Monitoring NIKEiD Groundswell

• Introduction of NIKEiD

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.

Facebook of NIKEiD

Facebook of Nike

Twitter of NIKEiD

Twitter of Nike

Blog of Nike/No independent blog of NIKE

YouTube of NIKEiD

YouTube of Nike

Flickr of NIKEiD

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:

1. Similar design with Nike resulting in weakness in recognition  and uniqueness
2. Update newest products as main content misleading the function of groundswell in product catalog
3. Neutral content and tough resulting in low passion and strength on social networking
4. lack of richness leading to limited traffic of social media
5. Lack of independent support resulting in all the weaknesses
6. Failure in energizing customers as a creative brand!

Listening! But how?

It seems simple and clear that if you are running a business, you should listen to your customers. Well, but how? Many companies spent a lot money on that, but they still failed to know their customers' feelings and thoughts. In Groundswell, we got the answer.

Let's see what others say first!

There are a lot of social media tools for monitoring your social media, tracking your traffic and getting the specific comments and other information in order to know your customers. Erik Qualman summarized 100 social media tools for groundswell management, which may scare you. Some of them are used by a large number of companies. For example, Shoutlet are applied by many well-known companies, as content creator, conversation generator, and efficiency metrics.

Also, a lot "teachers" appeared on Youtube, guiding audience how to listening to customers. Pedro Gomes gave us a guideline under this topic, which can be effective for small business owners. Many similar videos are there as well. All they mentioned are Google Analysis, Hootsuite and other tools, showing the general information.

Of course, there are other voice, something seemed more academic. Jim Kukral talked about a simple idea: you need to pick up the phone or send e-mail to one of your customer and ask, "Why you bought from me"? Gauray Mishra published a blog saying listening includes data collection and data mining.

Then you must wonder what Groundswell say.

First, listening is marketing research, like what Gauray said, instead of only general insights or a few specific contact.

Second, so-called homegrown monitoring methods, like what Pedro mentioned in the video, don't scale; whereas, vendors who provide professional tools are highly recommended.

Third, two strategies, along with real cases, are given as effective listening methods: one is set up your own private community; the other is begin brand monitoring. Managers can choose either way according to the industries and conditions of companies. Vendor like Communispace could provides real customer-based community for focus group driving to real results about brand impact, while sites like Nielsen's BuzzMetrics helps with understanding customer insight of brand through datas from social media.

So, what do I want to say?

First, as a manager, you need to understand what listening means. No matter it is marketing research, personal contact or data collecting plus data mining, you must have goals as getting clear picture of what customers are thinking about the brand, based on both qualitative and quantitive data.

Then, you should choose the right tools. Erik's 100 social media are nightmare for me, but some of them do works for companies, like Shoutlet which has some really good strategies. Pedro and his guideline may work, but is not that useful. From my personal experiences, tools like Google Analysis can only give you a general impression about your business and competitors. If you are looking for something you can analysis and work with and some useful advices, you'd better listen to Groundswell and choose some bigger vendors. You could also find similar vendors on search engine besides those two examples. 

If you are the owner of a small business, you are free to choose free social media tools, and, Jim is right, you can talk to your customer directly. If your are a manager of a big company, take Groundswell's advice. The power of social media will surprise you! ^_^