social media monitoring project - midterm report

When I say “DSW” what do you think of? Assuming you’re familiar with DSW (don’t worry if you’re not, I’m getting to you) maybe you think of their huge warehouses, their logo, or of course, an awesome pair of shoes you bought there. What doesn’t come to mind? Advertisements. Annoying sales representatives. Television commercials. Poor customer service. Need I go on…

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the company, DSW stands for Designer Shoe Warehouse and is now the largest shoe retailer in the country along with Macy’s. If you’ve been to a mall in the past few years you’ve probably passed one, and if you’re not a shoe lover you may have run away in the opposite direction screaming because the rows and rows of endless shoes. #heartmelting

But for a company that is just so huge, where are all the ads? The annoying sales pitches and silly jingles? The bad company-customer relationship that is so common amongst large retailers? It’s just not there. I’ve shopped at DSW ever since I first laid eyes on one of their stores almost a decade ago now, and until I started this project I had never considered any of those realities. You might think, well, if one of their loyal customers hasn’t noticed this, what good is it doing? DSW is involved in the groundswell so effectively, that it seems very natural. Their approach is very well-coordinated with their services and the way the company operates so that everyone, including the all-important customer, is happy.

Obviously there is still room for improvement, but it’s great to see a retail company with such a great customer relationship. As a result I want to highlight the effectiveness of DSW’s approach to social media and I’ve divided my analysis into three main categories from the book Groundswell by Li and Bernoff: listening and talking, energizing, and helping the groundswell support itself.

1.       Listening to and talking with the groundswell

It seems pertinent in talking about social media to start by showing you one of DSW’s main usages of social media – Facebook. As you can see, a lot of people like this group, and if you spend any time on the page you’ll notice that fans post things almost every minute. What’s great about what DSW does though, is that they respond to all of the posts – good, bad, neutral, questions, comments, greetings, everything. They thank their customers and tell them that they appreciate their support and their love of shoes. It creates a wonderful interaction between the store, which can oftentimes seem like a very distant being, and the customers which make the store successful.

And just so that you believe me – here is a chart taken from their pitch to investors on why they should invest in DSW. You can see that both their loyal customers and profits have steadily increased since 2001, and they’re planning to have doubled their profits from 2011 by 2015 (and they don’t seem far off given the current trend).

2.       Energizing the groundswell

Now, it’s in these next two sections were the use of web analytics becomes very helpful.

I tried a bunch of the online analytic tools and Social Mention was definitely my favorite – I love how specific it breaks down the strength, sentiment, passion and reach based on social media, as well as highlighting very specific facts like where the most posts are coming from, how positive they are, and so on.
As you can see, DSW has a pretty decent grasp on social media and is definitely being talked about, so they are doing something right. However, their numbers aren’t entirely stable – here are two snapshots just one day apart from each other:

                                   

They aren’t that different of course, but it is interesting to see that in one day their sentiment dropped significantly (how positively people are discussing their brand) while the strength of their social media presence increased. However, these numbers seem questionable to me, as I’m not really sure how Social Mention is deciding what comments are positive, neutral or negative. Because when I scroll through the mentions of their name (mostly through Twitter) they are overwhelmingly positive, either about loving shoes or the store, or just saying that they are there now. I have found very few negative comments anywhere – the closest I could find was when people post comments doubting the benefits of working at DSW, but these seem to be implying the fact that their employees don’t make any money because they spend all their wages on shoes (as I’m sure I would).

I also liked Ice Rocket because of how specific you could make your search – since so many of their social media presence is through Twitter, this was a great resource for me.

In the social media sphere DSW gets a lot of positive articles and posts written about it (from the “creators” as Li and Bernoff describe them) – the first article on this page was wonderful as it highlighted retail websites that do a great job of getting customers to buy and DSW was one of them.

Looking specifically at Twitter, the tweets are almost all positive again, and someone is tweeting at least every other minute or so.

This graph on the left shows the percent of blog posts that DSW has on any given day (obviously the numbers are small) and vary a decent amount (but if you think about it, these are really small numbers…) with each of the two high points (February 23 and March 3) followed by a clear drop. My best guess for this trend is that DSW has tons of online events where you can win free shoes and gift certificates – often these are done through Facebook where you either have to answer a trivia question or be the first to send in your request. I would assume that many people would be less interested in the company right after one of these semi-craze-inducing events (we do have other things to do with our time of course). But clearly the interest keeps going up repeatedly.

Another great way DSW energizes the groundswell is through their Youtube page. They post videos of all of their events, commercials and fun things like the behind the scenes shooting of their commercials. This way, interested viewers can watch their commercials whenever they want instead of DSW paying tons of money to air them all the time. I have only seen a couple ads for DSW, as they are pretty rare. They seem to target their audiences very carefully so they don’t waste funds unnecessarily.

This one shows the highlights of a store opening event with Steve Madden (I really want him to sign my shoes now...):

In addition there are videos like this one:

that show how to get more discounts from the store. Unfortunately, a lot of the videos with the word “DSW” in them are “double showcase winners” from The Price Is Right… so that created a strange mix of videos. This could be something for DSW to take a closer look at.

3.       Helping the groundswell support itself

DSW also does a great job of helping the groundswell support itself (in my opinion at least). Just by judging from a regular Google search, it’s clear that their sites are very popular for their acronym. Almost the whole first page of entries is direct links to one of their sites (whether for purchasing, information, locations, investments…) so it’s very easy to find anything you might want to know about them. The easy access to information is a great start to the groundswell supporting itself.

The other main way that DSW helps the groundswell support itself is through its presence on Twitter. DSW is very active with all of its free-shoe events, new store openings, and event hosting to post about. But this hype creates more interest amongst other viewers who may be more likely to post on their own the more they see this presence by the actual store, even if it is not directly related to their comment. I used Twazzup, a site that monitors twitter posts, to see how DSW uses Twitter. They constantly update their page so that everyone who follows them gets all the information they could want about sales and upcoming events.

  Judging from their minimal use of advertisements, DSW seems to rely heavily on word of mouth energizing to get shoe lovers to their stores. In part this is generated by their social media presence – a customer who has been thanked and shown appreciation (and who got a great deal) is going to be much more likely to promote the store to others. Just by writing certain short phrases on their Facebook wall you can win little gifts (I got a magnet and early information about a new line coming up) but they also give out gift certificates and other fun things. As a result, I have unknowingly been a huge promoter on their behalf – whenever a friend of mine is looking for shoes I automatically suggest DSW and if they haven’t heard of the store I will rant about it until they agree to go with me.

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When I started this assignment I had no idea that I would be so blown away by this organization. I’m now an even bigger fan than I already was. Instead of using a constant stream of ads or focusing only on profits, DSW has really let its simple philosphy speak for itself - "we love shoes." The employees from bottom-up all love shoes and are enthusiastic about other people who love shoes. Because of this they don't need all the flash and pazzazz other companies might use, because their purpose and approach to their customers is so welcoming and all-inclusive. 

#shoeloverforever