and community, live chat, status updates, image- as well as video-sharing are some of the major activities by Indians that spend close to 30 minutes every day online on the different social networks.

According to Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), the number of social media users in Urban India reached 66 million by June 2013 and by mid-2014 expected to cross 80 million users. Some 97 per cent of them are on Facebook. And they are spread beyond the big metros. One-third of social media users live in towns with a population of less than 5 million; 25 per cent of the total users live in towns with less than 2 million inhabitants. Social media usage is also fast catching up with mobile internet users. According to the report, 77 percent of the users use mobile for social media. Email, social media, search, app store and chat / IM are used every day by those accessing internet through mobile. Facebook has 78 million monthly active users (MAUs) in India for the quarter ending March 31, 2013, registering a 50% increase from the Q1 2012. LinkedIn has 20 million users, Twitter has 33 million users, Pinterest has 5.5 million users in India at the end of March 2013. Indians are very active on different social networks and are also actively increasing the amount of time they spend on the various social networking sites.

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Social Media Analyst jobs on the rise in India 2013, shortage of good resources

A social media analyst is responsible for developing and maintaining a company’s presence on social media sites like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Flickr, etc and also has to manage the blogs of the company. According to a new eMarketer report, “Worldwide Social Network Users: 2013 Forecast and Comparative Estimates,” nearly one in four people worldwide will use social networks in 2013. The number of social network users around the world will rise from 1.47 billion in 2012 to 1.73 billion this year, an 18% increase. By 2017, the global social network audience will total 2.55 billion. With such a huge audience Businesses across the globe cannot ignore them and they need to focus on the social networking sites users to promote their products and services. Social Media Marketing has hence become an essential strategy for the large, medium and small businesses across the globe. Most of the businesses are giving the responsibility of managing their social media presence to the corporate communications teams, internal marketing communication teams and some businesses who think there social media presence is crucial for their business success recruit Social Media Marketing managers and give them complete responsibility to manage the social media presence. Some companies are also outsourcing their Social media activities to third party suppliers who can be a pure play business process outsourcing vendor or any media or creative agency. Indian BPO Vendors are aggressively offering Social media services to their clients and they are recruiting social media marketing analysts in big numbers.

Most of the companies prefer graduates with bachelor's degree in public relations, marketing or business communications and also recruit candidates with prior job experience of couple of years and a proven track record. Other essential qualifications for the job include good English language skillsin terms of reading and particularly writing as a lot of content writing in the form of writing blogs, posting ads on FB, etc. Also require good knowledge of MS Excel, Power Point, and Word and good understanding of Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools and having a good knowledge of HTML/CSS, blogspot, Word Press, and website administrations will prove handy. Freshers can expect a salary in the range of Rs.20k-25 k and if you are really good at it then within a year or so you can expect remuneration in the range of Rs.100,000. Besides that an analyst has to be well versed with the latest trends in social media and must know how to connect with the targeted groups through new as well as popular social media platforms. An analyst must remain updated with the latest social media tools and as social media emerged as a key component in marketing and communications, social media analysts can hope for a senior or expert role in that profession or eventually the roles within digital marketing and can move on to other positions such as an account manager or social media manager who takes on broader strategic duties. 

Along with posting, managing and garnering new followers and like for the company pages on the various social networking sites and platforms the social media marketing analyst have to spend time on planning and strategizing future campaigns, brainstorm content, meet with other departments to ensure that their strategies are aligned, tracking campaigns and reporting according to Farhana Sidek, digital client executive at Edelman Singapore. So simply recruiting young people who are active on social media sites simply don’t work they need to understand the concepts of search engine optimization, content management without which they will not be able to deliver the desired results for the company. In the day, the analyst would follow the requests of the client and plan for upcoming posts and campaigns for the client. Besides responding to queries on social media platforms, she noted that breaking down information was an important part of the job. "While we track basic stats like followers, click-throughs, fans, comments and traffic, we also monitor conversations happening around the brand both on and off our social media platforms and carefully structure responses that are in line with the company's strategy," she added. Indian Business process outsourcing firms like Genpact, WNS, Aegis, Infosys BPO, etc. are aggressively exploiting the lucrative opportunity in social media outsourcing services wherein they manage social media for corporations whose customers are taking to the online medium to share feedback.

