Social Media Case Studies

Quired offers case studies highlighting successful uses of social media by small and large businesses alike. We will feature the top case studies in the content area of this page as well as links to pages featuring additional case studies at the bottom of this page. This list of Case Studies was started through a LinkedIn discussion in the SocialMediaToday group. Much thanks goes out to all who are collaborating to make this list as relevant as possible.

Gary Vanyerchuk

Vaynerchuk, 33, turned his family's small New Jersey liquor store into a wine empire that grosses over $60 million a year; more than 100,000 viewers watch his daily video blog; he's a sought-after speaker; and he's signed on to write nine more business books for HarperCollins (NWS).
Featured Gary Vanyerchuk Study

IKEA on Facebook

Forsman & Bodenfors are known for some great creative work, and they recently devised a Facebook campaign for a new Ikea store in Malmo, Sweden. When small budgets and big briefs clash, the out come only ever heads in a single direction these days...to Facebook!
Featured IKEA Case Study

BlendTec

Blendtec makes commercial-strength blenders for consumers and started a YouTube video series called, "Will it blend?" where it shows you the strength of its blenders by blending things that you would think would break most blenders. Blendtec reportedly increased its sales five-fold in that same week.
Featured Blendtec Case Study

Help A Reporter Out

Peter built his business, HelpAReporterOut.com first by creating a fan page on Facebook. The list grew virally because a lot of smart business people realized that this was a great resource to get some media coverage and free PR. At the time of writing this article Peter has more than 40,000 "followers" on Twitter and more than 60,000 people on his mailing list.
Featured HARO Case Study

Turbo Tax

Tax software maker TurboTax has a unique problem. Their customers find them incredibly useful. But for a very short period every year. The company has gotten used to the seasonal nature of its business, but this year, they took that approach to Twitter.
Featured Turbo Tax Case Study

Naked Pizza

Naked Pizza has embraced the Social Media Tool Twitter and has been using it to build and drive business. One day in April (April 23rd) Naked Pizza tested out the value of using Twitter and posted a special on Twitter. This post or Tweet on Twitter brought in 15% of the business for that day. This had a positive impact on the business and showed the power of a Social Media/Social Networking tool.
Featured Naked Pizza Case Study

Dove

Social media played an integral piece in plans leading up to, during and following the Super Bowl for Dove products. We are also leveraging our existing Facebook and Twitter platforms throughout the campaign to communicate with our consumers, extend our messaging and drive awareness of our product benefits.
Featured Dove Case Study

Dairy Queen

Dairy Queen launched the Official Dairy Queen Blog in February 2009. They realized it was a great way to humanize their brand and connect with their customers. The blog is written by Dairy Queen employees. The goal of their blog is to ignite conversation and have fun with a brand that has been around for more than 70 years. DQ has clearly demonstrated a successful formula for their corporate blog.
Featured Dairy Queen Case Study

Bacon Salt

Bacon Salt has a great blog, an active Twitter account, and a bunch of videos on YouTube. They searched social networks for anyone who publicly claimed they loved bacon (37,000 on MySpace alone). These are the people they originally reached out to and shared their new product with. They’re active in all the key places and they made their story really easy to share.
Featured Bacon Salt Case Study

Kogi BBQ

Kogi Bbq is Korean bbq-to-go, sold in a food truck that travels around Los Angeles County. L.A. times has called Kogi Bbq “a taco truck brought to you by Twitter.” Kogi uses Twitter as a primary mode of conversation with their customers. They inform their followers via Twitter about the next location of the Kogi Bbq truck, and the time of the truck’s appearance.
Featured Kogi BBQ Case Study

Indium

Indium’s Marketing Communications Director, Rick Short, has crafted a corporate blog strategy that hyper-targets the people who do need his company’s products. Short commingled the acquired insights with the corporate culture and determined that social media would be a good way to reach potential customers.
Featured Indium Case Study

Piper Aircraft

Videos about the PiperSport, posted on the PiperSport YouTube channel, have been viewed 22,808 times. PiperSport has 4,886 fans on Facebook, Major aviation journalists and bloggers are following PiperSport on Twitter and at least one $140,000 airplane has already been sold online through an Internet link.
Featured Piper Case Study

SmartPen

Smartpen is an Australian business that sells the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen. The Pulse Smartpen had significant hidden potential – the question for Smartpen was whether they could tap into that potential.
Featured SmartPen Case Study

Walmart

Video, slides and audio of Jessica Fredrickson, Suraya Bliss and John Andrews’ BlogWell San Jose case study presentation, “Connect and Share with 200 Million of Your Closest Friends,” where they share Walmart’s social media goals and how they connect with their large customer base:
Featured Walmart Case Study

