MIT Sloan Management Review

Recent studies show that CMOs are highly involved and supportive of the use of social media for their function, and are enthusiastic about its potential role it may play throughout the entire business as well. This strong and growing relationship between CMOs and social media data may be leading to a growing influence and strength among CMOs in the C-suite and throughout the enterprise.

Brands have embraced Facebook Inc. as a key marketing channel to drive engagement and brand awareness. The question is whether some brand content creates more brand engagement on Facebook than others. A recent study coded more than 1,000 wall posts from 98 global brands, aiming for a better understanding of how different wall-post attributes impact the number of “likes,” comments and “shares” a post receives. This article offers up the results of that study, for brand managers to act on.

“If you engage customers,” says V. Kumar, “they go and they get their friends” to try out a product, too. Kumar, of the J. Mack Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University, explains how companies can find their most influential online customers and enlist them to help promote their brands.

Target is among many retailers using social media this year to attract more Black Friday shoppers.
Image courtesy of Target Facebook page.
In the U.S.,

Marketers know social media should be a powerful way to generate positive word-of-mouth. If marketers can select the right platform, design the right message and engage the right users to spread that message, their campaign should succeed. One successful campaign — which marketers can look to as an example — took place at Hokey Pokey Ice Cream Creations, an upscale ice-cream retailer in India. By following a seven-step process, Hokey Pokey substantially improved its social media marketing.

SAP runs a 10-years old, online community network that has more than a million unique visitors a month. Mark Yolton, senior vice president of SAP Communities & Social Media, tells how his company is using social media for “outside-in” market insight and as a mechanism to immediately tell the world about its new products.

Social coupons have become a popular form of marketing promotion. Businesses such as restaurants, car washes and dry cleaners pitch coupon discounts through Internet sites such as Groupon and LivingSocial in hopes of attracting a new crop of customers. But a poorly designed coupon campaign can do serious harm to a business’s profit margin. While the coupons can generate value for customers and the social coupon service providers themselves, they can lead businesses into a thicket of problems.

Featured this month in the Social Business Innovation Hub:

New Q&A: Social Business at Kaiser Permanente

Kaiser Permanente uses Twitter to gauge customer reaction to specific initiatives, such as valet parking.

Featured this month in the Social Business Innovation Hub:

McAfee Q&A: What Sells CEOs on Social Networking
In 2006, MIT Sloan's Andrew McAfee coined the term "Enterprise 2.0" as a shorthand for what collaboration and sharing tools such as blogging and wikis (and, today, Twitter) would mean for enterprises.

Research into the Twitter practices of 47 companies including Whole Foods, Starbucks, Nokia, and JetBlue shows that to build a better tweet, think short, punchy and newsy.

Hiring people to create fake online profiles and post comments on web sites is a booming business in China. This custom-written spam “poses a concrete threat to online communities,” say researchers at the University of California Santa Barbara.

Many companies are trying to leverage the power of Twitter to connect with customers and promote their brands and products. This article identifies factors that increase the likelihood of “retweeting” so that a company’s tweets will be shared with recipients’ networks.

There are several practices that don’t work well. The most important to avoid is blatant hard-sell messages. Twitter may be better suited for building brands than for building markets for new offerings.

Companies need to understand and manage the rising threat of online public complaining. There is ample incentive, because the best ways to respond, and to prevent complaints from recurring, apply not just to the Internet.

You can. But it requires a new set of measurements that begins with tracking the customers’ investments — not yours.

Today we feature a guest blog post from Scott Henderson. Scott is managing principal of CauseShift, a team of strategists who help clients provoke, connect and market. He has led shifts for a variety of organizations, including P&G, UNICEF and wecanendthis.c

Guest blogger Elizabeth Winkler reports from the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi):

SXSWi is a conference that brings together some of the brightest minds in emerging technology. After attending, numerous panels and a keynote speech, it is clear that the tech community is concerned about privacy.

Last week Twitter debuted a new feature that lets you group your followers, Twitter calls it Lists. To learn Twitter List basics, Josh Catone's Mashable post HOW TO: Use Twitter Lists is a good place to start.�

Your customers are talking about you. Can you hear them? Trust Agents, a new book by noted bloggers and social media consultants Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, is a practical guide to learning how to improve your business using the web in its 2.0, real-time form.

People are connecting with one another in increasing numbers, thanks to blogs, social networking sites like MySpace and countless communities across the Web. Some companies are learning to turn this growing groundswell to their advantage.

A market research technique called conjoint analysis can help managers predict what kind of affinity marketing program is likely to offer the best return on investment for their brand.