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Worldwide Social network Users 2013- Growth declining constantly every year till 2017

According to a new eMarketer report, “Worldwide Social Network Users: 2013 Forecast and Comparative Estimates,” nearly one in four people worldwide will use social networks in 2013. The number of social network users worldwide will rise from 1.47 billion in 2012 to 1.73 billion in 2013, an 18% increase year on year (YoY) and by 2017, and the number of users globally will total 2.55 billion. Growth rates (YoY) are coming down with the growth declining by 5% in 2014 compared to 2013 and by 2% every year till 2017 which signifies maturity in the number of users in developed markets like US, UK, etc. where the population is smaller and population growth rate is also slower compared to emerging countries like India, China, Brazil, etc. Even in the other regions like Asia Pacific, Latin America and Middle East Africa that are presently growth drivers for social network user growth will also see fall in growth starting this year.

The number of social network users is directly linked to the telecommunication and internet penetration levels particularly in emerging countries. It also depends on literacy levels, population growth rates and relevant government spending in upgrading telecom and internet infrastructure like broadband. Key players in this segment are Facebook, Google+, Twitter, YouTube, etc. have been there for years and dominate the market in terms of number of users. Many new social networking sites have emerged in the recent years but failed to build up the numbers as big as Facebook but they are also picking up slowly. The amount of services and number of applications on the various social network sites have also increased drastically and most of the business organizations across the globe be it large, medium and small in size have significantly improved their social media presence and are spending billions of dollars on the social platforms for selling and promoting their products and services.

eMarketer has increased our 2013 forecast for total social network users worldwide by 100 million since our August 2012 forecast. This upward adjustment is based on new data that indicates higher-than-expected totals for internet users in India, Japan, Australia, South Korea, Brazil, Mexico, Russia and the Middle East and Africa; new data showing higher estimates for UK social network users than previously forecast; and a new breakout of social network users in the Netherlands, Norway, Finland, Denmark and Sweden. Accessing of the social networks is done majorly by personal computers like desktops, laptops and mobile devices like tablets and mobile phones not only smart phones but also the mid-range and low range phones. Mobile manufacturers like Samsung, Nokia, LG, etc. have also selling mobile phones at low price and mid-price levels that are preloaded with social network applications like Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Businesses and Governments across the globe are also encouraging people to log into social networking sites as they are providing the necessary information related to products and services, performance and reviews, customer feedbacks and are also providing the customers to use the social network sites to complain about the poor quality of product services and actively express their dissatisfaction. Politicians are also using the social network platforms to interact with voters and citizens. There has been a significant change in the way the social networking sites are used by users as they are not only sharing their personal information about their personal life with friends, relatives and colleagues, they are also actively using to interact with business organization of whom they may or may not be customers but they are voicing their opinion sometimes critically about the businesses and governments. The recent Arab Spring where in people in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Bahrain, etc. had voiced their opinions against their respective regimes and which led to the down fall of the dictatorial regimes and blossoming of democracy. Some governments are even looking to curtail the social networking sites usage by their citizens but are failing to do so effectively. Overall the number of social network users worldwide will keep growing at a slower pace in the next five years.

There is a discussion going on in regards to the slowing down of the social network users particularly the active users, users who login every day into the social networking sites and spend considerable amount of time on these sites. This is due to the social media fatigue where in some users are simply tired of using the social networking sites extensively, got bored of it and complain that the social networking sites are not improving their services and are not offering unique applications like games and content that keep the users engage and retain them. Social media fatigue is also a growing concern for the social networking sites and they need to develop strategies to overcome them. Even the changes in the government regulations and legislations in related to data privacy, confidentiality, protection, online behavior and also related to criminal and other antisocial activities on the various social networking sites. Many laws are being passed and amended particularly in emerging countries is also a big concern. Overall the social networking sites have a unique challenge in the coming five years where in they have to make sure users remain active on their sites and new users also join the sites and retain the existing users without which they will perish as the social network sites success is directly related to number of users.