Dustin Meyers

Dustin has been using Facebook as a marketing tool for his business for about 6 months, and his results have been remarkable. “I would say that 75% of our students are introduced to us via Facebook and the majority of our sales are brought about by our exposure on Facebook.
Featured Dustin Meyers Case Study

Mayo Clinic

Facebook Cuts Mayo Medical School Orientation Costs. Impromptu interview with Barbara Porter, Assistant Dean for Academic and Student Affairs, Mayo Medical School, after she mentioned some of the concrete savings (time and money) in the orientation program for incoming students that have been achieved because of Facebook:
Featured Mayo Clinic Case Study

XBox

Radian6, a social media monitoring platform for marketing, communications, and customer support professionals. is sponsoring Twebinars (hour long audio interviews) to share how companies are using Social Media on a regular basis. The most recent Twebinar covered how Xbox is using Twitter to augment their customer service.
Featured XBox Case Study

President Barack Obama

Barack Obama’s presidential campaign was more than a major social media milestone because it ushered in a new relationship model among leaders and their supporters. Due to social media, an unprecedented number of individuals had a new kind of active, direct role in Obama’s campaign.
Featured Barack Obama Case Study

Pepsi

This year, Pepsi is pulling the plug on their TV Super bowl ad spot they have held for 23 years, and trading it for $20 million social media campaign called The Pepsi Refresh Project. This will drive their product across a more international market as well. It will also hit the younger generation. More importantly, other brands will follow.
Featured Pepsi Case Study

Booz Allen

For almost a century, Booz Allen Hamilton’s image as a venerable corporation has endured. But when the firm combined its respected domain expertise with its agility in building dynamic solutions, it created an Enterprise 2.0 portal that’s so powerful… it’s actually cool.
Featured Booz Allen Study

U.S. Military

Each branch of service is augmenting their online presence with YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. They are benefiting from the power that social media offers in spreading their message virally. The military is one organization that “Gets It” and definitely participates in the conversation.
Featured U.S. Military Case Study

Dell Computers

Dell now has more than 80 Dell-branded Twitter accounts (including @dellhomeoffers for new system deals) offering everything from videos of new technologies to promotions for Asia-Pacific customers. It also encourages employees to twitter, and has well over 100 employee accounts.
Featured Dell Computer Case Study

Coasta Mesa

Travel Costa Mesa enlists the help of social media tools like Twitter and Facebook to market Costa Mesa. The website features a variety of accoutrements for travelers – including visitor’s guides, dining guides and local recreation. Social Media has also helped them increase familiarity amongst locals and brought traffic back to their website.
Featured Coasta Mesa Case Study

Best Buy

Amongst the famous examples of Dell, Ford, Zappos, Skype and the like, Best Buy may not be the first company that comes to mind when thinking about which companies using are using social media well. However, in reality they’re as advanced as any of the examples I give above.
Featured Best Buy Case Study

IBM

We don’t have a corporate blog or a corporate Twitter ID because we want the ‘IBMers’ in aggregate to be the corporate blog and the corporate Twitter ID,” says Adam Christensen, social media communications at IBM Corporation. “We represent our brand online the way it always has been, which is employees first.
Featured IBM Case Study

Nokia

North American Social Media Communications Representative Molly Schonthal explains that, for the world’s largest manufacturer of cell phones, ‘connecting people’ is much more than a tag line — it’s a focus of business. Social media communication is a top priority for Nokia, both internally and externally.
Featured IBM Case Study

TransUnion

Can’t put an ROI on social networking? TransUnion CTO John Parkinson has his: an estimated $2.5 million in savings in less than five months while spending about $50,000 on a social networking platform. Instead of buying more gear to improve IT performance, employees are brainstorming ideas across larger groups on the company’s Socialtext platform.
Featured TransUnion Case Study

TBWA

Until adopting Movable Type, TBWA communicated internally in a way similar to that of many large organizations today: with a lot of duplicative publishing. Employees spent hours compiling work data and thought leadership articles, which were then copied and distributed to peers around the world. “It felt very one-way,” says Coots.
Featured TBWA Case Study

Accenture

For our diverse global workforce, we created innovative communication and collaboration technologies that have spawned a vast internal groundswell -- one of employees who now create content, communicate, collaborate and connect (with each other and our global client base). They help each other find answers faster and get those answers to our clients more quickly.
Featured Accenture Case Study

