Shah says even though Wal-Mart is the biggest company in the world, not everyone knows about the company’s work in disaster relief, hunger relief and sustainability efforts. His job is to get that message out there. So how does he do it? With data.

Here are some key points from his presentation on SocialMedia.org‘s BlogWell conference in New York:

• Data is better than your gut: Shah’s team posts content for each of Wal-Mart’s initiatives on multiple Twitter handles. At the end of each day, the posts that performed the best with retweets and engagement are automatically reposted onto their most visible Twitter handle — not just the posts they think will perform the best.
• Your best influencers might not be the biggest online influencers: Wal-Mart uses data to identify the top 50 influencers on its content’s subject, not just the person with the most Twitter followers. Shah says that most “digital influencers” are just the loudest people online, and the loudest person is not necessarily the most influential.
• No more free shots: In the past, Wal-Mart’s strategy for handling inaccurate information people posted about the brand was to ignore it. Now, as a part of proactively managing Wal-Mart’s reputation, the social media team works quickly to correct misinformation and engage with the person posting it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you like this presentation, see more great social media case studies like it live at SocialMedia.org’s BlogWell conference June 19 in Chicago.

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• Is the social media universe still expanding?

Andy’s Answers: How Wal-Mart uses data to improve its reputation via social media originally published by SmartBlogs

This means it’s time for brands, big and little, to develop a strategy to capitalize on the power of social advertising. The customers are there; people are spending lots of time on social media, particularly on mobile devices — 30% of the time spent on social media is on mobile, and that figure is likely to continue to grow.

Brands have the learn how to optimize ad content to deliver an effective message and call-to-action to their audiences. This sector of advertising is not as aggressive as TV; it actually fits in with the way people absorb content on social networks. Facebook and Twitter have expanded their advertising options to suit a variety of budgets and business goals.

The goals for social ads typically include:

• Increasing the number of fans or followers.
• Distributing content, such as videos, photos and other items that live on the feeds of the network.
• Driving direct responses, such as e-commerce, application downloads, etc.

But how do you set up your ads for success? Social media present so many opportunities that making a choice can seem daunting. Here are five keys to keep in mind:

1. Content is king: Within social networks, you have access to a massive amount of data, charting your content’s effectiveness and how well it resonates with your audience. Promote and push the content that is working. If you’ve got good content, you’re ultimately a winner.

Look at the success of previous posts and promote the ones with a high amount of “likes” or comments. Know that photos and videos work better than text-heavy posts, and focus on spending money to promote your original content, such as infographics, in-house videos, podcasts, etc. You can use network data from testing to determine which markets interact best with certain content.

2. A/B test: Put your campaigns to the test. Assign funds to several ads and target groups in the beginning, and after one week or so, take a look at what is working Don’t go crazy; granular, but not too granular. Use any existing customer data you have to determine audiences and key demographics.

What is a good amount of “granular”? Let’s say your brand sells a light-up cooler similar to Coleman. Targeting an audience that “likes” Wal-Mart, camping and is male would probably be ideal. But if you have a durable, Army-colored $200 cooler, targeting an audience that “likes” Cabela’s, hunting, fishing and are males over 30 would be ideal. Lastly, if you have a fold-up cooler that weighs less than competitors, targeting an audience that “likes” REI, hiking and camping would be ideal.

3. Think about placement: With Facebook, remember that the click-thru and engagement rate is higher when you place an ad in the Newsfeed. Considering mobile use, stick with the middle of page on Facebook; not to say other types of ads aren’t effective, though. With Twitter, there is a higher engagement rate (greater than 3%) when you target ads specifically on mobile. Remember that video content doesn’t work well on mobile, but does work well on desktop.

4. Target well: Choosing the appropriate ways your ad content is delivered to your audience is imperative. You have several options when targeting audiences and paying for their responses. A few of those include:

• CPC: Cost per Click (pay every time someone clicks on your ad).
• CPA: Cost per Action (only pay for the action you want to get, such as likes, and no other engagement).
• CPM: This is Facebook exclusive and you pay for impressions. Facebook will optimize your ad to show to the people who are most likely to help you meet your goal.

Twitter allows you to target on specific phone devices, desktops, laptops, and Web on smartphones and tablets.