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Social Media Customer Service @ Honda Motors Customer Service on Twitter @HondaCustSvc

Social Media is not only for marketing, customer engagement and corporate communication but also is very effective in customer service. Social Media platform like Facebook and Twitter are being widely used by companies to provide customer services. Customer service or after sales service is an essential component of overall customer satisfaction and it often plays a key role in retaining the customers and increase customer loyalty. Automobile companies have embraced the social media aggressively in the past few years and have been effectively using the various social networking sites for brand promotion, customer engagement, product launches, product innovation and last but not the least customer service. Twitter provides the customers a platform wherein they can directly reach the company for solving their complaints and problems. They can express their satisfaction and dissatisfaction of the product and service immediately and companies can respond to the issues fast and avoid further dissatisfaction. For Automobile companies it is even more important as there is severe competition within the industry and dissatisfied customer may even influence other customers including the prospective customers through negative word of mouth. Automobile industry had been going through its fair set of problems mostly related to vehicle recalls due to safety concerns for the drivers by faulty parts and components, product quality and performance issues, dealership issues and non-response of dealers, etc.

Honda Motor America is using twitter for customer service effectively for the past few years and is helping the customers to solve their problems and issues. @HondaCustSVc is an exclusive account for Honda Motors customers to complain about the company products and services. This account is maintained by three exclusive personnel of the company whose photographs are visible on the Twitter account page and they are available Monday to Friday 07.30 hrs to 16.00 hrs PST for resolving the customer complaints. The twitter page also provides the details of the toll free phone number, contact postal address, fax number and customer website address of Honda. There are close to 9,000 followers and close to 7,000 tweets on this specific page and the customer service team are very prompt in responding to the customer complaints. The response time is very fast and they are either resolving the issues or guiding the customers to the relevant place for resolving the issues. Some of the types of complaints on this site are they are dissatisfied with products and services, lack of proper response from dealers, vehicle recalls, schedules and letters and also queries relating to the financing of the vehicles. Some of the tweets highlight severe dissatisfaction of the product and services of Honda Motors and the customer service team is efficiently handling the tweets and avoiding serious repercussions. Twitter interactions of Honda customers are a proof that the customer service through twitter is one of the most efficient ways in which the customers can directly contact company customer service using their mobile devices instantly without any problems and tweet directly with guarantee that they will get the response as soon as possible. A dedicated customer service team is responding to the customer tweets in matter of minutes and guiding customers so that they can resolve their issues immediately. This is good case study for customer service through twitter. 

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Social Media @ Honda Motors - Honda Loves you back & #Hondainnovator series

Honda Motor Company had been using social networking sites since past five years and had been present on all the major social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Pinterest, etc.  Honda social media strategy is based around supporting business and corporate goals such as new product launches, corporate communications, public relations messages, tackling rumors, engaging with customers and communities like  fans/ racing community and more. Honda is effectively using the social networking sites to humanize the brand, keeping track of the conversations about the company, deliver key messages about their corporate social responsibility efforts on topics related to the environment and innovating new technologies, and also build relationships with journalists and bloggers. Another advantage of social media is to share customer stories around Honda products And Services, events or happenings that Honda fans might like to know about and also engage the customers, fans and others in such events.

