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How social media can change your business trajectory

Considering that it was once considered a waste of time that only appealed to a few tech-savvy customers, it is an amazing feat that today social media has come a long way

Social media can be a great tool to utilise in business strategy

There’s no denying that social media is a robust and growing part of nearly every marketing budget in the world today.

Considering that it was once considered a waste of time that only appealed to a few tech-savvy customers, it is an amazing feat that today social media has come a long way to be the voice of many, many brands across diverse audience segments.

Hallmark, an ubiquitous greeting card brand, turned around strongly negative perceptions into glowing recommendations purely by virtue of its active social listening.

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The company had launched a toy puppy called Jingle that would bark, woof and interact with kids as they read the storybook that accompanied the toy puppy.

As you’d imagine, kids loved it. Parents loved it more. However, disaster struck when a batch of about 1,000 Jingle puppies were allegedly defective. The backlash against Hallmark on social media was instantaneous. From videos with crying kids, to outcries via Facebook posts, to terrible ratings on Amazon: angry customers used every platform they could to be heard.

Impressively, Hallmark was listening. The company personally reached out to each among the 1000 customers with a custommade (and funny) apology note.

For good measure, it also sent them a yet-to-be released toy puppy Nugget with a voucher for a future version of Jingle to complete the icing on the cake.

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The result? Users loved it. A full 75 percent of consumers turned dishing out negative perceptions to issuing strongly positive expressions of thanks for this exercise in corporate listening and rapid response.

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