A few weeks ago, Peter Kim wrote a post about his trip to Ford. He mentioned a few different times that Ford's initiative of inviting external influencers - several different bloggers from countries including Canada, Germany and China was a bold move and that it was a great example of how Ford delivers on being a social business. I agree.
Opening the doors behind the firewall to external people and being open to feedback is certainly one attribute of a social business along with operational elements like communication, connections and culture as Peter mentions.
I have always had this philosophy that a social business enables a brand to communicate more effectively with customers, partners, employees etc. and as Peter says "scale" programs such as Ford's initiative earlier this month. That being said, a natural conclusion of Ford being a social business is that their external engagement initiatives are second to none.
However, a recent report by Visibli, a real-time analytics platform shows otherwise. Visibli analyzed the top 5 auto brands to see which one of them is most engaging on Twitter, and how they do it. Some of the findings include:
- Honda is more engaging on Twitter than Ford and rest of 'big auto.'
- Honda does it by targeting the right followers - 45% of their followers are interested in auto-related content, higher than any of the other brands
- Contrary to popular 'best practice,' almost 100% of Honda's tweets are auto-related. Zero variety ... but it works!
Other than owning a Honda Civic many, many years ago, I have zero visibility into Honda as a company. Are there social business initiatives happening behind the firewall? Are teams collaborating and engaging internally? I really don't know and I don't know anyone who works there. But here are a few considerations:
- This is one study from one vendor; and one could argue that a retweet is not an accurate measure of engagement OR at least the the only measure of engagement
- Perhaps Ford is still early on in their journey of social business transformation per Chris Carfi from Ants Eye View.
- It could very well be that Honda just has a stellar marketing team (or agency) and utilizes real-time analytics to provide extremely relevant content to the community - the right content, at the right time, in the right channel to the right customer.
- Increased customer engagement is only one output of a social business - other outputs include an increase in employee engagement, increase in employee productivity, efficiency and sales; innovation, collaboration, etc.
Image: StockFresh Speedometer