Tom's of Maine

Tom’s of Maine is a company that produces personal care products but does so in a very positive way. They focus not only on quality products but also making sure that they are produced in a way not harmful to the environment, aren’t harmful to the consumer, and that their employees are also taken care of, over all they ensure that they are doing good.

Their website also focuses on their corporate responsibility as well as individuals responsibility. There you can find a lot of information about their company values, products, and organizations that they work with. They even have tips for furthering your environmental sensitivity along with other information on them in their blog.

Beyond their website they provide links to their flicker account as well as their Twitter, Facebook page, and youtube channel. On their youtube channel (or the video tab on their website) you can find a number of videos that emphasize their philosophy as well as show the pleasant atmosphere that the organization fosters.

Overall they are being talked about and are trying to show themselves through social media. Socialmention has the following statistics for Tom’s of Maine today:

4% Strength (likelihood of being discussed in social media), 6:1 Sentiment (ratio of positive to negative mentions), 37% passion (likelihood that those talking about Tom’s will do so again), 28% reach (range of influence based on the number of different users discussing Tom’s)

The strength here is not very high and the reach is just over a quarter; however there is a strongly positive sentiment as well as high passion. When you compare Tom’s to Crest on social mention we wee that they have very similar statistics:

9% Strength, 6:1 Sentiment, 29% Passion, 33% reach.

This shows that Tom’s is on par with other similar product organizations. Because of their strong website and involvement with social media outlets of all kinds they are reaching out to their consumers and so far the response has been positive.

Hello World

While in Mississippi leading a youth group on a service trip two weeks ago I paused at one point to think about the consequences of taking a week off of school and work. Mainly I decided (as I had before the trip) that my COPACE professors are so amazing (they might be reading this so I need to suck up) and my bosses had enough people to distribute the work amongst that there would be no major consequence. The main issue I have faced is getting all the work that I missed done, especially when there is the Internet that is so perfect for procrastination.

So of course I tried to do my work and was consumed with an urge to do everything but my homework, but I always feel better when I procrastinate in a slightly productive manor so I started looking at how different organizations that I am involved in are represented in social media which was almost like doing a social media monitoring assignment I have. Looking at how the group I went to Mississippi with had viral videos and how my internship had a large presence on Facebook made me think, how does this change how we perceive things?

Social media is now so pervasive in our daily lives we don’t step back and think about it any more. We accept the continuous updates and people snap and upload pictures all around us without blinking an eye.

But what if we didn’t immediately know about Whitney Houston’s death or that what you just saw on the Academy Awards was a wardrobe malfunction. In Mississippi parents had an idea of what was going on through the videos and didn’t need to wait a week until their children came home. Also in Mississippi the kids I was with did not have their cell phones and had a hard time not being able to quickly look up an answer to whatever questions arose.

While it may be nice to get the updates that we do it can also cause some harm. I know when I went on trips like the one to Mississippi I loved telling my parents about it, and I could in great detail because they had no idea what I had just experienced. They could never have said that they knew about my work site and had seen it in a video. It all just leaves me wondering if we are loosing interpersonal connections through all the social media. While the tweeting and the posting wont stop, we can remember to ask the people around us what is going on rather than just read about it on their Facebook page

Word of Mouth

In order to stay up to date with the groundswell you need to continue to monitor social media as it evolves. Following the groundswell begins with listening and as the excitement increases it moves to talking and then to energizing. These categories for following the groundswell also are similar to how people interact personally. The “social techonolographics profile” describes users as in-actives, spectators, joiners, collectors, critics, or creators. They are each representative of “a group of consumers more involved in the groundswell than the previous” and you progress from one to the next as you become more involved (43).

As organizations move towards energizing their consumers in social media rather than listening or talking to them, the power to reach more customers increases drastically. Word of mouth has always been an important tool for marketing and now with the help of social media every individual can talk to a lot more people than they used to. Because with social media everyone can be a publisher and everyone can get their opinions out into the open, opinions are much further reaching; credibility is also more difficult to gage when looking at a website rather than having a personal interaction with someone. Even though word of mouth can be increased with the Internet and social media, the process itself remains believable, self-reinforcing, and self-spreading. As Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff write in Groundswell, “Individually, no consumer can achieve the reach of mass media. But word of mouth is a powerful amplifier of brand marketing, achieving results no media campaign can achieve” (130).

Like always in the groundswell it is important to know what people are saying before getting into it. While it may seem great to energize your customers it needs to be positive energy and positive buzz going on about your company. Positive endorsement is free trusted advertising while going viral in a negative way can set you back because of those reasons.

