Once upon a time, store flyers were delivered on a weekly basis, house to house, to aware consumers about what sales were going on in store so that they could take advantage. There also was a time, where families would tune into TV stations at a specific time of the day so they could watch their favourite TV shows and commercial ads of various companies to know what new products are in store. With the world developing into the modern era, now comes a day where a well-known company Calvin Klein is says bye-bye to its print ads, and are focusing solely on digital media marketing. Calvin Klein has just announced that they will be focusing on a digital-first media strategy beginning in February 2019.  

At the end of a long day, or any special event, everyone deserves a special treat, especially when it comes to desert. Since social media has become a norm of society in today’s world, I have never gone by a day where I haven’t seen one of my friends or colleagues share a post of desert that they are having. Jennifer Grossman, owner of Irresistibly Delicious has established a successful at home business where she bakes various custom deserts and cakes and is known throughout the GTA. Many may think how Jennifer managed to grow her business since it is run and managed from home. Well the answer to that is the success of her business comes through her exceptional customer engagement tactics which she uses through social media platforms.

A business’ results are directly affected by its employees.  Simplified, the more positive the experience of an employee within the organization in which they work, the greater the potential for the employee to positively perform their duties and contribute to a business’ key performance indicators.   Higher levels of engagement are directly supported by the level of motivation and commitment of the employee.  There are multiple factors that affect an employee’s motivation and commitment, including company culture, feeling connected, opportunity to share ideas and opinions, trusted environment, employee recognition program, sense of community, and more.   L’Oréal, a global leader within the cosmetics industry, has embraced a number of unique, noteworthy social media tactics to develop employee engagement and in fact is extending their objective of employee engagement to include employee advocacy.  A question L’Oreal has asked though, is when can advocacy and engagement begin to be developed within an organization?  According to Rosie McCarthy, International Learning Manager for L’Oreal, “One of the best opportunities you have to engage with your employees is when they start.“   The onboarding process provides one of the first touchpoints with a new employee; it is a perfect opportunity to connect with, support and build engagement with an employee, during a very positive time that can be full of excitement and anticipation.  L’Oreal has harnessed this opportunity; L’Oreal has developed the world’s first employee onboarding app: ‘Fit’.

Magna International Inc. is known as North America’s largest global automotive supplier. Magna’s headquarters are located in Aurora, Ontario. “The Magna’s unique Fair Enterprise culture, based on fairness and concern for people, recognizes that your engagement and commitment is fundamental to our business success.”

Stampin’ Up! prides itself on making a difference. Its mission statement is “To love what we do and share what we love, as we help others enjoy creativity and worthwhile accomplishments … in this we make a difference.” And one of the ways it makes a difference among its demonstrators (independent sales agents) is with its hashtags.

The modern workplace continues to evolve, in both technological advances and a shifting work culture. Companies across the globe are becoming more concerned with efficiency, and productivity, culminating in the quest for new opportunities for collaboration and resulting in employee engagement via internal social media. Social media can be effectively used internally within an organization to engage employees, the same way it is employed externally to engage customers. Increasingly, organizations are adopting internal social media platforms such as Workplace by Facebook to inspire symbiotic relationships of mutual support and trust. These platforms can help foster the necessary conditions for collaboration and facilitate cross-pollination of ideas and information throughout the organization.

Home Depot is a popular home improvement supplies retail company across the United States and Canada. In Canada alone there are 182 stores and over 27,000 employees. The company stands on eight core values; Taking care of our people. Giving back to our communities. Doing the right thing. Excellent customer service. Creating shareholder value. Building strong relationships. Entrepreneurial spirit. Respect for all people.

When a drop falls into the ocean, it immediately becomes part and parcel of the Whole. The drop gets accepted and connects with all the other drops and together they become one powerful body of water. When a person joins a corporation with 12,000 employees in 120 offices across 40 countries, the part with becoming One, could be a little more challenging.

