As the world’s largest furniture retailer, IKEA as an organisation employs almost 160,000 people across 365 stores in 45 countries. Keeping the different department integrated and connected is a task they have struggled with over the years.
Social media is most commonly used to attract the consumer with new products or marketing material, however can it also be used to create a social internal business environment?
The digital development team at IKEA decided to use the concept of social media to try and interact the different departments in the created organisation by creating a ‘listening hub’. The development team worked alongside ‘The Socializers’ an agency focused on people and technology to help pioneer social change for IKEA.
Brand watch Vizia, was the technological platform chosen to power the listening hub. It is highly customisable allowing the team to build a social media command center within the Listening Hub to create a very real space for detecting, sharing and distributing insights across the organization. The listening hub was eventually placed in Inter IKEA Systems headquarters and allows senior staff to observe and engage with the centre.
This interaction across the organisation allowed them to establish problems within the organisation, for example, there where differences in the perception of the brand’s customer service across different regions.Using Brandwatch analytics the conversations on the nub could be compared and sensible conclusions made from this.
This type of essential information can be extremely beneficial to large organisations such as IKEA, realising there is a problem is a massive step forward in terms of improving the company and ensuring long-term success.