Sociology 167, Fall 2013
Assignment 3: Social media
marketing analysis
Ole Martin Ellingboe Nilsen
UC Berkeley
I choose to
evaluate the Facebook page of DNB, which is Norway’s biggest bank company. It’s being evaluated in terms of premiums, content &
content flow, participation & user-generated content and finally customer
service portal.
There is hardly any free stuff or gifts to collect by
following the page, so the bank is clearly
not trying to attract customers
on the basis of offering exclusive premiums.
Most content on the page
could be classified as commercial for the bank’s own product and neither of which
is participatory, meaning user-engaging. However, there is one big exception to
this. Last spring, the company launched a major multiplayer online treasure
hunt, where the treasure was hidden somewhere in the physical world. The game immediately
went viral in Norway. The rest of the content is informing about on-going
campaigns and offers for its many different products. Events held by the page are
usually information seminars about different financial topics, which are considered
to be both educational and relevant for today’s economy.
When it comes to content
flow, the page is providing new materials on a weekly basis.
The company always seems to find new ways to
attract interest from the public due to an innovative marketing strategy. Examples
of the types of contents are links to articles written by the company’s CEO. As
well as uploading the bank’s own TV-commercials (which is really cool, as long
as the commercials are funny!). Once again, I’ll emphasize that most of its
content is clearly meant as commercial for the banks own product.
The page does not offer
any user-generated materials, beyond (1) conversation treads and (2) the
ability of Facebook to allow for pages to be tagged in private photos. Thereby
resulting in the bank being tagged a very high number of times by its many Facebook
followers. All these photos are made available for the public to look through,
from DNB’s tagged photos album folder.
The banks customer service
portal is answering questions and concerns from users very fast and at every
hours of the day. Also, the page is replying to its own posts, if it got
additional information about the topic in question. At the moment, many of the
different conversation treads are warning other people about recently on-going
419 scam attempts. These treads are all written using interpersonal
communication style.
The bank is for some
reason liking other volunteer organizations pages on Facebook. One example
would be the Norwegian Red Cross. This might be due to some sponsorship/partnership
related stuff, or it could simply be due to controlling its social appearance,
namely impression management. Getting associated with well-liked organizations
and ideals are a good idea to achieve this.
My overall impression
of the page is very good. The most important reason for this, in my opinion, being
that the bank is offering fast responding- and easy to use customer support
service through its Facebook page. The downside here is the increased risk for its
users to engage in information oversharing. Such as revealing private and sensitive
information, through a medium where everyone on Facebook can read it. However,
this is not the banks fault.
Reference:
No comments:
Post a Comment