Honda was recently given the first-ever "Driver Engagement" award at the Chicago Auto Show for the Japanese automaker's campaign, “Honda Loves You Back”. The Honda campaign showcased a music video from the band “Monsters Calling Home”, as the video was filmed inside one of the band member's Honda. The car company got the band booked on" Jimmy Kimmel Live!" in a symbolic gesture of giving back to fans of the brand. Social media campaigns like this help drivers connect more personally with a brand, as they can interact with a company by uploading their stories and photos.Since social media has become an integral part of marketing for most major car companies, the Chicago Automobile Trade Association decided to introduce a new award at the 2013 Chicago Auto Show to showcase the effectiveness of marketing through sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Recently Honda launched a social media program, the #HondaInnovator Series, in support of a TV ad for its 2013 Civic that emphasizes on inventors and innovation in various fields. The series also includes social networking sites like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter and YouTube to initaite conversations about innovation and the car itself, as well as the idea that progress never stops. In a series of six one-hour tweet chats, users will be able to submit questions to inventors featured in the Civic TV spot, like baby product company 4moms co-founder Henry Thorne, Waterfall Swing inventors Ian Charnas and Drew Ratcliff and 2013 Civic Senior Product Planner Jay Guzowski. Additional content will include: Facebook posts to introduce fans to the Innovator Series; behind-the-scenes photos from the commercial and an assortment of Civic images on Instagram; and a "Things Can Be Better" board on Pinterest. In addition, on YouTube, Honda has created a so-called Innovation Playlist featuring additional content tied to the inventors featured in the Civic TV spot. Honda says its Civic TV campaign ties Honda's philosophy of innovative thinking and continuous improvement to other inventors working to develop better solutions. Promotion will include sponsored posts on the social news site Buzzfeed, promoted tweets, promoted posts on Facebook, YouTube ads and search.

Early 2012 Honda Motors launched a unique promotional campaign on Pinterest, a pinboard-style photo-sharing website that allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections such as events, interests, and hobbies. Users can browse other pinboards for images, ‘re-pin' images to their own pinboards, or 'like' photos.  Honda’s "Pintermission" campaign identifies top "pinners" and offers each one $500 to take a 24-hour break from Pinterest to explore some of the places or buy some of the products they've pinned about. Initially two women had been handed checks by Honda and are putting the money toward travel. The goal of the Pintermission campaign was to uniquely establish Honda’s new CR-V and promoted the vehicle’s “get out and live life” personality. Marketing the vehicle on Pinterest was a suitable choice, as target customers for this vehicle are young people on the edge of adulthood’s big milestones like marriage, children, etc. and young people plan those milestones on Pinterest. More than 4.6 million people were exposed to the #Pintermission boards, which produced more than 5,000 repins and almost 2,000 likes. Additionally, more than 16 million media impressions were garnered from the campaign.

Honda Motors social media presence include Facebook with close to 2.7 million likes, Twitter with close to 91,000 followers and more than 3,400 tweets, YouTube with close to 106,000 subscribers and more than 32 million video views and Pinterest with close to 6,600 followers. The company has also framed a Social Media policy and guidelines for its associates and employees that provide the rules and regulations they need to follow on social networking sites. Automobile industry is aggressively using the various social networking sites for marketing, customer service and customer engagement and they are allocating significant financial resources, appointing the relevant agencies that specialize in the social media and even recruiting exclusive managers as Social Media Managers within the company. Honda Motor Company has been using the social media effectively in its marketing, brand promotion, engaging customers and new product launches.

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HP turnaround strategy focusing on social Intelligence & social media

During the Q2 2012 earnings HP CEO Meg Whitman said, “In Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking, we’ll invest to drive R&D and innovation in our core businesses of servers, storage and networking. Together they create a converged infrastructure that is the foundation for top customer initiatives such as cloud, big data analytics and social media.” Social media channels and mobile technologies have fundamentally changed consumer behavior and companies have realized this fact have invested in social media tools that gather information about consumers and non-consumers but they are not able to use this information for generating value to the enterprise. By combining all of the data available, enterprises can drive significant competitive advantage and enterprise value.

HP core offerings as part of data analytics are social-network intelligence, business analytics and Autonomy. In 2011 HP acquired Autonomy which provides infrastructure software for the enterprise with a customer base of more than 25,000 global companies, law firms and public sector agencies, and approximately 2,700 employees worldwide. HP projected this acquisition as a strategic deal to enter into the high growth enterprise information space, strengthens data analytics products, add vertical capabilities in key industries like government, pharmaceutical, healthcare, etc.

