What to do with those LCDs in your office

We're always impressed when our clients come up with new ways to use FeedMagnet. This was definitely the case with AutoNation. When we think of using FeedMagnet on display screens, we tend to think of trade shows and other live events. AutoNation saw FeedMagnet and thought of the screens in their corporate headquarters.

They saw it as an opportunity to put the conversations going on about their brands in front of employees throughout the day. We set up a branded display that pulls in everyone talking about (and checking in at) AutoNation's hundreds of dealerships around the U.S., as well as posts from their own social media team.

Unlike most of the solutions we've built for customers, the AutoNation screens are purely internal-facing, with a goal of increasing internal awareness of these conversations among their employees.

Meeting the need

We talk about FeedMagnet as being one part of a bigger social media strategy that includes other social tools for things like advanced analytics. In the case of AutoNation, they already had those tools - the problem was getting everyone in the organization to look at the reports being generated by them.

What they needed was not another bar graph or pie chart to help them analyze social buzz. They needed a way to get that buzz in front of the bigger corporate team to help them stay in touch with the conversations going on every day.

Social dashboards

As more and more data about brand interactions becomes available via social networks, the power of corporate social dashboards for keeping a pulse on brands only increases.

AutoNation has inspired us to think about things like visualizers showing all the positive and negative chatter about a brand to help customer service reps stay on top of what is being said even when not sitting at their desks. Or a display of consumer buzz used to help a marketing department stay in touch with how campaigns are being received.

The real value: getting buy in

Most companies have a handful of people that already "get" the value of social media. While a dashboard screen is great for them, the reality is that they have Tweetdeck or Hootsuite up most of the day and are already on top of what is being said.

The real value in using these bigger displays in an office is in expanding the reach of social throughout the organization. Winning over new converts to the power of using social media for doing business. Letting the customer's voice in to the building.

We're excited to see where this goes. It's at least nice to see all these LCD screens everyone's buying getting put to better use!