Background

Social media has generally been thought of having its primary application in the B2C market.  B2B companies, however, are beginning to use it more and more, and in very effective ways.  Your task is to identify a B2B company that is demonstrating effective use of social media as part of its marketing communications strategy.  This assignment will be easier if you use a company with a fairly narrow range of products. On which there is outside information available (beyond the company website and social media outlets).  You will have to do some outside research, and may have to make some research-based assumptions (as we have often done in class this semester) about strategies and promotional element usage-just be sure they are reasonable and based in fact.

Assignment

• Identify your company, its products, its customers, and its overall communications objectives and strategy.
• Briefly describe your company's non-social media promotion (advertising, sales promotion, etc.) and evaluate the effectiveness of these promotional mix elements in marketing your company's product, reaching its customers, and its overall communications strategy.
• Describe your company's social media marketing, including which platforms it uses (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) and how it uses each one. Evaluate the effectiveness of your company's social media marketing.
• Describe how, and how well (or not), your company is integrating its non-social media promotion with its social media marketing. How do all these elements work together to achieve the objectives/strategy you identified in Question 1?
• What recommendation(s) would you make to improve your company's communications including its non-social media promotion, social media promotion, and/or integration of the two? Are there other platforms and/or promotional elements/methods it should be using? If so, how? Ditto if you feel there are platforms or elements it should not be using.