Social Web Services - Proven Examples

Marriott – Corporate Voice Community - The “corporate voice” style blog that is hosted by Marriott CEO Bill Marriott called “Marriott on the Move,” has been responsible, says Marriott, for $4M in additional revenues. Not bad for a person writing about their passion—especially considering that in that business most dollars are probably hitting the bottom line.

Hersey’s – User Generated Content - has embraced the Web 2.0 community and has even chosen to power six different online brand communities to engage and share content for varying interests.

Lenovo - was able to achieve cost savings by a 20% reduction in call center activity as customers go to community website for answers

Burger King - Whopper Sacrifice Facebook program - incented users to give up ten of their Facebook friends in return for a free Whopper. The estimated investment for this program was less than $50,000 yet they received 32 million media impressions which roughly estimated equals greater than $400,000 in press/media value.

BlendTec – Will it Blend humorous videos (where they blend everything from an iPhone to a sneaker) in YouTube are so famous it increased its sales 5x

Dell - sold $3,000,000 worth of computers on Twitter

A New Orleans Pizzeria - that specializes in healthy pies, set a one day sales record using social media. In fact 68% of their sales came from people “calling in from Twitter.” On top of that (no pun intended) 85% of their new customers were from Twitter. So without doubt, social media does work for small and medium businesses.

Barack Obama’s rise to the White House - he had 5 million fans on social media and 5.4 million clicked on an “I voted for Obama” Facebook button and he raised $500 million from three million online donors and 92% of his donations were in increments of less than $100.

By the time we discuss this; all the above market share & percentages discussed would already have an upward inclination. Together these statistics suggest that now is the time to invest in social media to help build and secure relationships with customers and capture the market of your interest.