The Invisible Giant

Well well well welcome back to another weeks post after a weeks absence from the blog-O-sphere.  We have hit the midway point of this blogging exercise and after this particular post, it will be time to hit the home straight for the finish line! Before hitting the home straight though lets dive right into blog activity five!

This weeks challenge was to head out and choose an organization from the retail sector and discuss their use of social technology. I have chosen to take a look at one of the newer players to the Australian retail sector landscape which has made its way to our shores from the distant land of the United States of America. That company is

I chose to do Costco as it has only just recently opened up on the north side of Brisbane, however it does have outlets further down south in NSW, VIC and the ACT.  Firstly though a quick bit of Costco history! The company began operations in the USA in 1983 and on its "AboutUS" page it mentions having 592 warehouses worldwide. Costco carries a variety of goods from fresh fruit and veg, through to electrical appliances and jewelry.  These items are normally on sale in bulk quantities and require a yearly membership in order to shop in any of their outlets.  As per previous blog articles, I'll be taking a look at Costco and briefly discuss a couple of the functional areas such as "Marketing and Sales" and "Enterprise wide levers" as mentioned by McKinsey.

With targeting these two functional areas in mind, I went off into the unknown and started looking up the various social media tools that Costco utilized.  The first thing I ran into though, which if I'm honest shocked me a little was the apparent lack of any social media tools being used.  Now admittedly I'm trying to focus primarily on Costco in Australia, however they don't seem to be using much if any social media anywhere.  In fact what I presume to be their main twitter account found here had no posts at all, and after searching for an Australian twitter account to which I did find one and attempt to follow has to firstly approve me before following and apparently only has 11 posts.  So all in all it seems safe to say they aren't big fans of using twitter.

The exception to this the employee twitter page to which the company posts to any of its subscribed employees on a regular basis and even does "shouts outs" to specific employees.  Seems confusing to me that they do something like that which is a real employee moral boost strikes a cord with McKinsey's ninth lever which is to "use social technology to improve intra or inter-organizational collaboration and communication", yet they don't use their official twitter account for anything.  Are they just trying to hide hordes of possible negative feedback? However after the recent lecture on Woolworths I was surprised to find they also don't have an active twitter account. Maybe I'm missing something or maybe its common practice for these kind of similar outlets not to utilize twitter.

The next piece of the puzzle which is missing from there social technology puzzle is the lack of any Australian Facebook page.  The small saving grace here is that there is a brand page which posts regularly, has over 1.1million likes and promotes products.  Even still Costco is a major international brand which according to their website makes billions each year, you would think they could throw into their marking strategy just a little more use of social media targeting tools.

So after all that how can I discuss how they are using McKinsey's function of "Marketing and sales".  I guess its really comes down to an opportunity missed.  By not including social media tools to assist in their company, various levers like number four where by they arn't "Deriving customer insights", they are potentially missing out on valuable customer feedback and area's which they could improve.  They do perform some of leaver five by marking some of their products on Facebook, however this is limited to their overall brand and not locally here in Australia.  Their lack of adoption of other tools limits their ability to promote sales and products and the ability for customers to discuss and interact with the company.

All in all this blog post turned out to be a bit of a surprise packet. I honestly didn't expect a giant of the industry to be falling behind so badly in social technology adoption.  It does however leave a lot of room for improvement!  To round out this weeks post here is the promised tall person's joke!

References

Costco Australia. http://www.costco.com.au/About/AboutCostco.shtml, Accessed 09/09/2014
Costco Twitter Account. https://twitter.com/Costco, Accessed 09/09/2014
Woolworths Twitter Account. https://twitter.com/woolworths, Accessed 09/09/2014
Costco Facebook Account. https://www.facebook.com/Costco, Accessed 09/09/2014
Most Interesting Man [img] http://www.pinterest.com/jacobemorehouse/tall-people-problems/, Accessed 09/09/2014