I have kept an eye on NIKEiD for more than a year for its extraordinary performance in customization. It is a service allowing customers to customize Nike products with colors, materials and "ID". Launched initially in 1999, NIKEiD has become the key part of Nike in both production and revenue. Although customers can design the shoes in NIKEiD studios, most people choose to design it online through nikeid.com. NIKEiD set an great example for e-commerce and especially for customization.
Social media platforms
NIKEiD has various social media platforms and keep updating frequently, ensuring NIKEiD always show up among its community. For the appearance, these platforms share the same color (black and white), logo, and name, so that customers can easily recognize NIKEiD's account while using these social media platforms.
However, from the list of pictures, we can easily find it's hard to tell the differences between NIKEiD's groundswell and Nike's groundswell. Furthermore, NIKEiD's groundswell design just reprints Nike's, instead of creating a new one. The colors and format of NIKEiD hardly express the spirit of NIKEiD which is creative.
Target Audience
From the audience demographics provided by Facebook insights, the target audience of NIKEiD, at least for Facebook of NIKEiD, is mainly teenagers from thirteen to seventeen years old. In addition, the products of NIKEiD determine its target audience is a group of energetic people. If someone would like to spend probably hours on your site for designing, he or she must love your products and brand. Also, this customer would be willing to engage in your social media and even promote the product and the brand. To sum up, NIKEiD's social media has nearly perfect audience who are young and energetic and can be easily embraced.
Social mentions
social mention for ALL
Social mention for pictures
The analysis of social mention shows NIKEiD has high rate of reach and mentions, but the largest part of sentiment is neutral. This also prove that the contents NIKEiD provides are failed to energizing the customers. Considering the large group of customer paying attention to NIKEiD, failure in creating social buzz may not regard as a big problem for the manager of NIKEiD, but may lead to harms on customers' loyalty and weakness in branding.
The second picture show the social mention of NIKEiD's pictures which are main part of its groundswell content. We can also tell that these pictures gain less passion than the general content, so the content strategies of NIKEiD are not really successful.
Traffic
Google trend analysis for NIKEiD for last 30 days
Google trend analysis for both Nike(in red) and NIKEiD(in blue)
The analysis of Google Trend indicate that the traffic of NIKEiD is limited especially compared with Nike. NIKEiD is a part of Nike, but NIKEiD meet special needs of a very creative group which are important for Nike's whole brand and revenue. So I recommend NIKEiD should have its independent groundswell strategies as well as impressive traffic and social mentions.
Content and feedback
From the content analysis of NIKEiD's platforms, I found these platforms are used as product catalog by releasing newest products, in a neutral and very "company" tough. It's hard to attract audience or energize customers in this neutral attitude, especially for a brand which encourage customers to co-create the products. To be more specific, there are following problems:
1. Repeated information and content.
Post1 of NIKEiD
Post 2 of NIKEiD
Post 3 of Nike
2. Lack of emotional statement. Post 1 is the most common content released on NIKEiD's Facebook, Post 2 is one of the posts attracting most likes and comments recently and Post 3 is the most common content released on Nike's Facebook. Compare with Post 2 and 3, Post 1 drew less attention.
3. Lack of official feedback or even attention to the customers. Most of NIKEiD's Facebook posts has a large number of likes and comments, but there are only posts to raise the topics but no feedback for these hot discussion. As a result, that will harm the passion of these followers.
4. Lack of management for Spam messages. These spam messages will definitely lead to negative results like reduce of the pageviewer or even antipathy of the brand.
Possible problems
After these research, I was surprised to conclude that the groundswell of NIKEiD probably is not able to help with energizing and embracing customers but lead to neutral attitudes towards the products. The possible problems are listed below:
Similar design with Nike resulting in weakness in recognition and uniqueness
Update newest products as main content misleading the function of groundswell in product catalog
Neutral content and tough resulting in low passion and strength on social networking
lack of richness leading to limited traffic of social media
Lack of independent support resulting in all the weaknesses
Failure in energizing customers as a creative brand!
After ten chapters talking about external groundswell strategies, we finally turn to internal social networking. The internal groundswell is easy to be overlooked especially for those large enterprise who have spent a lot on the external social networking. In Groundswell, three cases are given showing three benefits from internal groundswell: supporting your external groundswell, collaborating with and supporting each other and building corporate culture.
