Review of the research for strong and weak organizations in relation to using social media falls into two camps. Facebook, Twitter and Blogs make up one camp which seems to be prominent for B2C organizations. The other camp is mainly B2B organizations who use LinkedIn and Web 2.0 sites.
Both camps attract Flickr, Instagram and/or Pinterest as a secondary engagement medium as most users of social media are using those sites as a visual means to express themselves and organizations want to interact with their customers at a visual as well as textual level.
Using the search term “strong and weak social media companies” produced this results list https://www.google.ca/?gws_rd=ssl#q=strong+and+weak+social+media+companies and led me to this list https://www.google.ca/?gws_rd=ssl#q=companies+with+strong+social+media+presence using the altered search term “companies with strong social media presence”.
Looking at the numerous top tips and techniques on these sites that lead to becoming rated a good or strong user of social media led me to choose The National Railway Museum (NRM) of York’s site www.nrm.org.uk.
What drew me to this site being a strong social media site is the fact that they monitor their associated Groups such as Instagram for photos of the museum that are posted by their visitors, and interact with the person posting the pictures. I visited the museum recently while on vacation with my son who took a number of professional-level photographs and posted them to his Instagram account. NRM picked up on a particular photo and liked his content https://instagram.com/p/77wHbCkPOA/. This indicated to me that NRM is monitoring their accounts and association with Instagram and are interested in actively interacting with their visitors and their photos of the museum, and reaching out and interacting.
Another organization with strong social media (according to the research results) is Coca-Cola www.coca-colacompany.com/cokestyle. I visited their site to take a look at what Coca Cola are doing with social media and the tips to succeed – and to see what all the hype was about.
Coke relates to their specific market areas and demographics and even have specific country links on the web site, and connect across a wide range of social media locations such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Flickr.
Their site also has corporate investor links and charity sponsorship links, in addition to recipes and corporate citizenship such as environmental responsibility.
All of this indicates to me that Coke are serious about their social media presence and want to succeed and engage with their customer base at many levels, textual and visual across a number of topics-including Coke!
My personal experience with local bus operator OC Transpo is my selection of an organization on the weak or opposite end of the spectrum in contrast to NRM and Coke based on personal experience with the OC Transpo web site.
I have sent repeated requests using OC Transpo’s customer feedback form http://www.octranspo1.com/about-octranspo/customer_service and have requested and obtained email confirmation that my request for an additional bus stop was received. However, I have not had a detailed response, rejection or proposed alternative from OC Transpo.
Although Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Google icons are available on the home page, I do not see any evidence of promoting customer interaction or monitoring by OC Transpo, or use of those social media methods as a means of interacting and engaging customers – especially those with valid requests and suggestions.
I am interacting with OC Transpo using their web form as input, but to me it appears no one is listening. If OC Transpo were to use a social media strategy utilizing a corporate Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts that included listening to customer input and engaging in a dialogue about that input with the customer by monitoring the communication lines, this would be a first step to developing a social media strategy that involved the customer.
Since buses are of no value if passengers cannot get on the bus, adding stops along the routes is important, and should be responded to. The objective being to determine the optimum locations for stops along the routes, and passengers can provide valuable input to that process if they are engaged.
Algonquin College Social Media Certificate Program 