Thinking about what content you’re advertising and what kind of reaction you want from it is the most important aspect of targeting. When determining the audience, Facebook gives you a multitude of targeting and segmentation options, from demographics to custom interests, their pre-determined broad categories, audiences and more. The two key factors to keep in mind when selecting audiences:

• Keep them focused, but not too focused. Again, using any existing data you have in order to determine the most applicable audience for your promotion is a smart way to target.
• Test, test, test: Can’t emphasize it enough. The best way to find what works is to eliminate what doesn’t. Test different keywords, audiences/interests and interaction options.

Remember that some users face special circumstances.

First-time ad buyers should use the audience you already know is on social media and just target them in your first round of ads. If you know your customer base is females over 50 that live in Reno and love knitting, crafting, etc., then target only those to start with, and forget going after 20-somethings that have a much slimmer chance of interacting with your brand.

B2B users should remember that your potential clients and customers all work somewhere — right? Or a company you’re looking to set a meeting with has multiple employees that have Facebook profiles, correct? You can target by workplace and receive positive attention from the company’s personnel by sending them specific and applicable content through ads.

5. Use the right metrics to measure success: Make sure you are collecting and analyzing your ad campaign data to see if it’s working for you.

The great thing with online advertising is you can track it in real time. No need to fork over $1,000 upfront and cross your fingers that it’s going to be successful. Because of this, monitoring is huge. You need to watch your ads daily and adjust as necessary to make sure your advertising campaign is successful. Each platform has its own advertising monitoring interface so you can keep track of the results on there. You’ll know if your advertising campaign is successful by creating your own metrics to measure by:

• Are you trying to drive online sales? Then you’d better make sure you are using ads that drive people off Facebook and Twitter and convert into off-site sales.  If this is the case, measure how much money you are spending on the advertising campaign based on how much money you are making in sales. This will show you your ROI and you can decrease or increase your spending as necessary. If the ads are not generating any traffic, you might want to consider changing the copy or design of the ad.
• Are you trying to increase your fans or followers? The same goes for increasing your audience. How much is 1,000 fans worth to you? Put a price on it and follow the same methodology as No. 1.
• Are you attempting to make a video go viral? Make sure you’re using desktop options more than mobile.

The key is to experiment. The opportunity social provides is incredible, but your must have some time to invest in the process and understanding of social ads. The best part of social ads is that they can user generated, too! You get to pick what content works and who sees it when spending your money. That’s the new wave of advertising and it’s a process worth investigating and investing in.

A wordsmith turned tech junkie, Joshua Parkinson has a passion for conversation and content that led him around the world, and eventually to bootstrap Facebook content manager Post Planner.

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Social ads: How to get started with digital advertising’s hottest tool originally published by SmartBlogs

In December, as my family discussed destinations that involved a beach or an amusement park, my first-grader quipped that he wanted to go to see Santa Elena Canyon. There was a moment of silence as the rest of the family looked blankly at each other, wondering where this place was. A Google search returned the result that Santa Elena Canyon was in Big Bend National Park in Texas. A tweet to my followers connected me with Beth Nobles, executive director at Texas Mountain Trail, a nonprofit organization that promotes visitors to the six westernmost counties of Texas — an area as big as West Virginia. She provided me with information about places to see and activities in Big Bend National Park. Members of TripAdvisor helped me with information on other destinations on the trip, such as Carlsbad Caverns and White Sands Desert in New Mexico. The trip was a great success, and a lot of credit goes to several social channels.

Here are five ways social media is transforming travel:

• Communities and forums: Sites such as FlyerTalk and TripAdvisor predate today’s leading social networks and are filled with discussions from travelers who are experts on their experience with travel and destination. They are a good spot to search for the experience of other travelers with business and destinations. With the advent of social media, you can see whether you are connected with the reviewers, which may add to the credibility of the review.
• Social status updates: You can poll your Facebook or Twitter friends about places or get some specific information again about restaurants, travel tips. On Facebook, using Social Graph Search, you can find out who in your network or “friends of friends” have been to the places you want to visit. I used this feature on a recent visit to Warsaw, Poland, and got some great tips from my friend David Berkowitz, who had recently visited Warsaw.
• Social local mobile (SoLoMo): When you travel to a new place on a business trip and have the evening to yourself,  social networks such as Yelp and Foursquare  can help you find nearby places of interest. Yelp has an augmented-reality feature in its mobile application called Monocle, which will tell you about the places around you as you sweep your mobile phone around you. Foursquare users usually leave tips that you can choose to use or in case of conferences you can find where your connections are hanging out.
• Social recommendations: Travel websites and businesses use social sharing tools to allow their customers engage with them. When you look at a hotel or a restaurant website and a widget on the business’ page tells you that your friends have liked that page on a social network, you may be more likely to spend money with that business.
• Reviews and the wisdom of strangers: Reviews are a very important factor when choosing travel and many reviewers write reviews to be helpful and altruistic. There have been controversies about slanted reviews or unduly harsh ones. I think most visitors on review sites can decide which reviews are well-written and credible and make their own decisions. Remember that in the service business things can always go wrong. If you come across a review with a bad experience, look at how the business reacted to this experience.