HP Social Enterprise Services, a portfolio designed to help customers deploy and benefit from big data analytics-driven CRM solutions. HP Social Enterprise Services leverages technologies from HP Labs, as well as subsidiaries Vertica and Autonomy, to get deeper insights into customer behavior – in turn, converting customer chatter into sales and revenue. In 2011, HP also acquired Vertica that enhanced HP capabilities for information optimization, real-time business analytics for large and complex sets of data in physical, virtual and cloud environments. HP Social Intelligence Solution monitors and manages market sentiments, perceptions and trends that allow customers to win and grow high-valued customers. Additionally, organizations can use it to protect and enhance brand reputation. HP enterprise services offers social media outsourcing and analytics services.

HP recently unveiled the NASCAR Fan and Media Engagement Center (FMEC), a business solution designed to better serve NASCAR's industry, media, fans and sponsors by facilitating real-time response to traditional, digital, broadcast and social media. This solution helps NASCAR analyze fan sentiment, identify emerging issues and discover topic trends for instantly actionable insights. The ability to monitor information and sentiment to adapt quickly to changing environments can provide tremendous competitive advantage," said Charles Salameh, vice president -- Americas region, Communications, Media and Entertainment Industry, Enterprise Services, HP.HP Social Computing Research Lab focuses on methods for harvesting the collective intelligence of groups of people in order to realize greater value from the interaction between users and information. 

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IBM targeting Social Media software for business as a key growth area in 2013

Our performance in the fourth quarter and for the full year was driven by our strategic growth initiatives -- growth markets, analytics, cloud computing, Smarter Planet solutions -- which support our continued shift to higher-value businesses," said Ginni Rometty, IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer. Ms. Rometty also highlighted IBM is focusing on new growth areas such as mobile technology, social media software for businesses and security technology. Mike Rhodin, senior vice president of the IBM Software Solutions Group, has said that businesses are adopting social media technologies and collaboration tools have become mandatory for employees to communicate and collaborate in the organizations. Employees in the business organizations are expecting to have such social media based collaboration tools within the organization’s intranets. To further prove the significance of social business technologies, IBM referred to a 2011 Forrester study during the IBM Connect Conference which highlighted social business as an "emerging business category," and social technologies are expected to be worth $6.4 billion by 2016.

IBM has renamed its Lotusphere, an annual conference hosted by Lotus Software (one of IBM's five software brands) as IBM Connect in January 2013 and during this event it highlighted its social business strategy with the debut of several new software and cloud services products. The intentions of these new services are to enable businesses to integrate IBM's social networking and analytics technologies with critical business processes. The new IBM Connections social networking platform software is intended to enable users to analyze big data from inside and outside an organization, including Facebook, Twitter, audio and video, embedded document management capabilities allow members of a network to access, analyze and act on different data types relevant to their work for improving decision-making and business results and will be available from march 2013. Another feature is enhanced integration of social capabilities in the Microsoft Outlook client that will allow users to access their social data (such as profiles, files and communities) directly in Microsoft Outlook. In December 2012, IBM released IBM docs to include social document editing on-premises and in the cloud as part of the IBM SmartCloud for Social Business that allows browser users to simultaneously collaborate on word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents.

IBM acquired Kenexa in December 2012, merged its Applicant Tracking System for talent data insightsand launched a new web-based social networking environment in the form of the IBM Employee Experience Suite which is targeted at HR managers to "attract, empower and motivate talent" as the firm puts it and features social networking, e-meeting and instant messaging capabilities. IBM also announced that it expects to ship IBM Notes and Domino Social Edition 9 in March 2013 and expected to be a truly social email client" that delivers a social experience to users. Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace highlights IBM as a Leader in Social business technology market and IBM is investing heavily on the social technologies for future growth.

