Social Media Adoption @ Fortune 500 Companies- @Wal-Mart Labs, Social Genome

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer and the second largest company in terms of revenue according to the Fortune 500 2012. “Through the innovative fusion of retail, social and mobile, @WalmartLabs is redefining Commerce for the largest retailer worldwide”,according to the introduction on @WalmartLabs. Wal-Mart is developing tools and technologies that will help it analyze the relevant information hidden in the hundreds of millions of social media conversations occurring online every day and use it to understand consumer trends so that they can plan their product assortments, including new products to introduce and supply to secure. Wal-Mart acquired Kosmix, the company behind real-time Twitter filter site TweetBeat, medical search engine RightHealth, and topic-specific engine Kosmix for US$ 300 million and transformed the company into @WalmartLabs with an objective to create technologies and businesses around social and mobile commerce.

According to Anand Rajaraman, co-founder of Kosmix, the company focused on developing a social genome platform that captures the connections between people, places, topics, products and events as expressed through social media — be it a feed, a tweet or a post. WalmartLabs defines the "Social Genome" as "a giant knowledge base that captures entities and relationships of the social world." Wal-Mart has been building their own in-house Social Genome since past few years with both public and private data from social media, tweets, Facebook messages, blog posts, You Tubes, it’s all streaming into Wal-Mart. Streaming in so fast, that WalmartLabs created something they call Muppet, a solution for processing Fast Data, using large clusters of machines. The Labs describes the Social Genome as their "crown jewel." Wal-Mart is essentially looking to combine data on purchase history with data from social networks with actual transaction history.

Wal-Mart is looking to transform itself into a social media retail mega player and it is investing millions of dollars into @WalmartLabs to develop new tools, applications and technologies and also acquire companies who are actively developing mobile and social media applications. Post Kosmix and its transformation into @WalmartLabs, the company acquired mobile point-of-sale app maker Grapple, location-aware mobile ad company OneRiot and a mobile app company called Small Society known for writing apps for clients like the Democratic National Committee and Starbucks. According to recent Wal-Mart press release the @WalmartLabs team continues to evolve Polaris a semantic search engine for browsing products and ease of shopping. In the past year, the group has created Shopycat, a social gift finder; Classrooms by Wal-Mart, a program to make back-to-school shopping easer; Get on the Shelf, a crowdsourcing contest to unearth new products for Wal-Mart; and Social Media Analytics, tools that use social chatter to select items to be carried by Wal-Mart. @WalmartLabs goal is to have Wal-Mart create the next great shopping experience by melding physical stores with online search and social media input.

Social Media adoption @ Fortune 500 companies – Exxon Mobil Perspective Blog, etc.

Exxon Mobil is the largest refiner and marketer of petroleum products in the world and was formed by the merger of Exxon and Mobil in 1999. The company is also the world's largest company by revenue and largest publicly traded international Oil and Gas Company according to Fortune 500 2012. Exxon Mobil adopted various social media channels to be in touch with its customers and various other stakeholders. Since April 2006, Exxon Mobil has been active on YouTube and the channel has more than 1200 subscribers and close to 700,000 views. The official channel of the company has videos highlighting the real time updates of the company, employee videos, advertisement campaigns, and videos from the top management and leadership discussing various issues regarding the company and its products, environment issues, challenges and the company efforts.

Another major effort of Exxon Mobil is its Perspectives blog which is run by Ken Cohen, ExxonMobil's vice president of public and government affairs. The blog talks about company's views on the issues, policies, technologies and trends that are shaping the energy industry and Ken Cohen talks about ideas and actions from industry, governments, researchers and many others that affect the world of energy. The blog was started in November 2011 and it is widely followed and read by many people online. Exxon Mobil also has an official twitter account with close to 26,000 followers and more than 1000 tweets and the company only provides news about the company and various activities of the company in different locations. For further discussions, people are directed to Perspectives blog.

