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Home Insider Blogs Ellen Thompson's Blog What Can Starbucks Teach Us About Social Media Engagement?
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Oct 26
2011

What Can Starbucks Teach Us About Social Media Engagement?

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Posted by: Ellen Thompson on Oct 26, 2011 14:16

I spend a lot of time thinking about social media engagement. What’s it mean? How do we improve it? How can we use it to help our clients grow? One way to find out is to look at what other companies are doing.

I’m currently reading Onward, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s memoir of returning to save the company he founded. Early in the book Schultz says that social media has always been a huge priority for Starbucks. On the face of it, he’s right.

No matter what you feel about them, you can’t deny that Starbucks is a killer brand. On September 21, 2011, the company had almost 26 million Facebook likes, over 3 million check-ins and 1.7 million Twitter followers.

In the previous 24 hours, Starbucks had logged 236 Facebook comments and 131 Twitter mentions. Perhaps it’s not the storm of chatter you might expect from a powerhouse, but the check-ins tell a different story.

This leads me to an educated guess: as we examine other brands, I think we’ll find that small companies—with pages managed by principals at the firm—will have a higher proportion of social media comments. Customers respond to a personal touch, but they won’t cut ties with larger, more “faceless” brands, either. Starbucks has earned their loyalty, and savvy consumers won’t stray far.

So what can Starbucks teach us? Likes and comments don’t always measure social media success. Sometimes even the world’s biggest brands have to judge their campaigns by a different standard.


Comments (5)Add Comment
62
written by Brent Williams, October 26, 2011
I got bored with Onward, but absolutely loved Pour Your Heart In It. What's funny about Starbucks and social media is they have an amazing opportunity to create a phenomenal social network of their own. They have the community aspect already, and people log in through their network all the time. They have parts of a social network through their ideas page, but it could be so much more.
2272
written by Ellen Thompson, October 26, 2011
Yeah, I am kind of dragging my way through Onward and couldn't put the first one down, too. I am sure that they are getting good reactions to their app-driven social media efforts which I obviously can't measure, but I was really surprised I didn't see more comments and mentions given how big the "community" is and how the brand lends itself to social media, at least IMO.
68
written by Eric Brown, October 28, 2011
Hey Ellen, A thought provoking post,
This whole "Engagement" thing is tough, the reason folks have a love affair with Starbucks is because they are worth talking about. The fact that a big brand has achieved that is nothing short of outstanding. That said, Small Really is the New Big, as Godin points out. There are so very many things that any small business, or apartment community could do to stand out, but,.............they don't, because being different takes guts, as you may not be right sometimes and folks are deathly afraid to make a mistake, therefore staying the same as is perceived as "safe" also known as comoddity.

For goodness sakes, my last post on LinkedIn where we were talking about our Leasing Staff wearing Flip Flops actually drew Hate Mail from a few peers in the industry telling me just how stupid we are and non professional. My point being, dressing your Leasing Staff can be a point of being different.

Most Apartment Community Facebook pages are an utter failure. They only have a handful of Fans and zero engagement. They are no more than an electronic billboard.
0
written by Doug Benson, October 28, 2011
My real estate facebook page ("Adventures in Michigan Real Estate") almost never contains tenant discussions. Who would want it to? I don't promote it and I only have around three or four tenants that are actually fans of the page. Of course it has a small following, a little under 500 people. On occasion I might share a humorous event that was tenant or ex-tenant caused as this page is meant for the lighter side of real estate. It isn't meant to be a maintenance request repository or a place where I can hear why the rent might be a couple of days late. What does provide some drama is when I am describing an event that might make some folks chuckle and the "used to be anonymous" tenant jumps in and says "the only reason I left the garbage in the stairway was because I was too tired to carry it all the way to the dumpster..." That is about as direct a tenant interaction as I have ever had on my site. My tenants share their buildings. Apparently that isn't enough of a common denominator to electronically and publicly socialize about it.
2272
written by Ellen Thompson, November 01, 2011
@Eric The most interesting thing I have learned in my 9 years in the business is every company makes its money differently. There are certainly plenty of residents and prospects who think it's really cool / a major plus that your staff wore flip flops. You don't need to appeal to everyone - just enough to fill your units and what you are doing is working for you and personally, I think it's a really fun niche. BTW, isn't Mark Zuckerberg famous for wearing flip flops 24/7? Hasn't seemed to hurt his valuation.

As far as the Facebook=online billboard comparison, while this is true in many cases and not ideal in my mind, I think the level of interaction and engagement will evolve and improve over time as people learn what works. I think it's worth mentioning that people come up to me at conferences and tell me how great they thought a particular article was that had absolutely online engagement. Billboards are not as good as interactive sites, but it doesn't mean they are worthless.

@Doug Thanks for sharing your point of view. It's a great counterpoint. We see lots of maintenance and leasing renewal requests on Facebook pages. I'm over 40 and there is no way I would communicate this way, but it's a fact of life for some communities now. Social sites just give people another way to communicate with you, just like email did in the mid 90s (when my office dragged me kicking and screaming into installing an email server!). Most FB sites have limited to no engagement but we have several examples that have daily interactions. It depends on the community and as I said before, one size does not fit all.
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