Technographics

eGifting takes a new turn at Starbucks

The Starbucks Card eGift, which digitally expands its existing card program, has been integrated not just into social media, but even mobile platforms. Anyone can digitally purchase and send Starbucks Cards to friends via Facebook or e-mail, and upon receiving the eGift, recipients will have the option of printing out the personalized card for redemption, transferring the balance to their existing Starbucks Card, or adding the gift as a new card in the Starbucks Card Mobile app.

The e-gifting experience was previously tailored just to Starbuck’s Facebook community as a Facebook app. It really revealed just another way that managers could leverage on social media to reap additional profits. Besides making it more convenient for customers to purchase gift cards, this application allowed business to happen even after closing hours. The entry ticket to reaping such benefits though, was to have a large community or fan base on social media platforms like Facebook. The target audience could be considered to be limited to customers ranked on the higher rungs of the Technographics ladder. Hence to achieve pay-offs significant enough to justify such marketing techniques, this community has to be large enough. However, now that this experience has been expanded to mobile apps, users do not need to have to be a social media user to send or receive eGifts. In fact, an e-mail address was all that was needed to start gifting and receiving. Starbucks integration of e-gift cards into mobile strategies definitely serves to increase the potential of its gift card business. Now, its target customers have been expanded to include even the ‘inactives’. Given that this new avenue could potentially be a very lucrative addition, I foresee that many companies with existing Card Programs may consider additional avenues like these as well.

Challenges to Social Media Understated

Indeed, Social Media is an attractive platform to bring a brand’s marketing communication to the next level. To name a few, social media increases reach to a global audience and enables the company to generate instantaneous responses. It’s not difficult to name companies that have succeeded in incorporating social media into their game plan. But the challenges we know may well be way understated.

We all probably understand that on the Internet, anything that could possibly be said, be it the good, the bad, or the ugly, will be said. But wouldn’t the bad and the ugly have a more deleterious impact than the good have a positive impact on the company’s reputation? In general, people take good things for granted. But on the contrary, they condemn bad things more intensively. Similarly, discussions that centre around something that people didn’t like about the company may turn out to be much more heated and damaging, sometimes even having the company take action, as seen in the case of GAP reverting back to its old logo after public outcry.

I’ve also read about the 80/20 Rule on Larry Brauner’s blog. It’s interesting how it can be applied to social networking as well. To list a few he mentioned,

80% of all blogging is done by 20% of all bloggers

80% of all blog comments are made by 20% of all blog readers

80% of all online social networking is done by 20% of all online networkers

I shall assume using the 80/20 rule that 80% of social media contents (comments) are made my 20% of customers. But even if this is largely true, marketers could not focus only on this 20% of its customers. Using Technographics, if everyone is somewhere within the ladder, the impact of social media really is vast.

Creators blog content, critics repost them and comment, collectors link these content when they organize them for themselves, joiners discuss them on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, Spectators among with all the aforementioned consume them, viral spreads them to inactives. I guess the impact of social networks resonates much further than what I had imagined.