Gloria Jeans International is focusing on integrating its social media plans into an overall marketing strategy that drives community engagement, according to its innovation manager of social media, Joe Millward.
Millward made his comments at CeBIT 2011 in Sydney.
He was presenting a case study of the company’s social media journey, which has been ongoing for the past 12 months.
The aim of the study was to show how the company utilised monitoring and analysing the social media landscape to improve communication and find new customers.
“People didn’t realise how much was happening without them knowing,” Millward said of the reason for entering the social media landscape.
He said digital media and social networking meant businesses will know who is saying what about the brand.
The company uses Facebook pages and the location-based ‘places’ application to promote deals and Twitter to ‘push’ Facebook content out to consumers.
“Facebook for us is where we’ve seen most of the ability to communicate. The demographic we target is not really in the Twitter space,” he said.
According to Millward, it is important for the company - which has about 15,000 employees, who are franchise employees representing Gloria Jeans’ brand - to know what’s being said about it by third-party employees.
It also drives engagement with business partners and allows customer monitoring.
Millward said, “You’ve got to be out there and influencing what is being said. If you create these entities, you can’t leave it. It’s ongoing, not cheap and not something you just give to a junior or an intern – it’s got to be managed.”
He stressed the importance of being responsible for content development.
Taking ownership of online identities, setting achievable milestones and targeting advertising spends to attract customer interest was Gloria Jeans’ strategy in moving forward.
The company also employed a Facebook and Twitter management tool that allows geo-targeting content for specific countries, recently deployed an Intranet with a custom social media portal for content management a month ago and is moving towards a single global website with heavy social media connections.