Is it really necessary in 2018 to teach your staff and colleagues to be more socially engaged in social media? The quick answer is yes it is necessary, but it can also be risky at times. Social media is one of the strongest most powerful tools we have at our fingertips. It is the way that we now do business. 20 years ago it was mostly being used as an internal tool and many didn’t dream that it would become a part of everyday life for business in general.

How do you unite a rapidly growing company that has offices all over the world? How do you integrate the work of employees in disciplines that range from architecture to geomatics to wastewater engineering? How do you inspire people who’ve come to your organization through acquisition to buy into your vision?  These were some of the challenges facing Stantec in 2011. In consultation with employees, Stantec built a new strategic framework around the concept of community and launched it in 2013.  “We have evolved our brand to better reflect who we are and what our clients and employees believe about us,” says Stantec president and chief executive officer, Bob Gomes in a news release.   “Our new positioning—focusing on community, creativity, and client relationships—differentiates us in our many market sectors. At Stantec, we design with community in mind: we help our clients meet the needs of the communities we collectively serve.”  Four years later, that concept of community pervades all areas of the organization, on its website, in its employee publications and its marketing materials. And social media plays an important role in bringing the strategy to life. Here are three examples of how Stantec uses social networking and collaborative tools to build a sense of community across disciplines and time zones. 

Health Sciences North (HSN), a Northern Ontario hospital, is shining a light on the human side of healthcare as it reaching patients, hospital visitors, and the community at large. Located in Sudbury, Ontario, HSN has garnered Northern Ontario’s attention after the launch of their blog, Humans of HSN. Humans of HSN is an online blog modelled after the infamous Humans of New York, where pictures, videos and stories of HSN staff, volunteers and patients are shared. Each week, the blog features new stories of the many faces at HSN which are then shared across HSN’s social media networks. Doctors, nurses, and healthcare professionals alike are sharing details of their lives outside of their hospital life. Whether talking about their personal passions, such as curling, or a once-in-a-lifetime family trip, patients and visitors of the hospital are given the opportunity to see beyond the person treating them.

The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) was founded on May 21, 1904 in Paris by delegates from several European countries including Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. FIFA is currently based in Zurich and is an association governed by Swiss law. It has 211 member associations and its goal is the constant improvement of football world wide. FIFA is a not-for-profit community of football associations. The headquarters of FIFA in Zurich is the home for 270 million players, coaches, referees and other soccer participants and enthusiasts around the world. The founders created the first FIFA statutes to unify ” The Laws of the Game” to make it fair and clear to all players and set the foundation for all future football development. FIFA’s use of Social Media globally is a way for them to connect globally and instantly to all stakeholders including, fans, professional and non-professionals players and soccer clubs. As excitement continues to build for the 2018 Soccer World Cup in Russia, games broadcasted on TV, radio, news reviews, newspapers articles, are currently focusing on scores, teams advancing and major upsets of teams that did not qualify. FIFA is doing a great job through social media at keeping people up to date on the ranks of how countries are progressing in their soccer (also known as football) qualifying endeavors. Information is being updated in a timely basis as one can log into FIFA’s site to obtain all required information on countries successes. FIFA is well positioned with most external Social Media engines such as, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. In 2013 FIFA joined Facebook and by April 2014 they reached over 280M users,  FIFA joined Twitter in mid-2010 and had over 7M followers by June 2014, FIFA created an Instagram account in June 2014 for the 2014 World Cup within its first 18 hours accumulated 28,000 followers. Here are some current Analytics found in FIFA’s Social Media websites. Current Twitter stats: Tweets 65.7K, following 829, followers 11.4M, likes 123, list 15, moments 37 Current Facebook stats: Likes 3,440,829, follow 3,431,095 Current Instagram stats: posts 5,047 followers 4.9m, following 1,122 Current YouTube stats: subscribers 1,826,075 Current LinkedIn stats: followers 59,708 In order to watch the video, FIFA has granted permission via YouTube Picture of FIFA Headquarters in Zurich

Bell Canada is one of Canada’s largest communications companies providing solutions to customers’ various communication needs. A selection of the many services Bell provides consumers and business customers with include: wireless service, TV, high speed Internet, home phone and business communications services. Bell boasts an enormous 38,671 full time employees in Canada with the longest serving employee of 50.3 years.

