Week 1 - Most Engaged Brands

This was a pretty interesting article. I was surprised at which companies were on top and which companies I thought would be on top, but were not. I was very surprised to see Starbucks at number 1, but after reading the reasoning, it made sense. It was impressive that they took a facebook page that was run by consumers with 200,000 fans and turned it into a facebook page that has over 3.5 million fans. Very impressive from a social media perspective. I liked how Dell engages its employees and allows them to have social website interactions with its customers on a daily basis. This brings a lot of credibility to the brand. What all the companies who scored well did was focus on the customer. They interacted with them as peers, took suggestions, helped them out, learned and taught, etc. This is similar to Amazon's Jef Bezos was discussing about what the Kindle is and what it needs to be to consumers to be successful.

I was surprised that Coke and McDonalds were so low. I guess I don't follow that many brands through social media, but I would have just assumed they would be higher. I had a difficult time with the statistical significance of the financial link to social media. The report only looked at 66 of the top 100 companies (yes it is over 30 and could be called a representative sample), and the financial data was only from the last 12 months of financial performance that was available. We have a major recession going on here. I know social websites and media are a relatively new concept, but I am not sure if you can truly link connectedness with financial performance yet from a statistical perspective. Don't get me wrong. It makes perfect sense that the more connected you are to your customers, the more they want to interact and buy from you, so the more financial success you will have, but I just think you can manipulate the numbers at this point to say what you want (or at least draw a loose conclusion).