Boston Celtics

Celtics.com features GameTime Live, an application that features real time scores, tweets, and blogging with supporters throughout the world. The team beta-tested GameTime Live during the 2009 postseason, and more than 50,000 unique visitors checked it out during the triple-overtime loss to the Chicago Bulls in Game 6 of the first round.
Featured Boston Celtics Case Study

Wordstream

Recently at WordStream, we launched our first link bait campaign. By our standards, the campaign was successful, and we thought we'd share the details. In a nutshell, we attribute the campaign's success to setting clear objectives, creating killer content and aggressive marketing. What resulted from our hard work, planning and execution was a link from one of the most trusted sources on the planet: The New York Times.
Featured Wordstream Case Study

Afexa

Afexa Life Sciences, a medium-sized Canadian company with a variety of over-the-counter (OTC) products, has launched a fun social media campaign in November 2009 to leverage their sponsorship of the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, BC (“Cold-FX: Official cold and flu remedy of the 2010 Winter Games”). Cold-FX is the brand that is sponsoring the Olympics and is the backbone of this fun social media campaign.
Featured Afexa Case Study

Moon Fruit

Wendy Tan-White's web hosting company, Moonfruit, is one of those that got it right. For its 10th birthday, it gave away a Macbook Pro laptop every day for ten days. To win one, you had to tweet using the hashtag #moonfruit, although it quickly became a competition for how creative you could be. The idea was a good one and #moonfruit topped Twitter's trending lists for three days. At its peak it accounted for 2.5% of alltweets.
Featured Moon Fruit Case Study

LiveStrong

Today, social networking at LIVESTRONG creates a viral effect on the order of the yellow bracelet, but in the virtual world. The year 2009 was monumental for LIVESTRONG. The organization moved into a new headquarters building and appointed a full-time person to social media. The payoff: they raised millions, made political statements and helped countless people manage their cancer better.
Featured LiveStrong Case Study

JK Wedding Video

Last week the world watched in wonder as Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz's wedding party transformed a familiar and predictable tradition into something spontaneous and just flat-out fun. The video, set to R&B star Chris Brown's hypnotic dance jam "Forever," became an overnight sensation, accumulating more than 10 million views on YouTube in less than one week.
Featured JK Wedding Video Case Study

Baby Sitter Directory

Baby Sitter Directory is Australia’s leading babysitter and nanny directory. While living in Queensland in 2006/07 for a year with two young children, far away from family and friends and my usual babysitters, I found no online services that allowed me to easily and cost effectively locate and contact babysitters directly. Hence Baby Sitter Directory was formed and launched in June 2008.
Featured Baby Sitter Directory Case Study

Cisco

Building a Community with Social Media and Web 2.0 – A Cisco Product Launch Case Study. If you think that social media tools only can be used effectively for consumer products, think again. This is a great case study by LaSandra Brill, manager of Web and social media marketing at Cisco. It shows how Cisco used social media for the launch of the ASR 1000 launch router series.
Featured Baby Cisco Case Study

SeaWorld

There has been a some renewed interest in SeaWorld San Antonio's Journey to Atlantis social media campaign that was launched last spring after Shel Israel came out to visit the park for FastCompany TV. Fran Stephenson, the Director of Communications at SeaWorld San Antonio was also featured in the video.
Featured SeaWorld Case Study

NameCheap

Namecheap, a 70-person company headquartered in LA, is a domain name registrar that's been in business for 9 years, relying mostly on word-of-mouth advertising and have just two people who do marketing; almost everyone else provides customer service. Michelle Greer, their sole marketing specialist, has been on Twitter personally since 2007, and thought the service might be a good fit for Namecheap.
Featured NameCheap Case Study

Corey Smith

Corey is a great example of how you can make money from letting people freely share your music. He is letting the fans download his songs for free from his website who he likes to call patrons because he wants to develop a relationship with them. Following this thought, the manager sees it as his main assignment to remove any barriers there might be to accessing the music.
Featured Corey Smith Case Study

Bacardi

Bacardi Ireland distributor, Edward Dillon & Co, traditionally used normal micro sites such as www.blive.ie to promote their sponsorship of music events on the Internet throughout the year including the hugely popular Oxegen and Electric Picnic festivals. In 2008 they looked at the possibility of using social networking to get better targeting and some viral penetration to a wider audience.
Featured Bacardi Case Study

Additional Resources for Social Media Case Studies

Social Text Case Studies

Collaboration Project Case Studies

Mashable Case Studies

Huguesrey Case Studies

The Parallaxview Case Studies

WOMMA Case Study Directory

Now Is Gone Case Studies

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