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Posts Tagged ‘apple’

Is Social Media For Everyone?

I was reading a blog post recently by Valeria Maltoni (aka ConversationAgent) about Apple and its army of customer evangelists who enthusiastically spread the gospel about new products and genius of Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Part of Apple’s ability to activate and engage customer evangelists is an aggressive and creative advertising effort that saw the company spend nearly $500-million in 2008.

What’s interesting about Apple and its ability to generate amazing amounts of conversations is how it’s not really using social media at a time when many consumer-focused companies are scrambling to get on the bandwagon. Apple seems to be saying that it doesn’t really need to use social media because it has millions of customers using social media on its behalf. In many ways, Apple has been able to outsource social media.

It begs the question: Are there some or many consumer-facing companies don’t need to use social media?

If your customers are using social media to spread the word about your products and services, provide customer service, answer questions and build the brand’s presence, does it make sense for some companies to stay out of the social fray?

Instead, they can feed the machine by generating content that evangelists (and non-evangelists) can use when blogging, tweeting, Facebook updating, etc.

The reality is Apple may be an exception to the rule because social media makes sense for many companies as part of their communications, marketing and sales programs. Then again, it raises the issue of whether social media is for everyone at a time when social media is being trumpeted as a cure-all or silver bullet.

By Mark Evans - February 3rd, 2010 - 6 Comments »
Tags: , , ,
Posted in Social Media

Why Apple Doesn’t Use Social Media

TechCrunch reported yesterday that Apple is starting to increase its use of Twitter.

For any other world-class, consumer-facing company, this news would probably have been met with a shrug. But for Apple, this is major news because Apple hasn’t embraced social media, even though it’s all rage from a communications, marketing and sales perspective. Apple, which has always marched to the beat of its own drum, is not a social media user, aside from a few low-profile Twitter accounts such as iTunesTrailers

So why is that? Why is Apple sitting on the social media sidelines, while the rest of the world jumps on the bandwagon?

Perhaps the biggest explanation may be that Apple doesn’t need to do social media itself – not when you’ve got millions of consumers more than happy to blog, tweet, video and podcast about their love for Apple and Steve Jobs.

In a sense, Apple has outsourced social media.

Another reason may be that Apple’s marketing campaigns are so good that social media is unnecessary. A case in point are the popular Apple vs. Windows TV ads, which have attracted a lot of word-of-mouth and YouTube views. Again, no need to do social media itself.

And for all the talk about brands having conversation with their customers and potential customers, Apple is having conversations but in different ways. Jobs’ annual keynotes at Macworld is the biggest conversation in the high-world. Steve talks, and then everyone talks back in social and traditional media.

Another venue where Apple is having conversations are the Apple Stores where you can walk in, and have a conversation with a real person as opposed an avatar.

Maybe Apple is the exception to the rule when it comes to social media. Maybe Apple doesn’t need social media or, at least, to do it much itself.

Why do you think?

By Mark Evans - October 21st, 2009 - 3 Comments »
Tags: , , ,
Posted in Social Media

Focus On: Apple’s Snow Leopard

A week ago, Apple launched Snow Leopard, the much-anticipated upgrade of its increasingly popular operating system. The general reaction appeared to be positive even though Snow Leopard does not offer as many dramatic changes as its predecessor, Leopard.

To really get a handle how Snow Leopard is doing, we used MAP (our social media analytics service) to see who has been talking about Snow Leopard and what they’re thinking.

In general, Snow Leopard has been enthusiastically received with a 83% of the conversations being favorable – 44% positive, 39% neutral and 17% negative.

sentiment

In terms of the most prominent terms shown in the BuzzGraph below, “10.6″ was the most popular. This is the current version of the Mac operating system.

There were also strong links to “Mac”, “update” and “compatible”, which reflects the conversations about some applications not working with Snow Leopard. Information Week has an article on 100 applications that are not compatible with Snow Leopard.

buzzgraph.jsp

We also look at where the conversations within the blogosphere were happening. Not surprisingly, nearly one-third of all activity took place in the U.S. – with a lot of activity in California, Texas and New York. Outside the U.S., 6.3% of the conversations took place in Italy and Germany respectively, 5.9% in Spain, 5.1% in the U.K. and 3.7% in Japan.

map

We also checked out what people were saying about Snow Leopard on Twitter. Like blogs, the leading term was “Mac” but there were also strong links to “fixes” and “Flash”.

There was also a strong link to “ow.ly”, a URL shortening service used by many Twitter users. What’s interesting is Twitter’s default URL shortening service is bit.ly, suggesting there have been a lot of Twitter users writing tweets with tools and services other than Twitter.com.

Twitter buzzgraph

By Mark Evans - September 11th, 2009 - No Comments »
Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Social Media, Technology

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