Social Media

You are all employees at LLD Marketing, Inc., which is a consulting company that evaluates the marketing effectiveness of clients’ social media activities/websites. Over the last several years, more companies have begun to use social media as part of their overall communication and marketing strategies, and we have been asked to investigate how successful these companies have been, what the current trends are, how companies have changed the way they do business, and what the future looks like in the context of social media use.

Objectives of research:

1. Investigate how businesses and organizations are using social media to enhance communications and business interactions within companies (employee communications) and externally with partners, vendors, customers, and the community. Social media includes Web 2.0 technologies such as blogging, messaging tools such as Twitter, IM, texting, podcasts, and other interactive communication technologies such as wikis, Linked-In, Facebook, Snapchat, Pinterest, Redditt music apps, YouTube, etc. Social media also includes mobile applications for smartphones and tablets.

2. Investigate several companies within an industry:

· * How are these companies using social media technologies? Find specific examples & details.

· * How are they being implemented? Is there a strategy?

· * What are their objectives? (You may have to figure this out yourselves.)

· * Are they successful? (based on your opinion, various industry/professional articles, Alexa)

* What results have they seen that can specifically be tied to social media? Increased revenue?

Reduced expense? Increased customer satisfaction &/or appeal?

· * What improvements could they make?