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Crowdsourcing Innovation: Lego Cuusoo website & Minecraft Microworld success Case Study

Lego is a popular line of construction toys that consists of colorful interlocking plastic bricks and accompanied by range of gears, minifigures and various other parts that can be assembled and connected in different ways, to build vehicles, buildings, and even working robots. One of the biggest selling points of Lego Toys despite being costly is that toys stimulate the imagination and creativity of the customers. Lego was almost bankrupt in the 2004, as children turned away from the plastic bricks in favor of video games and computers and according to Harvard Business Review, “Central to LEGO’s turnaround is a new structure for strategically coordinating innovation activities, led by a cross-functional team: the Executive Innovation Governance Group. LEGO managers take a broad view of innovation that includes not only new products but pricing plans, community building, business processes, and channels to market, all of which can be powerful business drivers. The company distributes responsibilities for innovation in all areas across four groups and expects different degrees of innovativeness from each of them.”

Innovation is at the heart of the Lego survival and further continuation of its innovation strategy, Lego launched Cuusoo website in 2008 which allows users to submit ideas for Lego products to be turned into potential sets and users may create a page about their proposed idea for a set. Once the project reaches 10,000 supporters, it is then reviewed by the Cuusoo team who then decide on whether to produce it and once decided to produce, the ideator receives a 1% royalty on the net revenue. All the ideas related to alcohol, sex, drugs, religious references, post-WWII warfare or based on a first person shooter that are deemed inappropriate for younger Lego fans are rejected by the company. The term Cuusoo is Japanese and means imagination or wish. Cuusoo System, a subsidiary of the Japanese Elephant Designs, has been collaborating with LEGO for the past ten years and the company currently manages two platforms, Cuusoo MUJI and Lego Cuusoo. There are about 340,000 active users and 90 percent of Lego Cuusoo users come from overseas. Lego Cuusoo website also helps in strengthening the Lego player community as player and user communities are essential for the innovation and brand building strategy of the company. Along with company’s internal designers, the Cuusoo community innovators will speed up the product innovation process and bring new innovative products to the market on regular basis.

Some of the ideas that already hit the shelves are Shinkai 6500, a model based on a real submarine, Hayabusa 369-piece, model of the Japanese spacecraft was made by Daisuke Okubo and Lego Minecraft, a set based on the video game Minecraft. Lego MinecraftMicro World is a Lego set based on the sandbox video game Minecraft, which revolves around the game's player character, Steve, and one of the game's enemies, the Creeper.  Mojang started a project on the Lego CUUSOO program and within a matter of days; the 10,000 signature objective was achieved with support of Minecraft community. Sandbox is a type of video game level design where a player can roam freely through a virtual world and has tools to modify the world themselves and create how they play. According to Forbes, “Minecraft is a legitimate worldwide phenomenon, a building block video game that launched in 2009 and now has over 8 million paying customers and a total of 40 million users worldwide, its own conference, and a legion of YouTube stars.” Lego Minecraft Micro World was widely popular which led to shortages as both Minecraft players and other enthusiasts bought this upon its release and forced to ship more sets during the holidays.

Lego innovation platform Cuusoo is a win-win for both the Lego player community and the company as number of ideas generated will be more and company can rely on its player community and other creative players whose ideas will be more relevant and chance of them being successful will be more compared to the ideas by internal designers within Lego. This is also most cost effective, speedier and easiest way of engaging with player and creative communities and they are just sharing only 1% of net revenues as royalty. The voting mechanism not only helps in selecting the best ideas but also helps in creating buzz about the product even before they are manufactured and there will be a ready market available even before the product launch who will be interested to buy. Crowdsourcing innovation is being adopted by businesses and Lego is one company that is using this methodology extremely effectively and as discussed innovation and creativity are essential for Lego’s long term survival. Lego is facing tough competition from videogames and online based games that are attracting the players more. Lego has to constantly innovate and launch new sets on regular basis to keep its consumers attracted to its product.

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