Final presentation: Sevenly

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Mid-Term Monitoring Project — Part Two: Starbucks

As I continue to monitor Starbucks in the past two weeks, it seemed to be lazy in social media marketing. Although it had two new products released, there was no campaign coming out. Its official website stayed unchanged for a couple of weeks, while Facebook and Twitter were posting regularly to keep the buzz buzzing. On YouTube, the only video that Starbucks updated was about its new app for iPhone. These were what Starbucks had done during the time I monitored it, which made me a little anxious about its popularity in social media. However, to my surprise, the number of fans of Starbucks still climbed up steadily, and it was still being talked a lot on social media. 

Addictomatic

In this post, I will list all my findings from February 10 through April 1, and examine the data that I have collected. At the end of my post, I will give some personal recommendations to Starbucks; hopefully my points of view could help Starbucks improve engagement with the groundswell in a positive way. 

Two Official News Release

On March 19 and March 20, two news of Starbucks released one after another. The first one was about Oprah's cooperation with Starbucks to make Chai tea. Twitter was the first social media platform that announced this news. 

 People's reaction to this news were positive, giving 818 favorites and 608 retweets to Starbucks. On the other hand, Starbucks responded to customers questions very quickly on Twitter, simply and friendly.

Then on next day, Starbucks twittered again to follow up this news. This time, people were not as active as they were in the first time. 

These were all Starbucks did for this news on Twitter, and it didn't mention this news any more after March 20.

Regarding this news, Starbucks also post on Facebook. Besides using only words to tell its customers about the news, Starbucks added a photo of Oprah to attract attention. 

Impressively, there were over 1,000 comments and almost 13,000 likes on this post. More surprisingly, Starbucks replied to almost every single comment on the post, creating close connections with its customers.

However, just as what it did on Twitter, there were no any follow up post after that day. No videos, no results reports. This news of cooperation with Oprah to make Chai tea didn't even show up on Starbucks' official website, YouTube or any other platform, but disappeared quietly and quickly in Starbucks' social media.

Another news was about Starbucks' new app for iPhone. Compared to the news of Oprah's Chai tea, Starbucks put more energy on this news. Not only did it have video on YouTube, but also it was put on Starbucks' official website. 

Starbucks' official website

PS: this is not the official video because 

I could not find the link through this blogger

The video gained about 6,000 views on YouTube, while on Twitter, there were two simple posts telling customers about the news. For the two posts, they had roughly the same favorites, but with a three times increasement in retweets for the second post than the first post. As for Facebook, Starbucks didn't update the news until March 24, four days later after the news came out. However, once again, there was no other new tweet nor post on Facebook to follow up the news later on. 

Examine the Effect of the News Through Data Analysis 

In order to have accurate data to better analyze Starbucks' social media activities, I collected data every day in the past two weeks. Here are two groups of number from Social Mention. 

data from March 20 to March 25

We can see data varies from daytime to nighttime. However, does it change from data before the two news came out? The following is a group of data that I have showed in my first post of the monitoring project.

data from February 28 to March 12

After comparison, the result disappointed me.

There is barely change after the news came out. Why? Isn't it strange? So I went to Facebook Insight, the figure on the left shows that, there is an increasement after the data reached its lowest point on March 12. Nevertheless, the increasement was not impressive when compared to the data in February. What happened in February? As I mentioned in my first post of the monitoring project, "Dumb Starbucks'" release went viral immediately, which helped Starbucks gain talks on social media. However, Dumb Starbucks was not an official video, nor an activity; it was a resource that came from outside, and Starbucks didn't expect its popularity. So, does the unchanged data mean something to Starbucks? I put Dumb Starbucks, new apps, Oprah and one of the latest products, Vanilla Macchiato, on Socialbakers, Google Trends and Icerocket; let's see what they show to us. 

Socialbakers: twitter following in the past 3 months

Google Trends: interests over time in the past 90 days

Icerocket: daily blogs citation trend in the past 2 months

According to the trends shown above, all of Socialbakers, Google Trends and Icerocket prove that Starbucks' news release didn't push Starbucks to a new height, but only kept it flowed steadily. What's more, this help is not obvious. Being such a big brand in the world, people's attention to a certain product or a piece of news is easily covered by the flood of many other things that relates to the brand. Hence, maybe Starbucks should not rely on news release or new products promotion to catch attention like other brands do, but think about how to better utilize the power of groundswell outside the company. 