Exxon Mobil does not have an official Facebook page but there are many pages on Facebook that is filled with lot of negative criticism. The company does not seem to be interested in a Facebook page but is very active with a blog, Twitter account and YouTube channel. Exxon Mobil uses Facebook to aggressively market its flagship brand Mobil 1 — the world's leading synthetic motor oil. Mobil 1 Facebook page was launched in March 2008 and has close to 60,000 likes. With a focus on making new friends and market its brand along with a Facebook page, a dedicated channel on YouTube and an online game was launched enabling players to take part in a virtual race against Lewis Hamilton, awareness of the brand is going from strength to strength – the game alone has been played over five million times worldwide.

Exxon Mobil has also launched Apple iPad, iPhone and Android applications for their customers. The ExxonMobil application for iPad provides immediate access to ExxonMobil’s Perspectives Blog, a vital source of energy news and analysis, continually refreshed and relevant, and includes access to ExxonMobil’s library of publications, stock information, news, videos and more. Exxon and Esso Mobile Fuel Finder apps provide real-time maps, driving directions and station information for nearly 10,000 Exxon and Mobil retail locations across the continental United States and Europe. Overall Exxon Mobil is active on those social media platforms which it feels relevant for its engagement strategy with customers and other stakeholders. 

Case Study - Crowd sourcing @ Mattel – Open Innovation & Collaboration with Customers

Mattel, Inc. designs and manufactures world renowned and best-selling toys and for more than 50 years Mattel had been innovating, designing new toys, reinventing the way children play with each generation and had launched new line of toys for its most popular brands like Barbie, Hot Wheels, etc. Creativity, Innovation, cultural heritage of the company and vision is a must for a company like Mattel to survive and develop the iconic toys for the children. Another critical success factor for Mattel is, the company uses innovation to address existing trends in today’s marketplace and transforms toys into sophisticated gadgets, bringing a new dimension to how kids play. Take for instance Barbie Dolls are portrayed with different careers like Doctor, Teacher, Marine, etc.  The quest for innovation have forced Mattel to adopt a new method of product development process in 2001 called Project Platypus conducted three times a year in which a dozen employees from all levels of experience, with various skill sets and backgrounds were assigned the task of ideating and developing a completely new brand in 12 weeks through intensive and unique brainstorming process. Outside speakers like comedians were brought in to entertain the team and they were given freedom of time to explore and create new concepts like Ello, Construction set for Girls. This is how innovation is fueled within Mattel internally along with its constant innovation and development process the employees engage daily. The company design center called Handler Team Center had undergone an internal design refresh in 2009 to create a more creative and collaborative work environment and currently features a ramp at the front door which slopes up from the parking lot, allowing full-sized Hot Wheels cars to drive right into the building.

Mattel went one step further and decided to engage their customers in their innovation and development of new toys and developing the existing toys even further. In January 2010, Mattel launched a month-long voting campaign open to anyone for Barbie's next career on Barbie.com, Barbie's Twitter and Facebook pages, in addition to a bus and billboard campaign in New York and more than 600,000 votes were cast during the voting. The end result was Computer engineer Barbie "won the popular vote" and anchorwoman won the girls' vote.  Since its inception Barbie went on to have more than 130 other professions, frequently reflecting or even predicting societal change. In September 2012, Mattel has announced an Open Innovation initiative with Genius Crowds to develop crowd-sourced product ideas for their most revered brands of Hot Wheels and Barbie bicycles for young children aged 4-6 years old and the company is asking its customers to provide innovative product ideas and actively engage in the innovation process. Through this platform the company is looking to maintain an open two way communication with consumers about their ideas and product needs by constantly exchanging ideas with the company. Along with crowdsourcing the ideas and creativity the company is looking to constantly stay in touch with and meet the needs of kids and their parents. The company continuously focuses on translating entertainment brands to toys and creates long-term, sustainable properties with global product footprints and relying on crowdsourcing for achieving this goal.