T-Mobile’s product managers
monitor social networking sites to
hear what customers are saying
and to gather insights that could
benefit product development, says
Alex Samano, marketing director
and general manager for Bobsled, a
into paying customers. Amazon-
Wireless, for example, doesn’t find
social networking tools to be partic-
ularly efficient when it comes to
driving traffic that converts to sales
on its site, says David Camp, head of
marketing at Amazon Wireless.
T-Mobile, however, has
had great success with
social media — for some
products. It launched
Bobsled initially for Face-
book users and executed
the launch by briefing only
four high-profile technol-
ogy media outlets. Howev-
er, that limited coverage
spurred 200 additional
articles, and T-Mobile began
signing up Facebook users at a rate
of 3,000 per hour within the first
few hours, Samano says. (He didn’t
discuss the impact of having to
temporarily shut down the service
less than a week later because of a
potential conflict with Facebook.)
Through August 2011,
AARP.org saw 11 times more
page views from mobile
devices than it got in all of
2009. “We have to go where
the numbers are going.”
samI hassanyeh, head oF aarp’s
dIgITaL s TraTegy group
T-Mobile voice-over-IP product. But
“you have to be cautious of what
you’re hearing,” he says, since not
everyone who posts on Facebook is
representative of other customers.
Still, social networking interactions with customers are useful.
Ten years ago it was common to pay
$150,000 to get a focus group of
customers together. “You don’t have
to do that anymore,” Samano says.
Companies have had varying degrees of success in turning
their social networking followers
Unexpected Opportunity
Parallels, which offers virtualization software that lets Mac users
run Windows applications, used
social networking to turn a mistake
into an opportunity that led to some
