In this day and age social media can make or break your company. If you don’t use it correctly then you can end up like Wal-Mart and their Facebook social media backfire which filled the groundswell with negativity. But if you can use it right then your company could hear a lot of positive feedback, like Best-Buy and their company wide blog that was used to hear what the employees had to say which sparked loyalty in them.
A company must learn that negative feedback isn’t always bad either. You can take a negative comment and use that to make a happy customer, like McDonald's did when someone complained about not receiving the right toy in their child’s happy meal. McDonald's acted on the negative feedback by mailing the child the toy he wanted, which then created a valuable customer who would from then on spread the word of how amazing McDonald's is.
Patagonia is an outdoor clothing and outdoor accessories company that has a strong message, extremely environmentally friendly, and social presence. They are the exact image of the modern day hippie company and their product reflects that.
Patagonia is an outdoor clothing and outdoor accessories company that has a strong message, extremely environmentally friendly, and social presence. They are the exact image of the modern day hippie company and their product reflects that.
Patagonia’s Social Media Outlets:
Patagonia, like many other companies out there, has all the basic social media outlets; Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, a blog, and of course they have their very own homepage site online. Starting with what is required for any business: Patagonia’s homepage.
As you can see with just the main page you immediately have an idea in mind of what kind of product they sell and just who they're trying to sell it to. Looking further at the screen you can see a blurb about the picture shown, “A dip in the cool Mediterranean awaits Nicky Dyal after exposure on Sole Incantatore. Aguglia di Goloritzè, Sardinia, Italy. Photographer: Jim Thornburg.” This blurb shows the customer that the picture was taken by some loyal fan who went to great heights and risks to take a photo to show how much he loves Patagonia and what it stands for (rock climbing) to him.
Further exploring the site; starting with the “Shop Clothing & Gear” tab everything is clearly labeled and easy to navigate. Each product has a product information guide, highlighting all the environmentally friendly aspects of the product. There is also review section, which interestingly enough, has a question section as well. It’s like a “Top questions asked about this product” section. Of the one product I looked at, a rather cute dress, there were 106 reviews, with an average of 4 stars, but there was a range of people who gave it a 1 star, with a explanation why, up to 5 stars. The question section was most interesting though, especially because it was obvious each product had customized questions.
Continuing the tour, we stop at the“Environmentalism” tab which leads to…
On the bottom of the page are many links to some of their environmental actions they’re taking; one being their ever famous Common Threads Initiative. Under that tab you can find a YouTube video that was posted Sept. 27, 2011 that explains what it’s all about.
The next tab is “Videos & Music” which promotes their videos “from our friends and ambassadors traveling the wilder world.” These videos can all be found under their YouTube page as well. This tab also promotes “Patagonia Music,” which also has an App. that can be bought for your mobile phone. Patagonia Music states “Buy a song, benefit the environment. Patagonia has partnered with a diverse group of musicians to raise money for non-profit environmental groups…”
The very last tab on the Patagonia home page is “Blog,” which simply enough is a direct link to their “The Cleanest Line” blog.
Blog: The Cleanest Line
As the name states, they’re trying to advertise themselves as a clean, and environmentally friendly company. Exploring the blog, employees and ambassadors of Patagonia post on the blog about twice a week on environmental information or just some really cool and adventurous activity they were doing.This is a great way to share information with the groundswell and to simply show people the different activities they could be doing… with Patagonia product of course.
Facebook:
As you can see there are over 160,000 “likes” on their Facebook page and close to 3,500 people talking about them. These are good signs. They’re obviously getting their message out there into the groundswell. Looking at the comments left by some fans below is a good testament as to what people think and how they feel about Patagonia and their product/message.
Facebook is a great place for fans and loyal customers to comment/talk about their experiences and show their love to Patagonia.
Twitter:
Patagonia’s Twitter account, although active with daily tweets, has much less talking going on in the groundswell. It seems to be more of a place for Patagonia to easily share stuff and let the people do what they want with that information, which doesn’t seem to be much. Which makes sense because there's only about 53,000 followers here, which is still a lot, but is only about a third of what's on Facebook. There is some activity here though...
From icerocket.com
YouTube:
As you can see, there is a pretty small number of people watching these videos. The one that we can see above only has 925 views and was posted a week ago. That's not that great, though I'm sure the dedicated fans who do watch these get a lot out of what they see and appreciate the time Patagonia puts in to add a new video about once a week or so.
Graphs, Information, Statistics:
compete.com
Looking at the graph here on compete.com it's easy to see that the major season/time of the year for Patagonia is during the winter, specifically December. I am sure that this is a because Christmas is in December and everyone is buying gifts for their loved ones here. The winter season as a whole has a large amount of visitors in general though, meaning that I am sure people buy more warm, Patagonia, clothes during this period, then during warmer months, where people seem to not feel so up to buying Patagonia clothes.
Compare Patagonia to Eastern Mountain Sports (EMS)... well there really isn't much to compare.
As you can see here, although there are spikes, the spikes are not nearly as high as Patagonia, their Unique Visitors isn't as high, and their Rank is much lower than Patagonia. It would seem that people are feeling like Patagonia is better.
In conclusion, the only social media advice I could give would be to maybe try to make more and advertise more of their YouTube videos, especially "real" "average" citizens making videos, which I had a hard time finding. If Patagonia were to show case more "real" videos on YouTube then I think a lot more people would be interested in their product. Maybe Patagonia could shoot a video of doing something extreme with one of their jackets. Like put them through some kind of extreme lab test and see if they pass. Those kinds of videos are always fun to watch, for die hard fans and people who don't own a single Patagonian thing.
I also think that Patagonia is very oriented towards their very loyal fan base, which is great and good for them, but it means that you're not increasing fans as much as you could. When you focus only on the fans you already have; as a company you're relying on word of mouth through these loyal fans. This is all very fine, but if you want/need to grow, then Patagonia should try and broaden their horizons. Maybe, as I said before, Patagonia could make some kind of commercial/video displaying their product in extreme situations. They could even try and do something comical with their product; seeing how they're kind of a "hippie" product they could play on that and make some kind of stereotypical joke video/commercial. Comical stuff always draws people in, especially the younger generations.
Otherwise I believe that Patagonia is doing a fine job at using the groundswell.
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