The most impressive part is about relationship and culture, which are essential in branding. Internal groundswell can express the culture of a corporation, which audience more likely trust and accept. Also, it's a great way to gain more customers' attention and loyalty. After I learnt this, I want to apply it to my real life.
When nonprofit organizations embrace social media...
More and more NPOs emphasize social networking to create the community of members and donors. Like what Bob Alves said, the internal social networking strategies will benefit organizations in increasing traffic, collecting data and feedback from members and donors, and exchanging information. I strongly agree with these points from my own experience of internship at African Community Education(ACE), a nonprofit organization aiming help young african refugee in Worcester area.
Situation analysis
Since ACE is a small NPO so far with limited budget and staff, groundswell is one of the best way to connect with all the members and donors with low cost and large audience. However, the current social networking of ACE consist of mainly Facebook group, Facebook place and monthly e-newsletter and other direct e-mails to our contact list. Currently, ACE has 285 members in its group but much less active users to create new content. And for the Facebook places, there are few topics or activities updated as well.
On the other hand, in real world, ACE is a warm community with kindness, trust and happiness. All the staff, students, volunteers and even donors love each other. While getting along with those kids and staff, I deeply touched by their feeling that they are a part of ACE family. That's also ACE's culture.
In addition, ACE can be a powerful community which I found through Chase Community Giving program. From Sep.14 to Sep.19, they collected 453 votes which are just part of ACE's real community but much larger than their Facebook community.
Recommendation
Apparently, ACE should enlarge their Facebook community to meet the following objectives:
1.Listening:
ACE's Facebook group and page can be developed as a channel where all the members, including staff, students, volunteers and donors, can express their comments and suggestions. As a result, ACE can gather information from the students and donors. Even a simple statement like " Yesterday was the best day ever" can lead to hot discussion about latest Fundraiser dinner and drive more traffic, if the manager of internal groundswell provided better listening environment by adding rich information and giving feedback.
2. Talking:
More posts will lead to more discussion and traffic on groundswell. Continuing posting new topics will definitely contribute to more conversations. ACE can post policy changes, problems and challenges, and new achievements to encouraging members to working on the issues or at least informing them where we are.
3. Energizing:
ACE has a lot enthusiastic employees and students, who love their organization. Let them spread the words on the platform where all their audience can see and pass their passion, positive thinking and advice, in order to engage more people in the community.
4. Supporting:
Turn ACE's Facebook group is a place where members always get help and answers. In other words, they should include Facebook and other groundswell as a channel to support each other.
5.Embracing:
Open to new ideas and suggestions about ACE.
6. Branding:
"ACE is a family" should not be just what I experience but also the culture and key messages we should tell others. Groundswell can help with building the community and send the message out. ACE has already developed special culture and good relationship among the real-life community, and they should put that online and spread the principle -- "We are ACE, and we are a family."
We all know that groundswell is important now, but at the beginning or for those who don't know social media well, It's hard to believe. How much impact will it have if only one of your thousands customers says something to your brands? None? little? If this one convinced ten and each of these ten spread the words to another ten people, how much impact will there be then? The effects can be much more than imagination!
That is the word-of-mouth effects, the power behind groundswell.
Let's look back the history before mass media. The main resource of learning knowledge and getting information is word of mouth. Even after we surrounded by newspapers, radios, and TVs, we still get most of our knowledge from the mouths of our parents, teachers and friends. That's what we trust and rely on!
Marketers know that, so they spend a lot of money on WOM (word-of-mouth) in order to build trust with customers (While mass media are mostly used for public awareness). Mark Smiciklas wrote in his blog, " Word of mouth marketing has the power to quickly build up or tear down the reputations of products, services and organizations."
Let's see how we can make WOM more powerful.
Understand word-of-mouth
How to make the words be listened and spread?
The content we spread among the customers are important. People has inherent habits of choosing the words they want to listen and spread, even in the years long before social media appear. Heath brother's book, Made to stick, concludes several key factors to spread "stick" content, like simple, unexpected, emotional and stories. Also, engagement and other factors are important. That's why we frequently contains questions, "!" and links in the groundswell content.
How to make the words go farther?
In fact, not all the participators in your groundswell are the same important. Like what shows in right picture, the social media users, or critics and creators (Groundswell, chapter 3), are keys for the spread of words. If we energize them well, they will help to spread the words, create more contents, engage more friends and followers as well as even support the groundswell system(Groundswell, chapter 7&8). As a result, your brand community and reputation will rapidly grow.
