MarketingProfs - Case Studies on Social Media

CASE STUDY: With an increasing number of its members talking about the American Automobile Association via social media, the company decided it needed to monitor and respond.

CASE STUDY: What do you do when potentially devastating information about your company goes hyper-viral online, reaching millions of people essentially overnight?

CASE STUDY: How can you confront today's economic headwinds? See how IBM avoided a looming disaster and reached safe harbor with the help of customers and partners.

CASE STUDY: How do you build a thousand-strong online community when your entire global audience is just 20,000 people? Easy! (Not really, but it's possible.)

CASE STUDY: Forget the norms. For Cisco Systems, reinvigorating its security line and authenticating its leadership spot meant something truly heroic.

CASE STUDY: With millions of customers in more than 90 countries, Microsoft has its hands full keeping customers satisfied and loyal. But it has found a way to do so—by using Web-monitoring tools, social-media analytics, and the energy of influencers. Read on for valuable insights.

CASE STUDY: In this new age of conversation between corporation and consumer, chip-maker Intel and PC-maker ASUS have embraced "crowdsourcing." Allowing consumers to design the ideal PC, they are gaining valuable consumer insight and in the process building not just a PC but customer loyalty.

CASE STUDY: How does helping out a friend, or a friend of a friend, become a million-dollar business... with not a penny spent on advertising? When those little favors are in huge demand—and word-of-mouth and social media spread the good news like wildfire.

CASE STUDY: Small businesses need all the TLC they can get. Billing and invoicing online-solution provider FreshBooks knows that better than most. Its customer-centric focus is so fresh and refreshing, word-of-mouth has spread far and wide—and helped grow its user base 150%.

CASE STUDY: When US Airways flight 1549 landed in the Hudson River, Twitter users broke the news, 15 minutes ahead of mainstream media. The same channel and its immediacy also helped Ford Motor Company's head of social media quell a different kind of disaster--of the PR variety.

CASE STUDY: K9 Cuisine helped fill a void created by the pet-food crisis of 2007. Since then, its annual sales have reached $2.5 million, and it expects to double that in the next 8-10 months. How? With the help of social media.

CASE STUDY: While auto dealerships across the nation struggle to survive in the new economy, Auction Direct USA's business is expanding. In fact, its fresh approach to online marketing has transformed the brand of this "used car dealer" to drive up sales.

CASE STUDY: Founded in 1897, the Blue Cross is one of the UK's oldest animal welfare charities. It built an online community of pet owners - then launched a viral campaign, including rich media, that had people flocking to the social network.

CASE STUDY: Wiggly Wigglers is a natural-gardening retail company set in the countryside between England and Wales. Its products are not high-tech, but its marketing certainly is. Here's how the company abandoned traditional marketing and instead took up a podcast, a blog, a wiki, and more... and then reaped the results.

CASE STUDY: GotVMail set out to raise brand awareness, promoting itself in a way that would both amuse its audience and set the company apart. What resulted was a viral video campaign starring Gary Busey.

CASE STUDY: How could a software developer call attention to its new product? Serena Software developed a video Facebook application that garnered big results and, along the way, challenged the channel's reputation for negligible return.

CASE STUDY - How does a social-media monitoring company build excitement for its flagship product? In the case of Radian6, it leveraged (you guessed it) social media and the medium's inherent word-of-mouth properties. Here's how.

CASE STUDY: While others are still hashing out whether their CEO should be Twittering, blogging, or Plurking, Zappos Tony Hsieh has been using Twitter for over a year. Here, he reveals what he gets out of micro-blogging, and why he thinks it's important for his company and others to embrace social media tools.

When it chose to enter the saturated inkjet market 20 years late, Eastman Kodak had a few surprises up its sleeve. Still, the company found it also needed a little marketing ingenuity if it was to gain market share.

How does a university up its visibility with an increasingly wired target market of both students of alumni? By orchestrating a Web 2.0-focused Web site redesign that set the foundation for an ongoing social media campaign.