Social media has become a critical tool for businesses of all sizes. What was once seen as experimental is now frequently used by startups and corporations to engage customers or even design new products. With Social Media Week underway, here are insights we’ve compiled from earlier interviews with Chicago leaders on the value, challenges and promise of social media.
* Kate Sirkin, executive vice president and global research director of Chicago-based media agency Starcom MediaVest Group, on what its study with Twitter revealed about how people use mobile devices and Twitter while watching television:
Adding a branded message on Twitter with the ability to link to a brand website, coupon or video increased an advertiser’s return on television-advertising investment by 50 percent. If the brand added a video to the tweet, it increased engagement and impact significantly. If you just wrote a sentence about the brand, that was less likely to drive success.
* Paul Lee, a partner at Chicago-based venture fund Lightbank, on why he briefly quit Twitter and what he learned from the hiatus:
I was at a point where social media was present at all times. I’ve gotten much better at being present when I’m doing an activity, or I’m in a meeting with somebody. You’ll notice in the Twitter feed there are bursts of activity. It’s not a steady stream. I think it makes you more engaged and more thoughtful.
* Nicole Duhoski, partner of Chicago-based public relations agency VineSprout Inc., on startup founders’ misconceptions about using social media for promotion:
Some people think that if we have a Facebook page and we put the sticker on our door we’ll get 100 likes a week. A lot of times, all they care about is reaching 1,000 likes or 10,000 followers on Twitter when you can pay for those. You need to find your core audience. Even if it’s 50 people to start with, that’s a lot better than having thousands of followers that don’t care what your product is.
* Mark Devine, senior vice president of marketing of Aurora-based BRK Brands Inc.’s First Alert, on how customer feedback led it to create smaller safety devices:
We were hearing mainly through social media that “I don’t like these big bulky things.” So we imparted on a path of “how do you make this detector very small so it’s unobtrusive to the consumer in their home and they’ll be more likely to add additional protection.”
* Nancy Wright, CEO of Girl Scouts of Greater Chicago and Northwest Indiana, on managing scouting’s image and engaging girls in the digital age:
We have to think about everything that is part of a young person’s world right now. Technology is going to be key to that process. That’s one of the opportunities I see here using technology and social media in a totally different way than we’re using it currently.
* Mary Lee Schneider, president and CEO of Westchester-based Follett Corp., on how it’s taking a page from social media to innovate:
One (product) is Faculty Discover. Think of it as a TripAdvisor for professors and instructors to discover crowd-sourced content from textbooks, supplemental materials, Ted talks, and trade show presentations that they might not have considered before. We’ll also enable a peer-to-peer sharing tool to rate instructional materials.
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* B. Bonin Bough, vice president of global media and consumer engagement at Mondelez International Inc., on lessons from its Mobile Futures incubator pilots with startups:
Waze is a crowdsourced traffic and navigation app. We ran a program that highlighted a pin whenever you drove by a Kum & Go, Quick Chek or Target store. Our brand and the Target brand would appear on the screen, and when you clicked on it, you could receive an offer for Stride gum. We had huge engagement rates; 3 percent of people who saw the ad navigated their car to the Target store.
Q&As are edited for length and clarity.