When you search for a business you are likely to see the search results page include not only the business website but also several of the social media sites and review sites. If you are a business owner, you should pay attention to your reviews especially the ones that are in included in the top results.

This guest post is by Shashi Bellamkonda, vice president of  digital marketing at Bozzuto.com, a company that aspires to be the Best Real Estate Company in America — the community calls him Social Media Swami. He is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University.

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5 ways social media is transforming travel originally published by SmartBlogs

He also made a “personal plea” for cable to lead the way in the effort to keep students safe, “both online, and in their streets and neighborhoods.”

Three floors below, on the show’s exhibit floor,  Esri and uKnow.com were showcasing technology that would do just that.

Esri has partnered with the parental-intelligence provider uKnow.com on uKnowLocate, a service that combines social-network data and smartphone GPS data to allow parents to keep track of their children’s location. It also offers a host of features, including geofencing, mobile alerts and scheduled check-ins. UKnowLocate, set to be officially announced Monday, will be integrated into the consumer-facing uKnowKids product, as well as in uKnow.com’s white-label systems.

Tim Woda, senior vice president of strategic growth and co-founder at uKnow.com, says that the technology revolution has made almost everything easier — except parenting. With sharing pictures and information on an array of networks easier than ever, and mobile devices being adopted by younger and younger children, parents’ ability to keep an eye on their children is significantly diminished compared with the era when families shared a single landline phone.

UKnowLocate and the other services offered by uKnow.com are aimed at reversing the trend of parents being out of the feedback loop when it comes to the lessons they teach their children.

“We want to make parenting only as difficult as it used to be,” Woda says.

Esri’s ArcGIS Geotrigger service powers uKnowLocate’s geofencing feature. It gives parents the opportunity to create a virtual fence around areas of interest on a map — a school, a library, a child’s friend’s house. Parents can then set up customized notifications based on certain triggers; for example, a parent could ask to receive a text-message alert if a child leaves school before 2 p.m. Geotrigger’s “adaptive tracking mode” also helps reduce battery-life consumption, a common problem with location-based software.

Esri and uKnow.com were visiting The Cable Show this week because as cable companies hear calls to keep children safe, they’re also looking at the home-security and home-automation segment as a new source of revenue. Woda says his company can help cable fulfill both of those goals, by making the always-on broadband world safer for children, and by boosting revenue with a subscription-based, white-label uKnow product.

Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen, during a Wednesday panel, said cable has a “unique role to play” in education and safety. With uKnow.com and uKnowLocate, they have a unique tool at their disposal.

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At The Cable Show: Esri and uKnow.com partner on location tool for parents originally published by SmartBlogs

In her presentation at SocialMedia.org‘s BlogWell conference in New York, Arnott explains how even in a regulated industry the company has enabled 85,000 employees to share their expertise with one another and improve customer service through social media.

Here are some key points from her presentation.

• Get your social program off the ground with the right leadership: Arnott warns that leaders and their priorities may change, but it’s important to keep educating and sharing your successes. She says leaders always care about what their customers are saying about the company — and relay those testimonials and anecdotes so they can brag about them in meetings.
• Social customer service works because people love asking questions about “me”: The information on TD Bank Group’s website could answer most of the questions customers ask on the bank’s online forum, TD Helps. But Arnott says people prefer to ask questions about their own personal issues (the “What about me?” questions) and liking knowing that a real person is there to help them solve it.
• Creating a social business is about empowerment, not ownership: TD Bank Group’s social strategy started centralized and run solely by its social media team. But over time, they handed the reins over to each department to handle social with their own expertise. Slowly, TD Bank Group is integrating social into a part of every employee’s primary job responsibilities.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you like this presentation, see more great social media case studies like it live at SocialMedia.org’s BlogWell conference June 19 in Chicago.

