My Thoughts on Social Media and a Success Story

Social media is beneficial for companies as well as consumers because it serves the same need: to interact. In today’s day and age information is crucial and timing is everything. Companies’ competitive advantage relies not only on the superiority of their products, but also on fast access to their consumers’ thoughts and needs. To this extent, social media is invaluable. It has shortened the response time for consumer feedback, giving companies the opportunity to tweak their products sometimes even before they hit the market. This is a win-win situation: a better product results in higher sales for the company, while consumers become more invested in the process and thus more likely to promote the product.

Consumers effortlessly gain a voice through social media. They offer feedback and share their expertise on certain topics and gain loyal followers who in turn make purchasing decisions based on information found on-line. Consumers have always talked and continue to talk about their favorite products. Companies need to become part of this conversation that is taking place anyway. Forming and nurturing this partnership with the consumer is therefore extremely beneficial for companies.

One of the main concerns related to social media is return on investment. Social media is gaining reputation and becoming more sophisticated and with that so are ways to measure its efficiency. The most obvious ways to measure it are leads, sales, number of clicks, cost per conversion, followers, awareness, sentiment analysis, or reach. The main benefit though is the interaction between the consumer and the brand, which builds trust.

I use social media. In fact, I even have a success story: this summer, when my Challenge for Charity Co-President and I were trying to figure out how to raise money to provide T-shirts for 300 students, I logged into our Twitter account, @PepperdineC4C. Social media is about communication, remember? So I felt that our followers should know what we are dealing with so I posted: "Looking for sponsor for 300 T-shirts. Logo will be placed next to the Special Olympics and the Children's Lifesaving Foundation logos." 114 characters and two hours later, I received an e-mail from a classmate and fellow Twitterer (is that the official word?) @neovintage who informed me that he retweeted our request, which then was retweeted by a friend, who then received a tweet back from a company @onecoconut willing to sponsor us. What? Really? I was ecstatic! And what makes the story even better is that the founder of O.N.E. turned out to be a Pepperdine alumna. Who doesn't believe in social media now?