Social Media for Consumer Demands

My wife is part of a team that manages the web and social media presence for a company called So Delicious Dairy Free located in Springfield, OR. It’s a relatively small company with about 180 employees, but is growing rapidly. I feel like the company is incredibly visionary for investing so heavily in its presence on social media.

She and I talk quite a lot about all aspects of both of our jobs because there are a great number of interrelated things to share with one another. Aside from the run of the mill issues and complaints on actionable items the team feeds to their customer service department, I am fascinated by what the company learns through customer feedback gleaned from its social media accounts. This type of market research, which is a bi-product of their marketing and PR strategy, may well have been cost-prohibitive for companies of this size to collect. It has allowed So Delicious to be very nimble and responsive, and their customers have rewarded the company as a result.

Product development:

Based on feedback taken from social media, So Delicious is about to release a dairy-free whipped topping, and coffee drink. Additionally, they have another top-secret product she won’t even tell me about that is in development now to respond to customer demands.

Product reformulations:

In the company’s short history, there have been a number of alterations and reformulations to current products. After a landslide of…spirited suggestions, the company is working on reformulating all of their products to remove carrageenan as an ingredient.

Sales information:

I found it particularly interesting that sometimes, their social media team is the first to know when a product hits the shelves. Their shipping and sales departments know when the distributors have taken delivery, but when customers start commenting about how glad they are that So Delicious is finally in stores in Mobile, Alabama and Cooperstown, New York.

There are a slew of others stories I could share, but this is a good example of a company capitalizing and perhaps therefore justifying their investment in social media.

Oh, and by the way. Their "ice cream" sandwiches are amazing. 

Be Here Now

Give this song a listen as you read through the blog:

The jarring thing to me about the panel on “Mindfulness, Technology and Society,” was that this digital device I carry around in my pocket has the opportunity to steal so much from me when I let it. And, wow – I really let it.

I have not been allowing myself these little “micro-breaks,” and it seems like the length of my attention span has been the biggest loser in all this. I find myself getting board halfway through reading a paragraph sometimes…ok, I’ll be honest - I actually get board halfway through sentences sometimes.

I do hold my breath while I wait for my emails to load, and that’s just sad.

I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of days and I realize that I spend an embarrassingly large amount of my life immersed in whatever is happening on my iPhone. I’m even more embarrassed about how much of myself I give to this little screen at the expense of those sitting across the dinner table from me.  I need to just re-learn what it means to be here now.

As this all relates to our class, I am getting more than just a little bit worried about the digitization of our interactions. For lack of a better term, “emerging media” is clearly an important, if not the most important, piece in how we communicate with others, both personally and professionally. But it’s taking the place of face-to-face human interaction too frequently. In concrete terms, I’m worried that we’re going to end up like the people in Wall-E.

While I assume the vast majority of people (hopefully all of the adults) who saw these characters understood the cautionary tale Disney was trying to tell with this movie. But I can’t help but wonder how many kids’ first reaction was that the hovercraft/television/computer thing was pretty cool.

As a person who manages a communications team at a fairly sizable and somewhat notable organization, I recognize that we need to use technology to tell the compelling story I think we should be telling. I just really hope that the work we’re doing now does not contribute to the death of the concept of “Be Here Now.”

Social Media Intimacy?

Something about the story of the guy, Chip Zdarsky, who developed a relationship with the Barrie, Ontario Applebee’s over Facebook has stuck with me over the last week.

http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/man-develops-hilarious-sweet-friendship-applebees-facebook-page-154871

I have been trying to identify what it is about the exchanges that have taken up so much headspace over the last several days, (and I’m still not certain this is it) but I think it might be the very strange version of intimacy. The back and forth wasn’t necessarily intimate, per se, but there was a certain friendliness and committed earnestness (feigned or otherwise) that somehow came off as sweet.

One of the things I loved the most was when Zdarsky engaged his Uncle Melvin in one of the conversations/postings. Zdarsky may have initially been making fun of Applebee’s, but it seems to me the exchanges evolved from making fun to something a bit more…not a lot more, but it didn’t seem malicious.

This got me to thinking about intimacy on social media. What does true intimacy in this medium look like? Does it look like posting about a recently lost loved one? Does it look like those postings where you read about good people performing random acts of kindness? Does it look like that heart-rending story of the loyal dog that wouldn’t leave the side of a fallen soldiers casket? I would argue not. I feel like these things are all meant by the person posting to convince others how good they would like you to believe they are.

The intimate moments to me are things like Uncle Melvin’s post. (Below)

Uncle Melvin clearly doesn’t care much for “ethnic” (ITALIAN) or “weird” hamburgers with noodles and avocados and apples for toppings. Pure gold.

Though I criticized this in my previous post, the intimate moments to me are things like the "email" exchange between my mother and mother-in-law on Facebook.

These real, unscripted moments that are sometimes captured online are the real gems to me.