Social Media Spin

Tra­di­tion­ally, Utah has not been known as a fron­trun­ner in terms of adopt­ing the newest Inter­net Mar­ket­ing strate­gies. How­ever, one com­pany stands out in the Social Media Mar­ket­ing space, and it is the first com­pany fea­tured in my new weekly blog series Cor­po­rate Social­izer of The Week.

Overstock.com
I just caught an arti­cle in Utah Busi­ness by Overstock.com’s PR Direc­tor Brian Watkins giv­ing advice to Utah busi­nesses about imple­ment­ing social media in their mar­ket­ing mix. He basi­cally gave them the direc­tion to start strate­gi­cally and sim­ple. How­ever, Overstock.com imple­ments a robust and suc­cess­ful social media mar­ket­ing strat­egy. They’ve got a lively online com­mu­nity of cus­tomers who com­mu­ni­cate with Overstock.com com­mu­nity lead­ers and each other.

I don’t know the evo­lu­tion of Overstock.com’s social media strat­egy, but I’ve actu­ally worked as a con­sul­tant to Over­stock on a con­ver­sion project in the past, and I know they (under the lead­er­ship of CEO Patrick Byrne) are an inno­v­a­tive and smart com­pany — despite the ups and downs most cor­po­ra­tions face. Actu­ally, with a CEO as involved in offline Social Activism as Patrick Byrne is, it makes sense his com­pany would be equally involved socially online. Patrick’s drive to be con­nected in the com­mu­nity seems to have spilled over in his busi­ness phi­los­o­phy. As a result, Overstock.com not only sells great prod­ucts at great prices through the web site, but the com­pany has devloped a com­mu­nity of devo­tees, much like Ebay has done with it’s communities.

Overstock.com is a great exam­ple of how social media mar­ket­ing via com­mu­ni­ties works to boost sales and increase cus­tomer loy­alty when com­pa­nies allo­cate a rea­son­able bud­get and focused strat­egy to Social Media. Patrick Byrne has built a cor­po­ra­tion which embraces social media and is the per­fect blue­print for other com­pa­nies seri­ous about uti­liz­ing the strength of social media for their brand. I’d per­son­ally like to invite Overstock.com to enter the Cor­po­rate Social­iz­ers Pro­gram . This is a pro­gram for the Best of the Best in Social Media Mar­ket­ing.  The most cre­ative and inno­v­a­tive entrants will be listed in the Social Corps book as a case study.

Entry into the con­test is open to cor­po­ra­tions suc­cess­fully uti­liz­ing social media in their PR/​Marketing strat­egy. So cor­po­rate social media peo­ple: Cor­po­rate Social­iz­ers com­peti­ton entires due Sept. 15, check it out!