Walmart has learned a lot about social media in the last year. Walmart’s John Andrews, senior manager of emerging media, said in early 2009, “With social media is it about a true authentic connection with an audience,” he said. “It’s a way to engage people and it’s an augment for your product. ”

What has Walmart learned about social media? Find out in this post.

1. Use the right writers: After having a false start at using blogs written by a public relations firm (a little distanced from Walmart’s consumers), Walmart turned to its customers for its current success in social media. They hired 11 moms to write blogs about saving money. And moms know how to engage the audience Walmart wants to reach.

2. Welcome feedback: Walmart uses social media with a ratings and review section on its web site. This made Walmart officials a little nervous at first. After all, negative ratings affect business. Said Andrews, “Well, it’s better that you know about it. If you are willing to help solve the problem it becomes an asset in your favor. ”

3. Use mobile technology: Users who sign up for it can get information on sales from text messages.

4. Read the results accurately: Then an interesting thing happened this November. Seems Walmart announced they were starting to sell caskets. (http://bit.ly/WalMartCasket if you’re in the market.) Now, problem was, the idea of Walmart selling such a macabre item as a casket gave the funny guys out there on the web something funny to write about, and seeing an opportunity, they began using social media sites to give reviews of said caskets. These entertaining reviews caught on, and pretty soon, lots of funny people were writing funny reviews.

Can you imagine the analyst looking at the rise in social media numbers, but not looking at the comments themselves? At first glance, the numbers look pretty good. Increases in comments, lots of interest, lots of buzz. But once you delve a little further into it, the good buzz was based on good, clean fun, NOT on good, clean caskets.

What’s a marketing professional to do?

Here’s what the blog at Advertising Age had to say about it:

The example, funny as it is, serves as a reminder that your approach to social media monitoring should follow a similar approach to what SEM/SEO experts do. Use filtering to your advantage. Leverage tag clouds to determine what words are the strongest within a web page of content. If something looks fishy, dive deeper in your analysis. Also, if positive reviews don’t match the number of sales, that too should raise a red flag.

So take a hint from Walmart and there’ll be no grave mistakes.

Tuesday, December 29th, 2009, 7:04 am   |   Social Media, Walmart  |  RSS feed |  Respond  |  Trackback