Sports brings people together. It moves and inspires people in ways that can sometimes be hard to explain. The sacrifice can never be put into words or understood unless you’ve personally gone through it yourself. But yet, regardless of your participation or not, sports can bring a nation together. It can bring us to our knees and can instil a sense of pride. The raw talent, incredible dedication and sheer passion of watching someone give it their all is a great indicator that sport is much more than the result at the end of a race or a game, it tells the story of the incredible team behind-the-scenes that helps a team or individual propel to greatness.

We live in a world where we can buy anything, at any time, from anywhere. When you’re sleeping in Canada, your order could be processed in Australia, Africa or Hawaii. Isn’t it great? Thanks to globalization, “the process by which businesses or other organizations develop international influence or start operating on an international scale,” it has allowed companies to expand into different countries and create jobs for local people. But with growth and opportunity, comes the need for quick, simple and translatable communication. Que social media. Nowadays, the majority of the population has a smartphone and is always connected. Dialogue and networking have also evolved and taken on a new way companies do business and communicate. The need to have instant information at our fingertips is at an all time high and the expectation to respond, share or view something has become a 24-hour, 7 days-a-week responsibility. via GIPHY This is where social media has delivered. It has transformed how we communicate, broken traditional communication channels, and given companies the power to be creative with what they need to say and to whom.

Markets are conversations. Trade routes pave the storylines. Across the millennia in between, the human voice is the music we have always listened for, and still best understand. — The Cluetrain Manifesto, 1999 In 2014, Sephora, a world leader in beauty retail, joined the 6 percent of brands on SnapChat, blasting their followers with special deals on new beauty products. In 2015, the beauty powerhouse teamed up with women’s lifestyle publisher, POPSUGAR, to do what no makeup brand had done before: attach a mobile shopping function to customers viewing fleeting photos in Emoticode, an app similar to Snapchat. On June 6, 2016, Sephora was the big winner for small-screen commerce on mobile devices at the Internet Retailer Excellence Awards, dubbed “Digital Innovation”. In M. Penn’s University of Waterloo SMBP case study, Sephora – A Pretty Digital Face,  the author explained the essence of digital innovation behind Sephora’s award: how smartphones and tablets contributed half of Sephora’s digital traffic, and how Sephora was one of the first to launch Apple’s expedited mobile checkout platform, Apple Pay, as a payment option in Sephora’s apps and in-store. For years, the retailer had tested beacons, small sensors that track consumers’ smartphones and send personalized messages in its stores A year later, on June 6, 2017, Sephora’s Senior VP of Digital Marketing, Mary Beth Laughton, gave the keynote address at the same Internet Retailer Excellence Awards. Laughton offered insights as to how Sephora, by partnering first with Kik Messenger in Spring 2016, and then Facebook Messenger six months later, introduced its chatbot messaging apps to leverage the power of smartphone mobile by delivering an immersive retail experience that goes beyond mobile commerce and empowers shoppers to learn, be inspired and play through the power of chat. Why the move to chatbots? According to Brian Honigman, a content marketing consultant and the CEO of Honigman Media, a consultancy focused on helping marketers and entrepreneurs see results with content marketing and social media, chatbot apps are mobile’s sleeping giant because they also embrace the power of platforms. That is why the original iPhone succeeded. It was not based on product alone but also leveraged the power of the app-store ecosystem. Messaging apps provide the perfect ecosystem for the next generation of applications. It only makes sense that a chatbot, whose ancestor was exclusively used for communication, and which was dubbed by Steve Jobs in the iPhone keynote as an “internet communicator,” would… Read more »

