Social Media Report Advance Business Communication

1. Your company is:                                                 Starbucks[pic 1]
2. What is the company’s URL: http://www.starbucks.com/
3. What does the company primarily do? Sell coffee, deserts, coffee accessories, and some food.
4. Visit the corporate Facebook and Twitter page (or LinkedIn or Instagram, etc.) of your company.
5. Read – closely – through the last 6 weeks of activity on these pages.

After doing a close job of #3, answer the following questions:

1. What are 3 features of how the company uses FB and Twitter (or others) to promote its services/products?

1. Engage their customer base by creating creative social opportunity. Ex. “Worlds larges Starbucks Date”        
2. Starbucks does an excellent job of reposting pictures (crowdsourcing) via #Regram on their Instagram page, giving credit to the creativity of its active picture aficionado’s.        
3. Lately Starbucks has been using Facebook to promote their new product Starbucks Reserve small batch coffee that boasts to be the rarest of coffees roasted in small batches, which make it exclusive.
4. I noticed that Starbucks does an excellent job of varying its posts to highlight not just their coffee, but their juices, pastries, food, tea, Giftcards, etc. They appear to highlight each product to engage all interests with such grace. I am very impressed!

1. What are 2 patterns of customer interaction can you identify for each social media platform monitored?  Do the social media managers reach out to individual customers on FB and T (or others)?  How?

I was unable to find direct customer interaction on twitter and even sent a tweet probing to find out first hand how Starbucks responds to customers with no luck. I did however find that Starbucks is now in the midst of a racial campaign where baristas write Race Together on the coffee cups. Starbucks CEO Howard Shultz said: The cup writing part "was always just the catalyst for a much broader and longer term conversation" about racial inequality and diversity. So although not directly engaging individuals, Starbucks is using its massive footprint to take social responsibility in our country and to get people thinking about how they act and react to the serious current racial problems. An example Shultz referenced was the Ferguson Michael Brown incident. There were tons of negative responses to the #RaceTogether campaign that Starbucks stayed completely away from so I was unable to find any response to any of the negative posts on their Twitter feed.

Starbucks is engaging customer complaints on Facebook. There are tons of positive responses to Starbucks and as I mentioned above they do a great job of reposting and giving credit for the photos that highlight Starbucks in a positive manner. I did find numerous responses to customer complaints on Starbucks Facebook feed and it looks like they respond within the same day of the post. It appears that Starbucks is focusing its efforts to its Facebook page almost exclusively.

1. Do the pages contain any promotions?  Describe one and explain why it is/isn’t effective.

Yes, there are several promotions. The most current one is: My Starbucks Rewards members receive 30% off purchases, 2-5 pm today. This promotion had serious problems and there were countless comments below the promotion in their feed outlining various problems with Starbucks all over the country not honoring the promotion. I would say the promotion is effective in that it is engaging its customers and they are heading to their local Starbucks to purchase coffee, but Starbucks is really dropping the ball on effectively executing on this promotion. I feel sorry for their social media customer relations department, they have their work cut out for them with problems like this.