Stay With Us

In class as each student defined the strip of paper they were given the class irrupted with discussion on a few topics. So many students wanted to chime in on the favorite VoIP service. Students chimed in after a definition of Skype to tell the class about the different advantages of the services that they used like Viber or Google Voice. While a number of other topics cause the class to irrupt in discussion I was interested in the different podcasts that were mentioned. I have been subscribed to the podcast of This American Life from NPR and Public Radio International for almost three years now. In the podcaste, as Ira Glass tells you at the beginning of each episode, that they will choose a theme and present to you a number of stories on that time. 
A few weeks ago there was a story based on the factory's in China where they produce Apple products. In the story they looked into the "Foxconn Village" that is sprawling out around the factors, the living quarters that the employees are placed in as well as the conditions they face at work.The story went into detail exposing a lot of details about the factory that were truly horrifying.

There have been a number of news stories about the apple factories and the conditions they face at work including the staggering suicide rate of the companies employees (there are even nets outside the building to catch people from jumping) but nothing had painted such a clear picture of what the situation is like than this podcast.

Podcasts can be about anything from music to news stories or university lectures. People can subscribe to whatever theme of a podcast they are interested in. Because the technology is becoming so widely available almost anyone can make a podcast. They are increasing the information flow as well as changing who holds the power to distribute information. The issue that podcasts now face is the same that nearly all social media is facing: finding people who will subscribe and continue to listen to their stories. For this blog, as Ira Glass says at the end of each podcast "back next week with more stories of this American life".

Social Media for All

Chapter two in Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff is called “Jujitsu and the Technologies of the Groundswell”. In this chapter the authors discuss a lot of the different technology that is available on the web and go into who uses them and how.

While reading this chapter I decided this book would be the perfect birthday present for my father. I was immediately reminded of the number of phone call’s I had with him last year where he enthusiastically told me about the class he was taking at the community college that helped you set up and learn the basics of some social media tools. He was utterly fascinated by the growing trend in social media and was watching his colleges and peers jump on this bandwagon and he knew he needed to catch up.

As my father was in this class it felt like he was telling me every detail he was learning about social media, most of which I had a hard time understanding why he needed to take a class on it; wasn’t it just intuitive?

While chapter two to me was what I heard from my father, a basic outline of technologies that are very prevalent, chapter four, “Strategies for tapping the Groundswell”, describes what I imagine my father has been feeling.

The authors discuss the groundswell approach-avoidance syndrome I imagine that is what my father was feeling. This syndrome is describes people who “know they need to get involved, but they’re nervous about moving forward” (66). The authors describe their POST system (People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology) in order to help organizations create their own groundswell and use the technology to its full potential. They emphasize that you cannot begin with the technology but instead you need a goal that you wish to accomplish and then you can lend the technology to this.

I am finally realizing that I should not have made fun of my father as much for taking his introductory course to social media. As it develops further and the standards are set for the different technologies they are beginning to be overwhelming for all demographics. There is even a new twitter channel that is aimed at helping to teach political twitter users how to increase their civic engagement (and hopefully not make any mistakes like other politicians already have). The technology can be overwhelming and everyone needs some help to understand it.

Giraffe Bread

Social media has the ability to make everyone a celebrity or an expert. Through the different social media, personal family stories that would previously only be posted to the refrigerator, are now posted across the internet. This happened to one family in England when Lily, their three-year-old daughter, wrote a letter to Sainsbury’s, a supermarket chain in the UK, suggesting that they change the name of their Tiger Bread to Giraffe Bread because it resembled a giraffe more than a tiger.

Lily then received a letter back calling her idea brilliant, telling her a little about the Tiger Bread, and giving her a gift card.

Lily's mother posted the letters on her blog. The images of the letters and the idea of changing the name of the bread went viral until the supermarket chain caved into pressure from social media and changed the name to Giraffe Bread. 

Because of social media the power of being a news-maker and a decision-maker has been shifted; now any person can attract attention to their thoughts. Many of the barriers that used to be in place when producing information have been lifted with the number of different outlets for content on the internet. There are new obstacles because of the internet such as the intention for the content posted. Lily's mother may or may not have meant for her daughter's letter to become an internet sensation and change the product name, however, Anthony Weiner was not looking for internet fame when his misused his twitter account posting lewd pictures that led to his resignation. Whether or not the attention is wanted or welcome you can publish what you want on the internet and social media is connecting you to a number of different networks and people and distributing your information to a wider audience. At least for Lily, the name of her bread fits with the animal that it resembles.