Let's see how significant that outside power influence Starbucks' performance on social media. During my monitoring days, several rumors about Starbucks went around online, which were negative to the brand. The red line on top stands for the rumor that Starbucks doesn't support United States' troops; the dark blue line below the red line is Starbucks, the green line is the news of  Oprah's cooperation of making Chai tea with Starbucks; the yellow line means the rumor that Starbucks supports genetically modified organism; and the bottom light blue line is the news of new Starbucks app. As we can see in the figure, the two pieces of news do not help a lot to Starbucks' performance on blogs, but it is obvious that there is coincidence between Starbucks and the two rumors. 

Through the analysis above, it is possible that now people are become more and more interested in creating topics about Starbucks rather than talking about the official topics created by Starbucks. To some degree, this is a reflection of how well Starbucks has done in making connection with the groundswell. Yet for long-term social media marketing strategy, Starbucks may face crisis due to its passiveness to the outside groundswell influence. 

However, compared to other competitors, Starbucks still unbeatable. I compared it with Dunkin Donuts and McDonalds on Wildfire, and the results show that runs much faster than its competitors on social media. 

Starbucks' championship on social media attributes to its patience and timely response to customers comments online. As I mention before, Starbucks replied to almost every single comment on some posts, especially on extreme negative posts. 

Recommendations

1. Do follow-up posts

Starbucks seldom did follow-up posts after they released news or introduced

their new products on social media. However, I think it is smart for Starbucks to do follow up posts because through launching these posts, Starbucks can enhance their interaction with customers, increase customers’ engagement, therefore making the proximity between Starbucks and their customers more closer. On the other hand, Starbucks will get feedbacks, such as the advantages, the disadvantages and the popularity of a product or a piece of news, from customers’ comments in order to accumulate experiences as their references for their future products launch.

2. Create topics at nighttime

Based on my monitoring results, I find that Starbucks a are talked more frequently among consumers during morning than evening, and that’s what I supposed it should be in my Part 1 report. People are more incline to have coffee before they start their work and class in the morning rather before they go to sleep in the evening. Therefore, it’s not surprising that more customers would like to share their feelings about Starbucks a in the daytime. I highly suggest that Starbucks a should be more active in nighttime to exchange ideas with their online consumers, meanwhile creating more topics online so as to enhance their interaction with customers and expand the market. For example, launch night promotion - attract more people to go to Starbucks at night, then share their feelings on social media.

3. Create topics initiatively

My data shows that customers’ attention on Starbucks is not affected by the

official information as much as outside resources. In fact, topics such as Dumb Starbucks, GMO, Starbucks not support the troops, etc., which were made by the groundswell, were the ones affect Starbucks deeply on social media, even some of these topics were rumors. To some extent, it is not adverse for Starbucks to obtain so much public attention; however, from the aspect of obtaining a healthy development for a brand, it would be better for Starbucks to create topics initiatively. For example, the topic of Dumb Starbucks had brought Starbucks to the forefront of the hottest topics in February, yet Starbucks had made no response towards this video. Afterwards, people rapidly lost their passion on this topic, so Starbucks' popularity on social websites such as Facebook or Twitter decreased soon. Thus, I suppose Starbucks should understand how to maintain consumers’ fever by giving feedbacks to some related sources.

4. Treasure good suggestions from customers.

Customers' intelligence and creativity are immense. I know Starbucks has created a very good platform, My Starbucks' idea, to encourage people to share their good ideas about Starbucks online. I suggest that Starbucks can put more effort on this platform, instead of leaving it to customers. There are huge number of good ideas for helping Starbucks go further in the cruel marketing competition. Starbucks should not just leave the treasure there without utilizing the ideas to the real market.

My Starbucks' idea

Resources:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/03/19/starbucks-oprah-winfrey-teavana-oprah-chai-tea/6610587/