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Andy’s Answers: How TD Bank Group empowers its employees to do more with social media originally published by SmartBlogs

This week, we asked: Have you signed up for a social network during 2013?

• No — I have used only social networks I belonged to before the start of 2013: 50.33%
• Yes — I have signed up for a social network to which I did not previously belong: 41.18%
• No — I do not use any social networks: 8.5%

It’s been a while since a social tool has made a big splash. The last network to truly generate buzz arguably was Pinterest, which launched in 2010 and saw rapid expansion in 2011. Since then, we’ve seen existing social networks add features or tools, such as Twitter’s Vine platform, but there have been precious few totally new networks generating the kind of buzz that makes people feel like they’re missing out if they’re not part of the party.

That might be for the best, partly because few of us have room in our lives for yet another social tool. It also means that companies can stop playing the chase-the-shiny-object game and get down to the important business of developing a holistic social media strategy that isn’t platform dependent. When we stop trying to prove that we’re clued in to the next big thing, we can do many remarkable little things.

If the trend has a downside, however, it’s that a lack of new blood means a lack of competition for popular social networks. We all know what complacency gets us. Still, you could argue that between Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest, Reddit, Foursquare, Quora and Tumblr, we have more than enough tools at our disposal.

What do you think? Is there enough competition in the social media space? Have you tried an interesting social tool lately? Are there unfilled niches in the social media universe?

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Is the social media universe still expanding? originally published by SmartBlogs

What comes next should be obvious. If one person loves your e-book, then there is a high likelihood that the person will want to share it with others. This is the reason you need a social media marketing plan for your business.

Here are the top five building blocks for social network marketing that fuels inbound marketing.

Connect everything. Stop thinking about your website, your social sites and your sales effort as separate, disconnected and unrelated parts of your business. For example, today, you are delivering an experience to a prospect. The person sees you on LinkedIn, clicks through and views your website, then calls and speaks with a salesperson. Two days later, the person sees what you are doing on Facebook and looks for video on YouTube. It’s all connected. You have to remember that, leverage it and make sure your prospect gets treated to a remarkable experience through every channel. A well-thought-out marketing strategy and social media marketing plan help you make all of the connections and allow you to deliver the experience sought by prospects.

Be consistent. Your company’s brand and overall marketing strategy has to be consistent and obvious across all sites. Offers on your website should be similar to those on your LinkedIn profile. Create dedicated landing pages for each social media site so you know which site is delivering the best prospects. Make sure language used on social media matches that on your website and is consistent with the voice and tone created in your company’s marketing strategy. Inconsistency creates concern among prospects. That concern causes prospects to pause, slow down the sales process and question your ability to execute. Consistency delivers the experience that makes them feel safe and that gets them ready to buy. A social media marketing plan makes it easier to deliver that experience.

Drive them to share. Think about social media as a highway. It connects everyone and allows you to move your message to many people with a single click. Each of your connections, friends and followers also has a collection of connections, friends and followers. While most people want to share, others need to be reminded. The best way to leverage your network’s network and drive shares is to create compelling, unique and insightful content. The better your content, the more people will share it. A social media marketing plan that’s part of an overall marketing strategy helps you map out where and how to apply that content so your fans will share it.

Start a conversation. This is where most of us go wrong. We consider social media a place to post content. Instead, we should be asking people to get involved, questioning them, challenging them and asking for their opinion. People on social media want to get involved. That’s the reason they are there. The more you can get them talking, the more people will follow you and the easier it will be to use your network as a venue to distribute content. Strategic thought and planning, as part of a broader social network marketing effort, help you figure out exactly what people want to talk about and how to facilitate those conversations online.

Track, test and adjust. As with all inbound marketing, you have to track, test and adjust your approach. It’s going to take time to tweak what you are doing to fit perfectly in your business and in your industry. Every business is different. You need to watch which social sites are driving more traffic and which ones are driving better traffic (more leads). Which sites drive leads that close or close faster? It’s all there for you to learn from and make adjustments to improve inbound-marketing results.

A few years ago, most business owners thought social network marketing was for kids and not businesses. Today, most see as much traffic from social media as they do from organic search engine traffic. This means what you do to drive traffic from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter is as important as what you do to drive traffic from Google, Yahoo and Bing

To learn more about how to use social media to help your business get found, get leads and drive sales, download our free report “4.5 Ways To Drive Leads With Social Media.”

