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.