How IKEA is embracing Social Media & Advocacy as a business model in the digital era. You will find the best Customer Journey map i have ever seen so far: IKEA freely admits that it is at the turning point of becoming a business embracing social and they are looking towards a future filled with innovation in the social space – yet at the moment they have lots

of work ahead of them. IKEA in the US is where most of their social experimentation is occurring, with the brand’s regional social accounts embracing a program of US Brand Ambassadors, on blogs and social media sites like Twitter.

     However, IKEA’s journey is set against a history of trial and error experiences by brands over many decades, so the path is well trodden. Big Data for Big Decisions Before the advent of big data from social, there was scant information available to brands about their audience, other than what they managed to glean from their own sources. It was a little bit of knowledge; some surveys and some guess work. In juxtaposition to that limited era, the rise of digital has meant that organizations now have access to overwhelming volumes of data from a number of different external sources, including social.

It’s tempting to think that the term Big Data is some kind of marketing fad, yet within beyond the throwaway jargon and other terminology lies something truly valuable.    

     Social data can be hugely insightful and is produced at breakneck speed. It gives brands a new set of metrics that were previously obscured and provides an effective way of understanding an audience that previously would have been untapped or have taken weeks of more labor-intensive and expensive research. Social data can also be aligned with existing datasets, such as sales figures – giving another angle to the data that may not have been explored before.

However, it isn’t all about the figures; it’s about the people that those social mentions represent – customer behavior, prospect activity and other crucial nuggets of information that can help the business function more intelligently.    

     Across the Business: Being consistent with the data and the customer that it depicts is essential to having a social business that is aligned in all of its differing areas. This could be marketing, customer service or product development – all of these departments need to understand the importance of social data and spread it effectively across the board.

IKEA is experimenting with social, as described, but in order to generate buy-in from executives and to get every department thinking about the potential impact of (and value in) social data the brand has installed a very visual means of presenting insights: Brandwatch Vizia.  

     

This article was edited by Giovanni Montesanti based on the article by the author Chelsea Varney appeared in: http://www.business2community.com/social-business/innovation-social-look-ikeas-journey-01011002      Main  Topic:  Customer  Journey.  Secondary  topics:  Marketing.  Tag  words  for:  Marketing,  Customer  Journey,  Journey,  Consumer,  Consumers,  IKEA,  Social  Advocacy,  Social  Media,  Digital,  Digital  Media,  Business  Model    Date:  Sept  27th  2014    Number  of  cumulated  views:  1,412    Number  of  cumulated  Likes:    1,106