The article is based around social change and how this can be implemented within the IKEA organisation using the ‘Socializers Agency’. The agency has been selected by the organisation to help pioneer social change, with goal of forging a deeper relationship with customers by providing similar but tailored experiences across its markets. The article talks of IKEA’s desire for further collaboration across internal areas of the business, while establishing social media as a valuable channel across regions. IKEA want to devise a strategy that will enable the company to discover and share information at fast pace and have set their Digital department in combination with the ‘Socializers’ the task of achieving this aim. Devising this strategy presented some challenges to the business including:
- Inconsistent social media investment and usage across departments
- Potential disruptive change
- Siloed data due to barriers in sharing and governance
In order to become more socially intelligent, the team first decided to create a listening hub for the organisation, powered by brandwatch vizia. This highly customizable platform allowed the team to build a social media command centre in order to detect, share and distribute insights. The hub created a central space where senior staff and the relevant teams could observe and engage around global conversations about the brand therefore providing stakeholders with an appropriate planning tool.
The use of the listening hub led to the discovery of a number of insights:
- Perception of the brands customer service across regions
- The ability to compare online conversations across time periods and social media platforms
- A search tool that allowed for key word searches to identify the context in which they were used
- Conversation segmentation to analyse customer service complaints
An example of a specific key finding: “Americans were more likely than brits to complain about IKEA using Facebook”
Identifying these specific findings through insights, then gave IKEA the ability to analyze and react, taking the appropriate actions where necessary. The project introduced the benefits of social data to IKEA and encouraged positive change across the enterprise, extending its business intelligence. The business is now well equipped for the future developments within this sector of Digital Marketing.