Know-How Exchange : Social Media

Dear Greg,

Social media gives customers something that, up until recently, they'd not really had: the ability to influence other consumers with their opinions, reviews, thoughts, good feelings, and their frustrations.

Take, for example, the story of Dave Carroll and his "issues" with United Airlines. The video Dave made and posted on YouTube has now been seen by 5,445,781 times.

That's a lot of extremely bad PR for United. And all delivered via social media. www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo -

Then, there's Scott McKain's fantastic story of customer service and the lessons from "Taxi Terry"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XNFYBB1j_Q

There's more. But you get the point. Any retailer that ignores the power of one person now being able to make a huge difference to the brand through the power of www.gigg.com, www.facebook.com, www.twitter.com, and www.youtube.com, to name but four, is making a huge mistake.

I hope this helps.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA
Follow me on Twitter @GaryBloomer

Hey Greg! This might not be exactly what you meant, but retailers with online sites have really benefited from adding ratings to their websites. This is what really helped Amazon, and after seeing how much success they had with it, big box retailers such as Wal-Mart and Best Buy started letting customers rate products on their sites. Customers are using the internet as a pre-purchase research tool now more than ever, so companies that let customers rate the products they sell are really seeing the benefits!

Hope that helps!
Mack

Hi,

According to a new study publishes by Forrester Research,
60% of retailers wants to spend more on social media advertising- https://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId...

Key findings

Companies planning to spend more will increase investments in several areas, including search (80% of respondents), email (65%), and social marketing (60%).

This clearly shows that social media have huge impact on Retail sales.

Thanks,
Mary