Giveaway buzzing with social media

Within the last 5 minutes, I was alerted for two give-away promotions on Twitter and Facebook. Coincidence?

Number 1: Febo, the famous wall of snacks, is giving away free French fries tomorrow between 14:00 and 16:00. This reached me through a RT (retweet) on Twitter. Since April 8, Febo is using 100% bintje potatoes for their 'traditional' fries and they want everyone to know (and taste!) that.

Number 2: Starbucks serves free coffee on Thursday for anyone who brings their own mug, to create awareness for the garbage issue. Quite an extraordinary deal for a company that is known for its disposable (!) cups. I found out about this through this advert on Facebook:

My prediction is that these promotions will be highly successful, although they take minimal marketing costs and effort. Giving away free stuff will probably always be a winning formula (because: hey, we're Dutch, right?) but using the power of social media to create a buzz around it is incredibly smart. As soon as people find out, they are likely to use their networks to tell their friends, they will tell their friends and soon a buzz is born. I just feel sorry for all those poor employees who have to serve the hordes of people.

To be or not to be... social?

Although social media are the talk of the town in business communication, only one out of five companies world wide has a formal policy concerning them. This is what I read today in an article on managersonline.nl. The data were the outcome of an international study conducted by Manpower.

Negative aspects of social media mentioned in the article included a loss of productivity by employees who use social media for personal purposes and potential information leakage. However, they do also have benefits: building up relationships with customers, cooperation between different division and possibilities for innovation, to mention a few. Research conducted by Weber Shandwick showed that 73% of the companies which are listed in the Fortune 100 had a Twitter account, but that only a quarter of them tweets regularly. The original source, express.be explains that 52% of them barely show any activity, according to their numbers of links, references and reactions. Half of the companies involved have less than 500 followers.

Policy or no policy, I think social media should not be ignored. Of course, it can be a deliberate choice not to use Twitter et al, but in my opinion every modern company should at least take the power of social media into consideration. And it's better to be prepared than to be taken by storm. In the case of the article, I think it is clear that the benefits definitely outweigh the downsides, especially when a good policy is drawn up and lived up to by employees. This also includes the regularity of updating and monitoring, because a neglected profile is probably even worse than not having one at all. Social media offer companies such a large number of strategic possibilities (which I will write about on this blog), it would be a shame to let that go to waste.