Zappos - The Royalty of Social Media ... long live King Tony!

When I was first assigned the task of becoming a guru in the field of using social media for work, I decided that the best place to start would be to look at the masters. In my research I found that there are 2 main Companies that are absolutely genius in using social media to better their business. Zappos.com and the Obama Presidential Campaign.
In this blog I am going to focus on Zappos.

Here is a quick overview – Zappos.com is an electronic commerce company specializing in footwear and is currently based in Henderson, Nevada, USA. Since its founding in 1999, Zappos has grown to be the biggest online shoe store. Zappos did "almost nothing" in sales for 1999, but grossed over $800 million in merchandise sales in 2007, and is projecting over $1 billion in 2008. * Information directly from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zappos.com).  I would urge everyone to take a look at the company more.  They have amazing core values, culture and the most genuinely happy staff you will ever see.  Not to mention hundreds of BEAUTIFUL shoes!

Zappos is an amazing company that has dared to step full force into the world of SOCIAL MEDIA! A daring move that many are to nervous to make, or simply don’t know how. The mst unbelievable social media move that Zappos has made has to be through Twitter.

If you are on the Zappos website, you will notice that they have a whole page dedicated to “What are Zappos employees doing right now?” (can be found at http://twitter.zappos.com/employee_tweets ). This is amazing, as you will see that over 198 Zappos employees’ twitter messages, are recent and posted while they work! Not only that, but they are all inserting information off the Zappos website through out their posts. That is over 198 times a day that Zappos is being marketed. If you think that each Zappos employee is followed by at least 50 followers (many are followed by thousands!)… that is a lot of Zappos reaching the masses at no cost each day!

Even the CEO Tony Hsieh “tweets” every day multiple times! You can find him at http://twitter.com/zappos. I am a follower of Tony and he follow my twitter. As of today, Tony has 1,398,680 Followers! If you notice his bio is simply links back to his other Zappos sites.  Amazing that every day he is reaching over 1 million people (that want to follow him and know what he has to say) with information about his company?  How much to other companies pay for this when Tony has mastered doing it for FREE!

This is a serious thing for Zappos. They have a leader board in their office that shows who’s on Twitter and how many followers they have. This is so smart to me, as it keeps social media top of mind and breeds a bit of healthy competition between employees. From what I understand, it seems that Tony has 5 times as many followers as any other employee.

I find it amazing how the entire company has embraced this effort.  Although the more I come to know about Zappos, the less suprised I become!  Zappos is a great model for all of you who want to get your company immersed in Social Media in an easy, less time consuming way.

“Remember back when sending SMS text messages on your cell phone was a new thing, and it seemed kind of strange to use your cell phone to do that? And today, you probably wonder how you ever lived without text messaging. Well, Twitter is the same way. It's going to seem a little weird at first, but I promise you if you can talk your friends into joining it and you all use it for 2 weeks, it will change your life. You will wonder how you ever lived without it.” – Tony Hsieh CEO of Zappos.com

Zappos uses many forms of Social Media… but Twitter is the main one! I encourage you to read this interview with Tony if you want to know more. http://www.davemadethat.com/2008/07/09/communication-20-zappos-a-social-media-success-story-interview-with-tony-hsieh/

I am also a fan of the Zappos YouTube channels. They are fantastic, well done and very entertaining! Definitely something you should take a look at: http://www.youtube.com/user/zappos and http://www.youtube.com/user/insidezappos

Finally – if you ever get a chance to be in Handerson Nevada, Zappos offers free tours of their facility daily. They pick you up at your hotel and drop you off again! This is a very cool imitative on Zappos part, and something I look forward to doing.

I have been lucky enough to experience Zappos first hand through my fill time job, and am honored to be linked with many Zappos employees on linked-in, twitter, facebook, ect. They are a great group of people and I have enjoyed every interaction with them.

Have a great day,

Rebekah

p.s. I am often asked if I know what is happening with Zappos being bought by Amazon (I got 5 Linked-In requests about this on Saturday alone!) Yes – Zappos was bought by Amazon in June 2009. I do not know anything else and from what we can all read it seems that the transition will be taking place this fall.