Revolution of word-of-mouth marketing
There are two new trends to strength the power of WOM: multimedia and mobile. Pictures and especially videos can draw more attentions and are easy to be understood and transferred. Flickr and Youtube are required for all companies and brands when social media development. In addition, the rapid growth of smartphone users are definitely revolution of social media. Sharing whenever and wherever seems give the spirit for groundswell. About half of Facebook, Twitter and Yelp users and traffic are made up by mobile users.
Negative word-of-mouth
When the good words are spreading among your customers, the bad words are the same. If you want more promoters and less detractors of your brand, you'd better give responds, especially for the negative comments. Are you wonderring what people will say if you don't treat the negative comments seriously, see what Gitsnjsli say about BodyShop!
On the other hand, the effect of negative words is not a problem compared with the positive impact of word-of-mouth. According to Kisrsten, the negative WOM has less impact than the positive one.
More and more people like online shopping today. Of course, you will choose online shopping, because it takes only a few clicks without limitations of time or places... if there are not other concerns. Well, the truth is online shopping is not easy to accept. Research in 2008 shows 45 percent to 55 percent shoppers looked online for information, but relied on brick-and-mortar stores - or human agents - when purchase. However, shown in the figure below, researches in 2011 (E-commerce 2012) indicates 72 percent shoppers are buyers and 15 percent are browser among 87 percent shopper of Internet users.
For online merchants, looking is obviously not enough, while it's purchasing that make sense. The condition did improve among last few years, but now convincing customers to purchase online instead of just look or converting customers from browser to buyers is still a big challenge for most merchant. How? Trust may be the first step. Groundswell is, of course, one of the best way to build the trust. Five steps are giving in Groundswell's part two:
Listening -- Tell your customers that "we are hearing you" and "we are always here for help and improvement", and try to understand them better through listening.
Talking -- Spred the words about your company or products among "friends" (Like Facebook friends) instead of releasing from companies. Let your customers know you and participate in distribute the message.
Energizing -- Encourage the "fans" or "followers" of your brand or products to convince others to purchase.
Supporting -- Build effective system to help your customers to support each other. They may refuse to trust your company when facing trouble, but they would like to receive help from their "friends".
Embracing -- Involve your customer in creating the products or building the brand. Let them be part of your family.
I learnt a lot from these chapters, and the most important think I learnt is groundswell is a system rather than some tools. That means we need to build groundswell as a system to support the selling of the company instead of just tools to connect with customers. If we did, our brand and products would be greatly supported by the system, and our customers would trust us and be part of us. As a result, they will buyers instead of browsers. Then I have the question how we support the groundswell system and keep the trust while purchase. The case of LLBean gives some clues. There are two things may important -- free shipping and easy return and live customer service. Why? Let's see two charts.
The blue chart (E-commerce 2012) shows why customers do not purchase online, and the red one (E-marketer) shows aspects that online shoppers would like retailers to improve. Both of them indicates two issues I mentioned before are significant for online shopping behavior. In fact, these two mainly contributed to the big improvement of online buyers. So if we failed on these two parts, the groundswell system may fail at last. Free shipping and easy return Many companies provides free shipping and at least free return for customers. Does free shipping that effective? Ken Kikkawa gives the anwser -- yes! For me, I give a quality yes too. I buy from Zara much more after they launched their free shipping strategy; while even I put A&F's clothes in the shopping cart, I may still leave the page for shipping fee concerns.
Live customer service
Many merchants knows they must answer customers' question whenever they have one, which is also what groundswell tell that "we are always here for help". Amazon.com has an amazing live customer service which at least impress me a lot. They provide three ways for contact, and make sure they can help you whenever and however you need. From my own experience, I feel "Call me now" is the most effective one, because sometimes when I was nearly driven crazy by the seller I always get instant help to make me feel good again.
I have kept an eye on NIKEiD for more than a year for its extraordinary performance in customization. It is a service allowing customers to customize Nike products with colors, materials and "ID". Launched initially in 1999, NIKEiD has become the key part of Nike in both production and revenue. Although customers can design the shoes in NIKEiD studios, most people choose to design it online through nikeid.com. NIKEiD set an great example for e-commerce and especially for customization.
