Company: Sony Europe
Entry submitted by: Nico Henderijckx (tweety2b) Head of Communities, Europe
Community: Sony Europe Community (www.sony.co.uk/community) and European locale alternatives
Lithy category: Marketing Champion
Sony Corporation is a leading manufacturer of audio, video, game, communications, key device and information technology products for the consumer and professional markets. With its music, pictures, computer entertainment and online businesses, Sony is uniquely positioned to be the leading electronics and entertainment company in the world. Sony recorded consolidated annual sales of approximately $75 billion for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2014.
The Sony Europe Community has been setup to achieve and facilitate 3 pillars:
- Conversation – create a platform that enables end users to have conversation with other end-users so they can share experiences, issues, behaviors, etc with each other. This to be done through any media mean: forum, photo, competition etc…
- Self-service and Learning – Forums and How tos to enable customers to get the maximum out of their products and learn them how to become professionals using them (mainly photography and videography)
- Advocacy – Editorial blog strategy to support our social channels. Mainly create engaging content with high Like-ability and share-ability
This year we have been strongly focusing on developing the 3rd pillar. We have optimized our blog area and put it in the centre of our social strategy. 2-3 blogs per week are being posted in 5 different categories (Arts, design, Entertainment, Product & events, Education) and all of these are being used in FB, TW and G+ to drive traffic to the blog area. The ultimate goal being high engagement (putting the correct person in front of the blog) and then have them share the article back out in the social landscape.
UX flow is Post on social media linking to Blog
We also introduced a new Blog homepage:
Our results
1) Blog traffic
Traffic went up 3x versus previous year. We are now undergoing a new re-design exercise to further optimise the blog area and make it even better from a mobile friendly and responsiveness angle. Making assets used in blogs easier to share
- More focus on content
Legend: in pink the sharing functions, in Blue the next content suggestion. Otherwise on the page no distractions from the content.
- now no assets are directly shareable but only full blogs are Vs future where each asset (video, picture etc…) will be shareable directly out to the social landscape.
2) Blog advocacy
Results after introducing the sharing buttons actively to the blog area:
The additional reach produced by the social sharing buttons usage now exceeds the overall ORGANIC reach Sony has on FB, TW and G+. This allows us to compensate better when FB throttles further the posts displayed on end-users’ walls.