Social Media has played an important role in the growth of modern businesses. Due to the massive shift in global digitization, companies have been arming themselves with teams of people who monitor social channels, the performance of their brand and ROI of advertising dollars across channels such as Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinerest and more. With 700 million active daily users, Instagram alone, combined with the exponential growth of other social channels, continues to be a draw for consumers and businesses alike. Since social media channels provide this convergence of consumers and brands, it makes it quite easy for marketers to start to collect data on the habits of consumers and serve up relevant and engaging content. Sometimes referred to as KPI’s or Key Performance Indicators, this data has mostly been used for reactive purposes. This type of data can help marketers and product developers understand what specifically drives customer engagement. Questions frequently ask include, was it a picture that was shared and was it a piece of literature sharing key information that served an audience. Listening to what consumers want and serving them up when they want it is a great way to connect and build brand awareness and ultimately help grow the business. Monitoring the positives does not go without measuring the negatives or the “risks” to achieving business objectives. Social Media KRI’s can also be very helpful in understanding how to quickly adjust based on operational, financial, strategic, and regulatory risks. This significantly can improve how a business weathers a storm as well.  

Emco is a wholesale and retail plumbing supplier with highly sophisticated B2B clients doing multi-million dollar projects, and also has many ordinary B2C folk who just need a new faucet for their bathroom reno. How does a conglomerate like Emco engage their diverse customer base through social media, and, how effective is Emco’s social media customer engagement? There are two types of B2B Emco customers. Let’s consider the “3 bids and a buy” customer who calls late Friday afternoon for a price comparison. Sure, the customer is just price shopping, but Emco’s local branch will gladly fill out the RFP (Request for Proposal) and email it back promptly. They’ll follow-up conscientiously, but they know only the lowest price wins with this particular client, and this time, it may not be in Emco’s best interests to match the competitor’s lowest price as margins, ROI, and the intrinsic cost of time necessary to get this sale may not fall within their sales formula. Emco’s sales professionals know that selling on lowest price isn’t going to create an ongoing sales relationship. Emco wants all their customer’s business, and they are highly motivated to take a lot of time to cultivate multiple personal contacts to develop deep customer engagement, often requiring complicated engineering solutions to alleviate their customer’s pain points along the way. Emco’s mantra is “Get your customer out of pain”, and much like the intimate relationship between a doctor and his patient, Emco works fiercely to foster strong customer relationships based on person-to-person meetings, expertise, collaboration, and transparency formulated on correct customer problem diagnosis and resolution. Emco’s core belief: develop mutual respect and confidence based on providing solutions, and the customer–corporate relationship will have deep roots, based on mutual trust, and will have long-lasting mutual value. Sometimes, that makes their products more expensive than their competitors’, but for a large B2B customer working on a multi-million dollar project, it’s getting the job done on time, and within budget that matters most. Is it even significant then, if the customer pays a few dollars more for Emco’s product if that special valve to finish this vital stage can arrive on-site tomorrow? Suppose there’s a crew of engineers stuck out in the field, ground to a halt in BC’s interior, because they can’t move on without that specialty item. The clock is ticking and time is money – big money. Often, taking the time… Read more »

When we think of social media, we often envision the curved necks, hunched shoulders and bent elbows of mobile phone users. These active, engaged audiences are liking, following, tweeting, and pinning their way through the day with ease. Social media provides incredible opportunities to create engaged communities. And companies are increasingly considering how to leverage these technologies to strengthen, widen and deepen their reach among a key stakeholder group: their own employees. Would it be possible for employees to feel as engaged using social media at their place of work as they do on their mobile devices during leisure time? If so, how can companies develop a robust, successful employee involvement strategy around social media; the kind of strategy that could be a game-changer when it comes to reaching the highest heights of internal collaboration and external recruitment? Exchange Solutions, a software solutions company  in Massachusetts and Toronto, has discovered some novel ways to promote the use of social media and technology tools to improve talent attraction, and increase collaboration across their organization.

