Research in Social Media

In case you haven't noticed yet, I'm heavily involved with a sport called Orienteering. As well as keeping me fit and active, I have the opportunity to do some marketing and communications work, both for my local club and for the Canadian High Performance Program (HPP).

As part of my communications assistant duties for the Canadian HPP, we are trying to raise the profile of our athletes within the Canadian orienteering community. Our main communication tool is our online blog. The blog is now fairly well established and has a reasonable following. However, I would like to increase the number of people viewing our blog, and the number of interactions that take place on each entry.

To increase the number of people coming to the blog, I would do a survey of members of the orienteering community (online, distributed via local club member email lists) to see which websites these people frequent most, and look at setting up accounts on these sites to push traffic through to the blog. I would also do a campaign to ensure the community members are aware that the Facebook, Twitter, and Team Canada blog exist, and that they are connected with us.

To increase the number of interactions, I would have athletes post on a variety of topic categories, such as race report, training report, goal setting, athlete interview, and health and wellness. I would also look at factors such as the author of the post, whether photos were used, whether maps samples were used, and so on. Using the number of views and comments per blog post, the number of 'likes' and comments on Facebook, and the number of retweets and replies through Twitter, I can clarify which blog posts were not only popular, but compelled viewers to engage in further interaction. The athletes would then have further clarity no only on what topics to post, but also whether they should use photos, map samples, and so on.

Can you suggest any further metrics I could use to measure engagement?

Back to Basics ~ Wind Mobile

If there's an industry in Canada that suffers from lack of transparency, it's the cell phone industry! Fees for everything, extra costs, high charges, etc... we all love to hate our cell phone providers! Wind Mobile is trying to change that.

Wind's customer engagement strategy stands out to me as innovative, yet so simple; Wind listened to their potential customers! They set up an online forum where they encouraged consumers to vent their feelings about what is wrong with the cell phone industry. Wind then built their cell plans and overall service around the weaknesses of their competitors. This approach built a great foundation of consumers, who feel that they helped build the Wind Mobile brand, and therefore built brand loyalty before they even provided cell services! So simple, yet so effective!

Market Share of Canadian mobile network operators in Q3 of 2011 (CWTA), Sourced from Wikipedia

The main challenges facing Wind are coverage and cell phone compatibility; the popular iPhone cannot be used on Wind's network. Although there are many challenges ahead, I feel that Wind has positioned itself well in the Canadian cell phone market, has connected with its target market through advertising and the use of internet forums, and will continue to build a strong nationwide brand.