Businesses grapple with social networking

IDG News Service - It's clear that companies are increasingly using social networking to connect with customers--Facebook said brands on its site get 100 million "likes" per day--but it's also clear that they are having varying degrees of success.

In fact, their definitions of success vary, according to speakers on a panel during the Seattle Interactive Conference on Wednesday.

"We haven't seen a lot of 'R' in the ROI," said David Camp, head of marketing for AmazonWireless, referring to the return on investment his company is getting from social media. AmazonWireless is Amazon's site for selling cellphones and service.

But Kim Johnston, vice president of marketing at Parallels, said she sees good return, although not necessarily of the kind Camp was talking about. "'R' could be insight, not just money," she said. Parallels learns a lot from customers it interacts with using Facebook and Twitter, she said.

Companies are using social networking to tap into a feedback loop from customers, but doing so can be a tricky proposition, the experts said.

T-Mobile's product managers listen closely to what people are saying on social networking sites to inform product development, said Alex Samano, marketing director and general manager for Bobsled at T-Mobile. But he warned that not everyone who writes comments on social networking sites is representative of many customers. "You have to be cautious of what you're hearing," he said.

Still, social networking interactions with customers are useful, he said. Ten years ago companies would pay $150,000 to get a focus group of customers together. "You don't have to do that anymore," Samano said.

The companies have had varying degrees of success in turning their social networking followers into sales. AmazonWireless, for example, doesn't find social networking tools to be particularly efficient in driving traffic that converts to sales on its site, Camp said.

T-Mobile, however, has had great success for some products converting social networking connections into sales. It launched Bobsled, a voice-over-IP product, initially for Facebook users and executed the launch by briefing only four high-profile technology media outlets. Those articles spurred 200 others, and T-Mobile began signing up Facebook users at a rate of 3,000 people per hour within the first hours, Samano said. He didn't discuss the impact of having to temporarily shut down the service less than a week later due to a potential conflict with Facebook.

Parallels, which offers virtualization software that lets Mac users run Windows applications, used social networking to turn a mistake into an opportunity that resulted in some of its best sales results for repeat customers. Last year it had planned a coordinated launch of a new version across retail stores, online merchants, resellers and catalog sales, Johnston said. But the product mysteriously turned up early on the shelf of a store. After a fan posted a photo online, customers began chattering about it on Twitter and Facebook.