A communication revolution is sweeping over the workplace as it begins to dawn on company stakeholders that the personal benefits of social media communication could be bolstered in the corporate setting. If using social media for internal business communications sounds like a conflict of concepts, then this blog might change your mind… or not. A few mind-boggling stats: According to SEC filing, for the first time, Facebook’s U.S. ad revenue will be larger than the biggest traditional media companies trailing only behind Google. Updated May 8, 2017 Worldwide, there are over 1.94 billion monthly active Facebook users for March 2017 (Facebook MAUs) which is an 18 percent increase year over year. There are 1.15 billion mobile daily active users (Mobile DAU) for December 2016, an increase of 23 percent year-over-year 28 billion people log onto Facebook daily active users (Facebook DAU) for first Quarter of 2017, which represents a 18% increase year over There are 1.74 billion mobile active users (Mobile Facebook MAU) for December 2016 which is an increase of 21% year-over-year On average, the Like and Share Buttons are viewed across almost 10 million websites daily. Age 25 to 34, at 29.7% of users, is the most common age demographic. Five new profiles are created every second.. Every 60 seconds on Facebook: 510,000 comments are posted, 293,000 statuses are updated, and 136,000 photos are uploaded.(Source: The Social 75 billion pieces of content shared daily as of May 2013 which is a 94 percent increase from August 2012.(Source: Facebook) 50% of 18-24 year-olds go on Facebook when they wake up. One in five page views in the United States occurs on Facebook. 42% of marketers report that Facebook is critical or important to their business. 16 Million local business pages have been created as of May 2013 which is a 100 percent increase from 8 million in June 2012.    

Nowadays, social media is part of our daily life. People want to share their everyday experiences with others: they study and work in different cities, they fall in love and relocate to different countries, traveling becomes the normality for leisure and for business, a quiet month in your hometown is an exception. Social media allows us to stay connected with our families and friends; it allows to share our experiences, no matter where we are. Social media also serves as a platform for new opportunities. Businesses advertise new positions and promote their products, employees of the companies re-post and share information with their peers. The best insights for the business of an organization are gained from the inside of that very same organization. Many companies understand this and try to use social media to tap this potential. For global companies with different offices around the world, social media is also an opportunity to connect and engage with current employees. Booking.com is one such international company that uses public Social Media in different ways: it (1) engages with current and future employees by posting the latest news about the company, (2) promotes new positions, (3) engages current employees to share their experiences about the roles, the cities they live and work in, and their experience of relocating to a different country or a new city for a new position, (4) share their passion for traveling.

Budget Marine is the Caribbean’s leading marine chandlery, specializing in equipment sales and service.  Headquartered in St. Maarten, Budget Marine has a firm retail footprint throughout the Leeward, Windward & ABC islands.  Budget Marine supplies all types of boats: sail, power, fishing, and megayachts.  Budget Marine is also keenly committed to promoting the sport of boating through their involvement in events and youth sailing programmes on many islands.

Hicham Abu Baker, A Jordanian guy who has visited more than 15 countries in Europe, Africa, and East Asia, touring local coffee roasters and houses and spending hundreds of hours tasting specialty coffees and experiencing different coffee cultures. Then he decided to establish a state of art specialty coffee roasters  in Jordan, that competes with international brands. His roaster is one of a kind, proudly 100% made with passion in Jordan.

Tripcentral.ca started as a one store operation in Hamilton, Ontario back in 1989. It has maintained that intimate, family dynamic over the years even though they now employ over 120 people with agents in 25 locations across Central and Eastern Canada.

“You get the best effort from others not by lighting a fire beneath them, but by building a fire within them.” — Dr. Bob Nelson, Employee Engagement Expert (http://www.egroupengage.com/blog/social-media-to-increase-employee-engagement) It’s no secret – the Vega team is definitely lit from within.  With a strong set of internal values and a workforce that lives and breathes those values, it is unsurprising that Vega was named one of the Best Workplaces in Canada for six years running and this year nabbed the prestigious title of #1 Best Workplace in Canada 2017.  How does an organization like Vega secure its place at the top?  It starts with a connected community of likeminded people.