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Social media marketing and inbound marketing: Brothers from a different mother? originally published by SmartBlogs

The following is an e-mail interview with Gupta. It has been lightly edited.

What’s the appeal of image-based social networks for brands? Why should a brand that’s already juggling several other social platforms add an image-based network to the mix?

Consumer behavior is undergoing a fundamental shift. Increasingly, consumers are electing to communicate with pictures rather than words. On Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram alone, consumers share nearly 5,000 images every second of every day. Add in platforms such as Pinterest, Polyvore, Wanelo and even SnapChat and it’s clear this isn’t a fad; this is the new face of engagement. Unfortunately, for most brands engaging with pictures is the equivalent of learning a new language. With this new language, it’s not a question of if brands will have to learn to communicate visually, it’s just a question of when they’ll get up to speed. Forward-looking brands have realized that investing now is far less expensive than trying to play catch up later.

How do the leading image-based social networks stack up against each other? What strengths and weaknesses of the leading platforms should brands keep in mind when deciding where to allocate resources?

At Curalate, we try to help brands think about visual networks in broad classifications so that brands can make connections between networks and better understand how they relate. One classification we consider is temporal versus thematic. Facebook for instance is a highly temporal network — new posts push old posts down diminishing their visibility and engagement. On temporal networks, it’s all about what’s happening now. Contrast this to thematic networks, the most notable of which is Pinterest. On thematic networks, time plays a much smaller role. Instead, images are grouped together based on commonality — themes. This allows brands to tell stories rather than produce news.

The other broad classification to consider is user-generated content versus brand-generated content. Instagram, for instance is almost entirely user generated content — people take their phones out, snap a picture and share it. Tumblr and Pinterest contain far more professional imagery.

For brands, understanding these classifications help to form smarter strategies around how to leverage these networks. While each of these networks represents a unique channel with a unique experience, learning to engage consumers across these channels in native ways is where brands need to be. For instance, starting a story on Facebook and extending the story with richer visual cues on Pinterest while asking consumers to add their own experiences into the story on Instagram can create an incredibly engaging experience for consumers.

How do you measure the success of a campaign on an image-based social network? How is it different from measuring the success of other social media efforts?

We still think that measuring engagement with images matters. By understanding what images resonate with fans, brands get the ability to repurpose highly resonant images into social posts, display ads and even e-commerce opportunities. In addition to traditional engagement metrics however, the visual content on these emerging visual networks is frequently very granular — it’s about specific products. This creates opportunities for clicks that convert to revenue. As a result, it’s becoming not only important to measure social [return on investment] metrics, but hard-dollar contributions as well.

Are image-based social networks only good for reaching female audiences? Can you share any instances of brands finding success courting gender neutral or predominantly male audiences on these networks?

While social networks in general skew female to begin with, there is nothing inherently female about engaging with images. This is a human thing — we’re a visual animal and images drive an emotional response with an immediacy that no other medium offers. We’re seeing brands like Nike do an amazing job of generating compelling imagery on Instagram and have the following and engagement to prove it. [Curalate's] own social experiment, G1VE -a basketball lifestyle brand run by one of our marketing leads, has done a great job of generating engagement via the #ballislife and #hoopdreams tags from an audience that is decidedly male. That said, one of the things marketers everywhere need to understand is that females are incredibly influential in household spending. Even traditionally male brands benefit from female engagement. Look at engagement with Bonobos on Pinterest and you’ll see women pinning clothes that they’d love to see their boyfriends in.

What are the biggest mistakes you see brands making on these networks?

Brands need to think natively about the platforms they participate on. Too many brands treat the networks the same creating content that doesn’t tell a story or acknowledge how consumers want to consume content.

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How smart brands are adapting to the language of social images: A Q-and-A with Curalate CEO Apu Gupta originally published by SmartBlogs

There’s a commonality here. The brains behind these branding efforts were able to mobilize fans with emotion and inspire them to become full-blown advocates.

But what about the toilet paper, tampon, and household supply brands of the world — brands that undoubtedly face greater advocacy battles than markets like entertainment or dessert? While social media has helped glamorous industries accelerate word-of-mouth, others struggle to reach consumers who now opt-in to much marketing. How do you drive advocacy for brands that aren’t as innately moving — brands that many use and love, but just don’t think to engage with or advocate for as often?

