Starbucks Gets Its Business Brewing Again With Social Media

How the Company Turned Around Sales by Finding 'Intersection Between Digital and Physical'

By Emily Bryson York
Published: February 22, 2010

CHICAGO (AdAge.com) -- Let's get this straight right away: Return on investment in social media is not measured in how many friends you have on Facebook or how many followers you have on Twitter. It's not calculated in trending topics or YouTube comments. It should, in fact, be held to the same criteria other marketing channels are: Did it move your business?

It's done just that at Starbucks, which is a digital marketer worth watching.

No one would have guessed at that turn of events during the chain's dark days of early 2008. Sales and traffic had begun to slip for the first time in its history as a public company. Founder Howard Schultz, returning to handle day-to-day management, even admitted that Starbucks had lost its soul. As part of Mr. Schultz's multifaceted turnaround plan, the chain launched MyStarbucksIdea.com in July 2008 as a forum for consumers to make suggestions, ask questions and, in some cases, vent their frustrations. The website now has 180,000 registered users. Some 80,000 ideas have been submitted, 50 of which have been implemented in-store.

Chris Bruzzo, Starbucks' VP-brand content and online, said amassing Starbucks' 5.7 million Facebook fans and 775,000 Twitter followers could be tougher for a dental-floss brand. "Maybe we have an unfair advantage because in so many ways Starbucks and the store experience is like the original social network," he said. Consumers "come in, hang out and talk to our store partners. They sort of got to know us as a brand in a very social way."

But he's quick to point out that Starbucks' advantage could easily have been squandered. "If we had approached it not from 'what you know and love about Starbucks' but as a marketing channel, we would have taken this down a path that would have been very different," he said. "This was not [built as a] marketing channel, but as a consumer relationship-building environment."

More important than the number of fans, however, is that the coffee chain is beginning to see sales lifts following social-media promotions.

Results: Starbucks posted its first U.S. same-store sales gain in two years .........

Tabla periódica elementos del Social Media

El Social Media, como la química, se basa en combinaciones de los diferentes elementos que forman este ecosistema. Y ahí es donde radica la gracia de una tabla periódica del Social Media, en conocer cuáles y cuántos son los elementos, y qué resultados se llegan a obtener combinando éstos. Es un punto de arranque, en el que se establecen:

• Comportamientos comunes en Social Media (las cosas positivas que puede llegar a hacer la gente)
• Miembros destacados del Social Media americano (la gente que te puedes encontrar habitualmente haciendo uso de los comportamientos típicos de uso de las herramients)
• Herramientas de Social Media (aplicaciones empleadas)
• Las prácticas del Social Media (como maximiza uno su experiencia en los medios sociales)
• Social Media live (o las personas que traen su experiencia real a Internet)
• La gente de Facebook (power users de esta plataforma)
• La gente de Twitter (maestros e influenciadores en el microblogging)
• La gente de Youtube (pioneros en desarrollar contenido en vídeo)
• La gente de los Blogs (aquellos bloggers con contenido intelegente, provocador y educativo)

Rick Liebling en eyecube desarrolla la nomenclatura de cada uno de los elementos y su significado. Todo para entender mejor la tabla periódica con los elementos del Social Media, que promete ir actualizando cada seis meses.

Fuente: TerritorioCreativo