Walmart Serves its staff as its customers

*This is an old post I wrote in 2014 on a different online social platform, and I just would like to repost it and share it again on Linkedin.

This post is about #Walmart, the giant retail chain in USA and the World, and how it uses social networking in two sides; its customers' side and its staff's side by using different social networking technologies. In addition, I am going to match these two approaches with two organisational functions described by the McKinsey frameworks; "Marketing" and "Sales and Business Support".

Source: https://www.lippincott.com/en/work/walmart

Walmart website claims that there are more than 245 million customers visiting their 11,000 stores in 27 countries and its e-commerce websites in 10 countries. Walmart approached $473 billion as the sales of the fiscal year of 2014. In addition, Walmart has over 2 million associates around the World(Walmart.com, 2014). So, it is obvious that Walmart is investing heavily in technology by having e-commerce websites in 10 countries till date. This, for sure, requires social network support to survive with the online market competition either by having social network tools for customers or for associates.

Walmart and Consumers | WalmartLabs

WalmartLabs office. Source: https://www.walmartlabs.com/

Before stepping directly to the @WalmartLabs, let's discuss the social media strategy that has been done by Walmart and how they overcome some critical obstacles especially from those anti-Walmart people and communities. In 2012, Walmart launched a successful social media campaign that helped get an increase of 84% in the number of people engaged with its social media channels according to its Director of Social Strategy, Umang Shah (as cited in forbes.com, 2014).

Walmart has used the most successful social media channels to get closer to its current and potential customers by taking advantage use of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, Pinterest, and Google+. Walmart's Facebook page already has over 34 million "Likes". Most of its Facebook posts are product suggestions to share with its fans to get their views - as a way to get their insights about those suggestions as it is mentioned by David Moth in his blog (econsultancy.com, 2013). He also mentions that Walmart uses these channels to communicate and interact with its customers by involving them in some other online activities. it keeps them up-to-date with any new stuff and gets their feedback. So, based on McKinsey Global Institute report, insights and communicate and interact are ways that help add values to the organisation functions; product development and marketing and sales (2012).

After the shut down of its first blog because the customers did not find any authenticity in the content and responses that were presented through that blog, Walmart launched another blog to communicate and interact with customers positively by being authentic and clear about any issue related to Walmart not just to be like a typical PR (Harris & Rae, 2009). So, Walmart thinks strategically in terms of how to manage these channels as there are plenty of haters who are ready to respond to any post with negative response that for sure will affect the organisation reputation which in turn will affect its marketing and sales. Therefore, Walmart reaction toward such actions are by having different teams and different hashtags to lower the number of those negative attacks. For example, it has two teams, one team is for the marketing and the other team is for corporate-reputation management according to Josh Sternberg (digiday.com, 2013). By lisetning to customers conversations and being able to satisfy them is considered as customer care lever toward customer service according to McKinsey report (2012).

So what is @WalmartLabs?... @WalmartLabs is as an engine based on Social Genome Platform which works to analyse customers social experiences and interests through their data they put in social media channels. For example, customers share a short post in Facebook or Twitter, the WalmartLabs catches this post and it will analyse it and store it in that user profile and so on with others then store them and database where it can refer back to them for any customers and markets related analysis. So, Walmart social media channels works as a facilitator for WalmartLabs by collecting these data. This technique helps Walmart get its customers insights and suggests for them what kind of products are suitable for their needs anytime anywhere. "#Get On The Shelf" was one of the ideas launched by @WalmartLabs to crowdsource ideas from its suppliers by collaboration and the winners would have shelf space for their products as mentioned by Mike Schoultz (www.digitalsparkmarketing.com). According to McKinsey, crowdsourcing and collaboration are considered as elements that work toward the co-creation lever which works to help them solve and enhance their product development (2012).

"It utilizes external data — social media updates, blogs, transactions, images, media check-ins and location — to map trends across a number of variables, or nodes. Presented as charts and graphs to business users, the information helps Walmart buyers and merchandisers more effectively predict the items that will sell best, particularly in the lead up to big holiday shopping events: Halloween, Black Friday, Christmas."

Digvijay Lamba, WalmartLabs (Ferguson, 2013)

Thus, it is obvious that Walmart tries to keep itself in top of the retail market either through its stores or through the virtual market (e-commerce) competing with other giants like Amazon.com. The marketing and sales function's elements as described by McKinsey report are almost achieved by Walmart to stay within the hard competition.

Walmart and Staff | WalmartOne

WalmartOne.com source: https://www.factorsf.com/portfolio/walmart-walmartone/

"We want each of our associates to arrive and find that place where they can immediately have a sense of belonging and join (or start) a conversation in a trusted environment"

Micah Laney, Senior Manager of Global Associate Communications, Walmart (as cited in simply-communicate.com)

Walmart works toward improving collaboration and communication among its over one million of its associates around the World. As a solution to achieve this strategy, Walmart launched WalmartOne.com to achieve the social collaboration platform for its people which is powered by Ektron technology (Bals, 2014). Walmart objective is to achieve knowledge management and collaboration by sharing knowledge, ideas, improvements, and associates know each others. In addition, Walmart encourages the collaboration by offering competitions and prizes for associates to have more contributions that will benefit the company internally and externally. This helps Walmart to facilitate co-creation by crowdsourcing which help improve the performance and productivity of the organisation according to McKinsey report (2012). In addition, top managers have the ability to distinguish the talented people and then they can match talents to tasks based on their contributions on the portal. Therefore, the business support function will be enhanced by this portal. We can see here that Walmart try to serve its staff as the same as its customers to keep them satisfied with the Walmart work environment.

In conclusion, do you think that e-commerce will replace such retailers in future?

Reference List

Bals, F. (n.d.). 3 Great Intranets Powered by Ektron // Ektron. Retrieved September 04, 2014, from https://www.ektron.com/Blogs/Fred-Bals/3-Great-Intranets-Powered-by-Ektron/

Ferguson, R. (2013). It’s All About the Platform: What Walmart and Google Have in Common. Sloan Management Review.

Harris, L., & Rae, A. (2009). Social networks: the future of marketing for small business. Journal of business strategy, 30(5), 24-31.

Kass, K. (n.d.). How do you communicate to 1,000,000+ associates? – Walmart shares its recipe for social success | simply communicate. Retrieved September 04, 2014, from https://www.simply-communicate.com/case-studies/company-profile/how-do-you-communicate-1000000-associates-%E2%80%93-walmart-shares-its-recipe-s

McKinsey Global Institute. (2012). The social economy : Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies, (July).

Moth, D. (n.d.). How Walmart uses Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ | Econsultancy. Retrieved September 04, 2014, from https://econsultancy.com/blog/61827-how-walmart-uses-pinterest-facebook-twitter-and-google#i.9p6lyl14q5etdp

Schoultz, M. (n.d.). Will Walmart Labs Make Walmart More Innovative in E-Commerce? Retrieved September 04, 2014, from https://www.digitalsparkmarketing.com/innovation/walmart-labs/

Sternberg, J. (n.d.). No Free Shots: How Walmart Responds to Social Media Haters - Digiday. Retrieved September 04, 2014, from https://digiday.com/brands/walmart-social-media/

Walmart Corporate: Our Story. (n.d.). Retrieved September 04, 2014, from https://corporate.walmart.com/our-story/