Our team used the various social media monitoring tools to look at two brands: Domino’s and Pizza Hut. Although we had a hard time initially agreeing on which company and competitor our group unanimously agreed to do the project about the food industry.

Social Mention: This tool showed the strength, sentiment and passion of the company and its competitor. Pizza Hut: 18% strength, Sentiment: 7:1, 15% passion and 45%reach. Domino’s: 18% strength, 5:1 sentiment, 51% reach and 10%passion. One could also see the number of retweets and number of unique authors of the social mention. Additionally, one could view the top words used.

Twitter Stream Graphs: A stream graph is shown for the latest 1000 tweets using the search word (company name). This tool also breaks it down over a time line. The graph produced is visually appealing. Pizza Hut: common words were “order” and “wings”. Domino’s: “pizza” was a common tweet.

How Sociable?: This tool produces a visibility score. 1548 for Pizza Hut vs. 1173 for Dominos. Then it breaks it down for type of social media. Pizza Hut had 1282 mentions on Facebook, 1412 on Twitter and 342 on LinkedIn. Of interesting note are the 1451 mentions on MySpace. Domino’s on the other hand had 1440 mentions on Facebook, 754 on Twitter and 527 on LinkedIn. Dominos had 974 mentions on MySpace. When one clicks on the number, you can view exactly what was said in the mention and check for positive or negative remarks.

TweetFeel: This particular tool gives you a real time twitter search feelings analysis to check if tweets are positive or negative in nature. Both companies had a more positive than negative sentiment.

Google Insights for Search: This tool allows you to compare search volume patterns across regions or categories. It shows where potential customers are located.

Overall, our team was surprised that despite the increased marketing, especially commercials, for Domino’s advertising the new menu and “artisan style” pizza, the public still likes Pizza Hut better and talks via social networks about Pizza Hut more, and in a positive light. It was interesting to check these various tools and see which company consumers are talking about, and their sentiments.

I was all excited to pick one of my favorite companies to check what they are doing lately for a social media strategy. I chose Panera, and one would think that since they are a trendy sandwich and bagel shop, they would also have a trendy social media strategy. Well not exactly. I was pretty disappointed in logging on their Facebook page. Although they had over 700,000 “like” of their page most of the conversation I saw was customers talking among themselves. There were no Panera responses to any of the customer questions. And what’s even more concerning is that there was a post of one of the franchises not passing health inspection and Panera not commenting at all on it. Customers did respond to the commentary along with some individual employees but nothing from whomever works the Social Media page. Minimal connection score on Facebook.

The web site itself did not have much to engage the audience either. The two best pieces from the web site are the member card information section and the recipe tab where one can use Panera products in preparing some tasty treats. There was a nice selection of recipes in the database. The Twitter page did have some Panera tweets mostly about different hours for the holiday and Black Friday.

Panera is minimally meeting consumer social media motivations. Panera should be more engaging and timely with their Facebook posts. They need to step it up to allow consumer motivations like create control and compete. Right now they are getting beaten by a ketchup website!

Relevant metrics for Social media applications include the number of tweets, the number of likes, number of @ replies, or visits to a page. In addition a company can utilize metrics to check the number of retweets, incoming links or number of mentions on a blog. These type of references would indicate word of mouth which remains to be a strong method for building your brand and image.

Panera could do so much more to allow consumers to create, control, compete and/or connect. Improving these areas would increase brand engagement and brand awareness. Panera should have a recipe contest allowing members to submit their own and give prizes to the winners. When there are negative posts from consumers, Panera needs to take an active part to either correct or dispel the negative commentary in a politically correct manner. Panera could also ask open ended questions of their fans or members to get them more engaged and talking. Discounts perks or small incentive to come into the restaurant via the Twitter page would also be an improvement. By getting the public to talk more about what Panera is doing there might also be an increase in mentions on recent consumer’s blogs or tweets. Moreover, people might stay more on the web page as well. This would show an increase in engagement and awareness and lead to positive ROI.