We all know of products that won’t ever have the innate allure of an Oreo or Lady Gaga tickets — but there are core understandings about engagement that lead people to become emotionally invested. These understandings can help marketers in more challenging spaces drive advocacy, and ultimately, sales.

1) Develop participatory systems

Consumers prefer to engage by providing their perspective.  Research shows 70% of consumers cite listening to feedback as the top reason why they participate with brands. In categories where people tend to make fewer emotional connections with brands, asking consumers for their opinion can also build an important bond between brands and consumers where there was none.

This bond is partially a result of the Hawthorne Effect — the principle that people who are involved in research become more engaged because of the extra attention they receive. From a marketing perspective, 64% of people asked to weigh in on things like flavors, bottle art, product names, and new offerings said they were highly likely to consider purchasing the product.

2) Give people a mission beyond just a product or service

Along with offering up an opinion, consumers become emotionally involved when they understand and identify with the problems a brand aims to solve, its mission, and its higher-level values. Yet research shows brands aren’t being clear. More than half of consumers are unaware of how brands give back, contribute to society, or create utility in their lives. Nearly all major brands invest in efforts like charitable giving, but does a lack of clear communication about the utility and social consciousness brands offer hurt consumer’s willingness to advocate?

Dish soap maker Dawn guessed the answer was  yes. To create greater clarity around social consciousness, Dawn made it a major corporate and social priority to support wildlife following the BP oil spill. Dawn’s Facebook page dedicated to the effort, Dawn Everyday Wildlife Champions, has 497,629 likes, whereas the brand’s traditional page sits at 67,850. The brand’s recent social engagements speak loudly about fan’s excitement toward Dawn’s effort.

“Because of your efforts to help wildlife, I only use Dawn. I tell everyone I know about this and ask them to use it exclusively. Thank you Dawn for caring” wrote one fan this week, with several postings much the same.

3) Join in on the conversation

Before, brands in difficult spaces could rely on methods like TV advertising to get in front of consumers. Today, with greater importance placed on social media and content marketing, consumers dictate whether they even see many of a brand’s best messages. But how do you drive engagement when you market a product people need but just don’t think about often? You turn to consumers.

In its “Feel Good” campaign, Kleenex used social media to find 50 people tweeting about feeling sick. The brand then sent surprise care packages to the 50 sick people, and all 50 uploaded a photo of the Kleenex care package to their social networks. After launching the campaign, Kleenex continued to receive social love from sick consumers who wanted their attention.

Some brands may look to word-of-mouth as a challenge. But if more welcome the challenge as Dawn and Kleenex have, it will be interesting to see truly innovative, consumer-centric campaigns emerge that allow brands to market “with” rather than “at” consumers.

This post was written by Lindsey Plocek, manager of marketing at Crowdtap. Follower her on Twitter at @lplocek.

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No one is advocating for your brand. Now what? originally published by SmartBlogs

In his presentation at SocialMedia.org‘s BlogWell conference in New York, Rhoten explains how the brand used social media listening strategies to figure out what people wanted from Wendy’s. He also shares how the brand made real use of the results by making big decisions that paid off.

Here are three examples from his presentation on how social listening made made a big difference for Wendy’s.

• Developing a great app: Using social listening, Rhoten’s team found that when people decide to go to lunch, they’re having thoughts such as, “How can I go here and not break my diet?” So to help them out, the team developed an interactive application with nutritional information — a decision that made some PR people skeptical. However, because the brand listened to customers, the app earned tons of users, even without advertising it.
• Making value items cool: Wendy’s understood that people rarely talk about the $1 hamburger they had for lunch. To encourage tweeting about value-menu items, the brand asked social media fans to give these items different names — a move that marketing people always resist. After that, the brand saw a lot more customers buying off of the value menu.
• The “pink slime” issue: When news outlets were outing every business involved in the beef byproduct known as “pink slime,” the industry wanted restaurants to be quiet on the issue. However, Wendy’s was more interested in what customers wanted (and were loudly asking via social media): to know whether Wendy’s served pink slime. Through social media, Rhoten’s team was able to proudly say Wendy’s had never used pink slime, earning additional fans and enhanced word-of-mouth.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you like this presentation, see more great social media case studies like it live at SocialMedia.org’s BlogWell conference June 19 in Chicago.

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Andy’s Answers: How Wendy’s uses social listening to make better business decisions originally published by SmartBlogs